Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to CCL Industries' first quarter investor update. Please note that there will be a question and answer session after the call. The moderator for today is Mr. Geoff Martin, President and Chief Executive Officer, and joining him is Mr. Sean Washchuk, Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Please go ahead, gentlemen.
Good morning, everyone. This is Sean Washchuk. Welcome to our first-quarter call. I'd like to draw everyone's attention to page two of our slide deck, our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. I'll remind everyone that our business faces known and unknown risks and opportunities. For further details of these key risks, please take a look at our 2020 annual MD&A under the sections Risks and Uncertainties. Our annual and quarterly reports can be found online at the company's website, cclind.com, or on sedar.com. Geoff, would you like to have some opening remarks?
Thank you, Sean. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our call. We've had a strong start to the year 2021, as you've all seen now by the numbers. In the developed world, we're seeing a market recovery based on consumer activity with the vaccines doing their jobs and making life better for many of the citizens in the developed world. In the emerging world, with the exception of China, it's quite a different story in Latin America, the Indian subcontinent, and parts of the ASEAN region. It's not clear yet whether 2021 will see the end of this pandemic or not, and only time is going to tell. For sure, we're going to see a much stronger first half of 2021 than we saw in the pandemic-affected first half of 2020.
With that, I'm going to hand the call back to Sean, who's going to take you through the numbers.
Thank you, Geoff. If everyone could turn to page three of our slide deck. The first quarter of 2021, sales increased, including the negative impact of currency translation by 4.1%, aided by organic sales growth of 4.2% and acquisition-related sales growth of 2.5%, resulting in sales of CAD 1.35 billion compared to CAD 1.3 billion in the first quarter of 2020. Operating income was CAD 223.1 million for the 2021 first quarter, compared to CAD 200.3 million for the first quarter of 2020. A 14.2% increase, excluding the negative impact of foreign currency translation. Geoff will expand on our segmented operating results for the CCL, Avery, Checkpoint, and Innovia segments momentarily. Included in the first quarter results was a CAD 5.4 million increase in corporate expenses due to an increase in short-term and long-term variable compensation expenses for the comparative periods.
Consolidated EBITDA for the 2021 first quarter, excluding the impact of foreign currency translation, increased 9.5% compared to the same period in 2020. Net finance expense was CAD 14.7 million for the first quarter of 2021, compared to CAD 17.1 million for the 2020 first quarter. The decrease in net finance costs is attributable to a reduction in total debt for the first three months of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020. The overall effective income tax rate was 24.2% for the three months period ended March 31st, 2021, compared to 26.7% for the same period a year ago. The decrease in the effective tax rate is attributable to a higher portion of taxable income earned in lower tax jurisdictions and some one-off tax items. The effective tax rate can change in future periods, depending on the proportion of our taxable income earned in higher tax jurisdictions.
Net earnings for the 2021 first quarter was CAD 147.8 million, up 19.5%, excluding foreign currency translation, compared to CAD 126.6 million for the 2020 first quarter. Moving to slide four. Basic earnings per Class B share were CAD 0.82 for the first quarter of 2021, compared to CAD 0.71 for the first quarter of 2020. Adjusted basic earnings per Class B share were CAD 0.82 for the 2021 first quarter, compared to adjusted earnings per Class B share of CAD 0.72 for the first quarter of 2020. The increase in adjusted basic earnings per share to CAD 0.82 is primarily attributable to higher operating income, contributing CAD 0.11 to the EPS improvement, with a reduction in net interest expense and tax rate adding a further CAD 0.01 and CAD 0.02 respectively, partially offset by a CAD 0.02 increase in corporate costs and CAD 0.02 from negative foreign currency translation.
Moving to slide five. In the first quarter of 2021, free cash flow from operations improved to CAD 87.6 million, compared to an outflow of CAD 15 million in the 2020 first quarter. The improvement can be primarily attributable to an increase in operating income and a positive change in working capital for the company. For the 12 months ended March 31st, 2021, free cash flow from operations was CAD 718.9 million, compared to the 12 months ended March 31st, 2020, at CAD 518.8 million. This comparative improvement is attributable to improved income for the company, the change in working capital, and reduced net capital spending for the comparative years. Moving to slide six, our cash and debt summary. Net debt as at March 31st, 2021 was CAD 1.33 billion, a decrease of CAD 61.1 million compared to December 31st, 2020.
The decrease is principally a result of debt repayments during the first quarter, partially offset by a decrease in cash on hand at March 31, 2021 compared to December 31, 2020. The company's balance sheet closed the quarter in a strong position. Our balance sheet leverage ratio was approximately 1.16x , declining from 1.24x at the end of December 31, 2020. Liquidity was robust, CAD 662.7 million of cash on hand and $1.2 billion of available undrawn credit capacity in our revolving credit facilities. It is all likely that any portion of our current debt will be paid from free cash flow over the course of the year. The company's overall average finance rate was largely unchanged at approximately 2.3% on March 31, 2021 compared to December 31, 2020. The company's balance sheet continues to be well-positioned as we move through 2021. Geoff?
Thank you, Sean. I'm on slide seven now that highlights capital spending so far for the year. Slow start to the year, which explains some of the free cash flow performance that Sean talked about. Only CAD 53 million spent net of disposals, excluding the right of use asset additions and depreciation. The CapEx will go up for the next three quarters. We're planning to spend around CAD 330 million-CAD 340 million for the year. Page eight, slides on the CCL segment and how it's performed. A very strong start, 5.4% organic sales increase. Growth was strong in the Americas, up mid-single digits in both Latin America and North America. Slower in Europe, up low single digits, and very strong in the Asia-Pacific region, up in the high teens. Strong results with our healthcare and specialty business, food and beverage, and CCL Design.
Solid with CCL Secure, but down in the home and personal care business as the sanitizer cleansing boom came to an end and travel-related businesses remained somewhat impaired. Page nine, highlights of our joint CCL ventures, one in Russia and the Middle East. Very strong start again for the year. Somewhat impacted by the Russian currency, down 25% against the Canadian dollar quarter on quarter. Slide 10, results from Avery. This business really had a very strong start in Q1 2020, really unimpeded completely by the pandemic in North America and only slightly in Europe. This year we have tough comps to compare with, especially in the U.S., where we're down high teens, mainly in the badges and organization products business affected by office closures and low workplace presence.
Europe and Asia Pacific, which is more label centric, was up high single digits and much easier comps to a softer Q1 2020, also driven by the pandemic. We do expect growth in sales and profitability for all the remaining quarters this year and 2021 in total for Avery. Slide 11, results for Checkpoint. Outstanding quarter here, of course, compared to the weak start we had last year when the apparel industry closed down in Asia and China had a pretty rough time of it at the beginning of the year with the pandemic unraveling there in Q1 last year. This year we saw very strong comparative growth in our MAS business, gains in all regions, including the U.S., where we had a big rollout last year. We even had gains in the U.S. with Europe and Asia especially strong with the easier comps.
Record quarter on apparel labels compared to a weak prior year period. Very strong growth in RFID and our price labeling business in Europe recovered. Innovia, the organic volume was up in North America, down in Europe and Asia Pacific. The sales gains really all came from resin pricing pass-through and the Polish acquisition. Profitability increased on continuing strong productivity gains, especially in the Mexican operation, and we're now preparing our Polish plant for the EcoFloat investment, which will incur over the balance of 2021. Outlook summary. As I said earlier on, Avery will post strong gains, particularly in Q2, and we should make progress in the second half of 2021 in total. We do expect Checkpoint's recent progress to continue, in part fueled by RFID, and we still have easy Q2 comps.
CCL Design will continue to remain a strong component of CCL segment with automotive recovering and demand for IT peripherals still strong. Food and beverage will improve as the on-premise channels open up. That healthcare and specialty business faces the pantry loading DIY boom period that we had in 2020, which won't repeat in 2021. In the HPC business, we should see skincare and travel-related demand improve as the vacation season opens up and hopefully mobility and travel improve. The cleansing and sanitizing boom is largely coming to an end. CCL Secure looks very solid for Q2. It has tough comps in the second half on the cash run the banks had in 2020, which won't repeat in 2021.
Innovia still needs to navigate the resin volatility, which we still see and managed its way through the EcoFloat transition in Poland, and there are no more easy comps in the second half of the year. With that, operator, we'd like to open up the call to questions.
At this time, would you would like to ask a question? Please press star one on your touchtone phone. Once again that is star one to ask an audio question. Your first question comes from the line of Adam Josephson with KeyBanc.
Geoff and Sean, good morning. Hope you're well.
Morning, Adam.
Thanks, Adam.
Geoff, in CCL, can you just talk about your expectations by region? Obviously, Asia Pac was up high teens as China shut down a year ago. I would think Americas would remain pretty strong for a while. U.S. and Brazilian economies are going gangbusters with all the stimulus, et cetera. How do you expect the comps to just remind us how the comps will evolve over the course of the year such that we can have appropriate expectations by region?
Yeah. I think the Q1 trend will probably continue, and I think we do expect to see Q3 to be strong, just driven by the prior year situation. We have some waxing and waning. We've got some businesses like healthcare and specialty, where we had the over-the-counter medicines boom last year, which we won't have this year. We rather expect the DIY boom that we've seen in the U.S. while everyone's been at home would recede if travel opens up. You get it one way or the other. Overall, I would expect the U.S. to stay relatively strong. The situation in Asia with IT peripherals and cell phones and all the like, that's not waning at all.
We've got the chip shortage to deal with, so that's a bit of an unknown factor, which we don't know how much difficulty that will present some of our customers. We seem to be working our way through it, but it's an ever-changing daily situation we're having to monitor.
Yeah.
It's very hard to say much more than that, Adam, really.
Just on Europe specifically, Geoff?
We'd expect Europe to still be lagging the rest of the world through the summer unless something changes. I'm in Switzerland as we speak here. Last week I flew down to visit our operations in Mexico and flew through Dallas Airport, which was completely mobbed with people. I landed in Zurich yesterday morning to an empty airport.
Got you.
I think until you see those situations changing, it's hard to imagine the.
Yeah.
Of our product is going to change.
Yeah. No, understood, Geoff. On resin, can you just help us with precisely how much your cost went up through 1Q and to what extent those costs have receded, and what your expectations are along those lines, and when you expect to have fully caught up?
Yeah. Well, the resin spike, as you know, was pretty extreme in the U.S. North America was by far worse than it was in Europe, and it happened very suddenly. We did manage to get most of our price through, but not fast enough to catch it all. We also had the benefit of some inventory in the system with lower cost. Now we're going to have the reverse situation of that in Q2, where resins fall, so we've got inventory and higher price resin. I think you'll have to wait to see till we get through Q2 how successful we've been. I think Q2 might be more of a struggle than Q1. We thought we'd have a tougher time in Q1 than we did, as you probably might imagine.
Yeah.
I think Q2 might be slightly more difficult than Q1 was. We'll have to wait and see how things unfold.
Got it.
Depends on what happens with the pricing.
No, understood, Geoff. Thank you. In Checkpoint, can you just quantify how big RFID is for you right now, and where you're seeing that very strong growth, and the extent to which you expect that rate of growth to persist for the next few quarters?
It's all in apparel. We're up 25%, 30% in apparel. Just for perspective, apparel labeling is less than CAD 200 million for us, and RFID is a portion of that. I'm not going to get into how big a portion it is because it's difficult to measure. It's a portion of it, so it's not terribly material for us as a company. It's growing very nicely. Most of our business is with European retailers, and we're involved in a few good-sized rollouts there. It definitely underpins the performance in the business in the current quarter. You do have to remember it is against a very difficult backdrop in 2020.
Yeah. No, understood, Geoff. Last one from me on M&A. Can you just talk about what you're seeing price-wise, opportunity-wise, and just give us a sense of what label multiples are in the private market these days compared to where you and the others are trading?
Well, it's not really any different from the public markets, frankly. Private equity businesses are chasing some of these things at multiples that reflect our stock price. We're not really participating in things like that. We're trying to find new opportunities for the bolt-ons. It's still a difficult market for larger transactions, and you still have the problem of how do you do due diligence and getting around the world is so difficult. There isn't really anything new comments to add beyond the situation. We think we've addressed that more over the last several quarters.
Terrific. Thanks, Geoff.
No problem, Adam.
Your next question comes from the line of Mark Neville with Scotiabank.
Hey, good morning, Geoff. Good morning, Sean.
Good morning.
Hi. Geoff, I'm just curious if you could maybe speak to, just in general, your reopening experience. I'm just thinking of certain geographies that have opened and certain markets or certain businesses that were more impacted, such as food and beverage. Is there typically a lag sort of in the sales recovery? Is there a surge as inventories are built?
It really varies dramatically on which part of the world we're talking about. The region of the world that I would say is still extremely tough is the ASEAN countries of Asia. Countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, very difficult to get in and out and move in between these countries, Vietnam. Very, very tough out there. India, I'm sure you've read about in the newspapers. The degree to which we've seen open up is really in Latin America and the U.S., we've seen some encouraging signs. China is pretty much as normal, but domestic China. It's kind of like a bubble around it. In Europe, it's still more difficult because the lockdown is not gone yet. It's better than it was, but there's still restrictions there that you don't see when you're sitting and living and working in North America.
Great. I guess, when they do reopen, have you experienced then that there's been sort of a lag in your sales, or is there an initial surge as inventories are built?
It varies by customers trying to guess the prediction, right? They're having to build inventory on the assumption of what might happen. Everyone's assuming that in North America this year, the summer season will be strong, and therefore, people are making plans according to that and probably the reverse of that in some other parts of the world. I don't think we really know yet, but we've seen encouraging signs in the beverage space of a bit more normality than there was certainly this time last year. We're too far away from the end use point to really comment beyond that. We're driven by the behaviors of our customers, not by the consumers.
Right. Again, it seems like the semi shortages, you're managing that well. You've obviously managed the resin situation pretty well. I guess I'm just curious, just broader, hear a lot about sort of supply chain issues, logistic issues from other companies, and just appreciate your business a little more localized, but just curious if you're sort of feeling any supply chain challenges or logistical challenges there that we should-
Well, we're local everywhere we operate around the world. That's the big advantage we have. I can tell you, just to give you a frame of reference of how the world has changed, we put a new tube line into our plant in Los Angeles, last year, that sat on a boat and we were trying to get into Long Beach Port for eight weeks, trying to get into the port. Those types of sort of challenges we're having. Coast-to-coast freight from the West Coast to the East Coast, if you needed to move something in an emergency, around CAD 2,000 for a 45-foot shipping container. Price this year is CAD 8,000. You've got a lot of situations like that which we're having to pass along to customers, and which we're doing, obviously.
There's definitely some sizable pockets of inflation out there that we're having to work our way through. So far, we've managed to keep people supplied, not let people down and done our job, but not without a lot of hustling around and moving around.
Sure. Got that. I guess just on the lower CapEx spend in Q1, is it just a timing thing or is it some of these challenges?
It's just a hangover from the cutbacks we made last year.
All right. All right, Geoff. Guys, thanks for the time, and great quarter. Thanks.
Thanks, Adam.
Your next question comes from the line of Stephen MacLeod with BMO Capital Markets. Your next question is from Stephen MacLeod with BMO Capital Markets.
Oh, thank you. Sorry about that. I was on mute. Morning, guys.
Hey, Stephen.
Just wanted to follow up on the CapEx question there. Can you talk a little bit about what's embedded in your accelerated CapEx plans for this year versus last year or is it just a catch up?
It's not accelerated, Stephen. It's around the budget number we had for the year. It's just the timing of it because when you order equipment, a lot of it's on long lead times. With the cutbacks we made last year, it created a vacuum, and we've seen that in the fourth quarter and the first quarter of this year, something of a vacuum. It would correct itself in the next three quarters, because we've got.
Okay.
some businesses where we've got pretty significant capacity constraints that we're needing to fill. The areas it's going into, the shrink sleeve business and around the world is an area of strength, CCL Design, Checkpoint. It's broad-based across the company, really. I think the CapEx vacuum is really driven by what happened in 2020.
Okay. That makes sense. Maybe just turning to the Avery business. You reminded us that Avery had a strong start last year before getting impacted heavily by the pandemic, and then you have a positive outlook for the rest of the year, partially driven by easy comps. Can you talk a little bit about when would you see the Avery business returning to where it was before? Is that a 2022 timing?
Well, April sales, I can tell you, were almost double last year. That's one point of information I can give you. We still see challenges in the badge business. That's really driven by large-scale events. We are beginning to see orders coming in now, but it's dropped off pretty rapidly, and I don't think we'll come back full scale until 2022. I'm assuming that the world returns to normal in 2022. That remains to be seen whether that happens. The two product lines that are really affected are organization products and badges. The label business is in pretty good shape, and those are the two things that need to return. The drivers are return to offices and return to attended events. Until those normalize, it's difficult for that to get back to where it was in 2019.
It's been getting better and better really every month since June last year. Each month it's been improving. I'm very confident we'll see the next three quarters of gains and a gain for the year of 2021 over 2020, for sure.
Okay. That's great. On Innovia, obviously with the resin pricing issues and the guidance you color on Q2, which is great. Will those price increases filter into the back half of the year as well, or is it too soon to tell?
The resin price is dropping in the U.S. now, Steve.
Yeah.
Resin went up to over CAD 2,500 a ton. It is now down in the CAD 2,100. It's actually been dropping in the U.S. because the resin is really the effect of storm phenomena. We're adjusting prices down now in the U.S. to reflect what's going on with the time of index. That's what we're worried about in Q2, so that we put prices up as we had low price inventory to help us compensate for that. In Q3, we got the reverse, so we've got prices dropping and high price inventory. That's why we're worried about the impact in Q2.
Right. Okay, thanks for clarifying that. Then maybe just finally, are there any areas when you're in this recovery that's a bit spotty globally, but are there any areas that have recovered faster than expected or slower than expected?
The one that's been very strong all the way through has been what's going on in tech. Demand for computers, printers, servers, cell phones, headphones, you name it, just seems to be steamrolling on. I'm sure that's not helping the chip situation for the guys in automotive. We don't see any slowdown there. I think it's more driven by the chip supply situation than seems to be impacted by demand. That's the area of most notable strength we see today. CCL Design in the first quarter was up in the mid-teens. It's pretty strong organically, pretty strong number given they weren't that badly affected this time last year.
Mm-hmm. Okay. That's great. Thanks, Geoff.
Okay.
Your next question comes from the line of Walter Spracklin with RBC Capital Markets.
Thanks very much, operator. Good morning, Geoff. Good morning, Sean.
Morning, Walter.
First question is on pricing, but ex-resin pricing. Obviously, a robust demand in many of your end markets. If you exclude the changes in your pricing due to resin, would you say that your same store pricing is up? If resin goes down, is there a way to keep that price a little sticky and keep it higher based on higher demand in some of those higher growth segments?
This is a question about only Innovia, right?
That's right. Yep.
Yeah. I think it's a resin story, Walter. We've indexed our customers, so you can't have your cake and eat it. If you put a price up based on an index, the price comes down on the other side of the curve.
Okay. Fair enough. Then pricing outside of Innovia, would you say that overall healthy?
Fairly limited impact from inflation in the rest of the business. In Q2, we'll see more of it, because in Q1, we had people raising prices, but they haven't really been implemented really until Q2 unrolled. We didn't have much inflation in the other parts of CCL outside of Innovia and outside of our aluminum can business. The inflation from metals going up. In the core label business, we didn't see much inflation in Q1.
Got it. Okay. Moving to your core CCL and CCL Secure in particular. I know, Geoff, you've cautioned us about the margin impact that the cash hoarding has had on that business.
Yeah.
That we should bring it back down. Is that still the case, or are you seeing higher margin ex Secure in other areas of CCL?
Well, we've seen some good new business wins in CCL Secure. We did have those windfalls last year, which we know are not going to repeat. It's very hard to predict. We know the first half's going to be okay. Second half is a big mountain to climb, and till we get closer to it, I couldn't really give you any more color than that.
Got it. Last question here, again, on the CCL core division. I rememberBefore the pandemic, you had been experiencing a little bit of weakness in that division and it accumulated in the fourth quarter of 2019, I guess, and with some weakness and some forecasts pre-pandemic that you had were a bit soft. What investors are asking now is, what is the risk we go back to a softened environment even if we go back to normal? Or has the pandemic completely reshuffled the deck now and anything that existed before pandemic, those trends are ancient history, and we're in a new dynamic here? What's the risk we go back to a weaker environment in your core division as we emerge from the pandemic?
Well, we'll have to wait and see about that. Getting into calling out what may or may not happen.
Right. Yeah.
I think the world has changed pretty dramatically, and we're going to have to wait and see how things unfold in the trade.
Okay. Appreciate the time. Thank you.
No problem.
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Glen with Raymond James.
Hey, good morning. Geoff, just to start, when we look at label sales in Q1, and we look at what might be expected in Q2, is there any real reason to think that the overall level of sales in the segment would change into Q2 versus Q1?
The unknowns are what happens with the things that are waning. We know some things are coming back. Skincare, high-end beauty sales are improving, travel-related sales have improved. Sanitizers are a dead duck at the moment. All the customers have got big inventory to finish products. The orders have slowed to a real trickle in anything to do with sanitizers and cleansers. That's the thing we're wrestling with. We've got so many moving parts and pieces, it's very difficult to predict how things will unfold. In the month of April, carried on pretty much the trend we saw in Q1.
Okay, in a normal year, there's really no seasonal vary between Q1 and Q2.
There's not a big difference between Q1 and Q2. Not a big difference. There's a lot of things going on at the moment, so I'll just call those out. We had that over-the-counter medicines boom last year gone, sanitizers and cleansers gone. Now we've got beauty care coming back. We've got on-premise beverage coming back, and how that mix will play out, we'll just have to wait and see.
Okay. I know it's probably early on this, but any thoughts on how back to school might play out this year? Any thoughts on the inventory levels with your customers?
Well, the retailers are planning assuming it's normal, but with some level of caution because they all got caught last year with inventory they couldn't sell. Because you remember we had a very good June last year in back to school. Then the replenishment orders which usually come in late July and early August didn't happen. They had some inventory at the end of the cycle when all the mess around school openings unfolded. They're assuming this year that back to school will be normal, but with some caution in view of what happened last year. I expect the initial selling will go well like it did last year. Then what will actually happen in July and August will depend on what's going on with the pandemic and what's going on with school openings.
Just maybe a last one on overall, if you can characterize the overall pipeline of customer activity in CCL Secure, how is that trending?
Pipeline's very good.
Okay. That's it for me.
Your next question comes from the line of David McFadgen with Cormark.
Oh, yeah. Thank you. A couple of questions. Maybe just on the resin front with Innovia. It seems like the timing on the ability to pass through price increases and price decreases fairly short. I think on the Q4 call, you had some caution with respect to that. I was wondering if you could comment on the exact timing. If you're dealing with higher priced resin inventory in Q2, could that really have an impact on the margins?
Well, that's the point I was making. What we don't know yet is the impact that will have. We've got price declines going on in the U.S. at the moment because the resins have dropped, and we've got high priced inventory that we bought in the month of March and film we made in the month of March with resins at a much higher price point and what the impact of that will be remains to be seen.
Okay.
In Q1, maybe there'll be a drag in Q2. We don't know. We'll just have to wait and see because it's mix driven. There's lots of other factors that can sway it. We'll have to just wait and see how it unfolds. We're just calling out the risk, really, but it's difficult to quantify.
What's your timing on your ability to pass through resins? Seems like it's quite short. Can you comment on that?
Well, you have to remember the spike was very big. The resin hike in the first quarter is the highest in the quarter in history.
Okay. Just on badges business with Avery. Is that really improving much? There are some returns on that.
Not much so far. We've seen some improvement in the month of March and April. We've seen some slow signs of some events are now being planned, some social events. If you went back to 2019 and you called out 100, we've moved from 10 to 15. We haven't moved from 10 or 15 to 50. It's improved, but slowly.
Yeah.
I think until you've got baseball stadiums filled, sports stadiums full, Vegas conventions back where they were, it's hard to see why event badges would have the demand they had in 2019.
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
It's a little over CAD 100 million of Avery's business, so it's not a small number.
Yeah. Okay. Thanks so much.
Okay.
Once again if you would like to ask an audio question, please press star one. Your next question comes from the line of Ben Jekic with PI Financial.
Good morning. I have a question on Avery then. If the badges haven't rebounded that much just yet, what is the source of the very positive expectations for the remainder of the year in Avery?
Well, everything else is doing well, Ben. Badges and binders and dividers, they're the three product lines that have had difficulty during the pandemic. We're seeing some improvement in binders and indexes. Badges are still difficult. The core label business is still doing pretty well. Internationally, for the international business, which focuses almost exclusively on labels, we've seen that return to 2019 levels. Because they don't have anywhere near that portion of those products in their mix, because they're almost entirely labels driven.
Okay. Great. Thank you. My second question, just with regards to the CCL core segment, fairly strong operating margin jump. I'm assuming part of that is CCL Secure, you're mentioning healthcare specialties, food, beverage, and CCL Design.
The margin jump was not really CCL Secure driven. It was more driven by the three businesses that really performed were healthcare and specialty food and beverage and CCL Design. They were the three main drivers.
That answers my question. Okay. Thank you.
No problem.
Your last question comes from the line of Adam Josephson with KeyBanc.
Thanks for taking my follow-up, Geoff and Sean. Forgive me if I missed this. Could you quantify the EcoFloat investment? I mean, that was obviously sizable enough to have called it out in the slide, so just figured I'd ask.
CAD 35 million.
That will be over what period, Geoff?
Most of the money will be spent in the second half of this year.
Got it. Okay.
We spent some of it already, but the lion's share of it will get paid in the second half of the year.
That'll flow through the segment results?
Correct.
Okay. Got it.
The bigger impact more than capital is just the start-up cost. When you start up a new center line, there's always some level of start-up cost. It's more about that than the capital really.
Okay. The start-up cost will be in the range of?
We don't know yet.
Can you give us? Okay.
We'll give you some more color on that when we see when it's going to be, because you got to build the line first. We don't know when the line's going to be finished. When we get nearer the time, it'll either be the back end of this year or early part of next, we'll give you some color on that.
Perfect. Okay. One more on cap allocation, Geoff. You raised the dividend by 17% in March. Your leverage is down to almost 1.1x .
Sure.
I mean, you mentioned big M&A is probably unlikely in the foreseeable future, just given where prices are and the difficulties in doing due diligence, et cetera. Are you considering anything else or are you okay with letting leverage go sub 1x and just letting the chips fall where they may?
We don't like leverage below 1x.
Right.
For obvious reasons.
Yep.
We'll be having some debates about that with our board over the next quarter or so about what we're going to do. I don't want to give the impression we're throwing the towel in on acquisitions, because we're not. It's still the number one priority for where we want to invest that excess free cash flow. You know we've always been a strong dividend player and buying back stock, because we haven't done that for some years yet. As Sean mentioned earlier on in the call, we're definitely going to pay down the rest of our variable debt this year in the absence of a large-scale deal. It's something that's on the agenda as we speak.
Yeah. No. Understood, Geoff. Last one on sustainability. Are you hearing anything new or different from your customers in terms of substrate preferences, recycled resin availability, pricing? Any change in tone whatsoever from your customers given the targets they've put out?
The hysteria on the subject is probably the best way to characterize it. A lot of it not necessarily logical. The preferences for substrate today are paper and metal, which are sort of the highest carbon footprint substrates the packaging industry uses.
Right.
The lowest carbon footprint substrate in the packaging industry, plastics, out of the public consumer perception is the devil incarnate.
Right.
That's the world we're all existing in, our customers and the producing side. I think it'll take a few years for reality to unfold. I do think plastic recycling will be one of the solutions to the problem and we're sort of doing a lot of work in that arena. Sustainability is a topic du jour amongst everyone in the consumer products industry today, driven by how the public perceives what the problem is. It's a moving target. I think if you'd have asked this question second half of last year, before the Netflix movie about what's happening in the oceans came out.
Right.
say plastics is a problem. Everybody says fishing's a problem. It's such in public purview, and it's so sensitive that sometimes that sort of gets in the way of the reality of the science of the subject, and we're working our way through that along with everybody else.
Does it seem like your customers are making long-term decisions based on current sentiment? As you said, public perceptions can and do change pretty quickly.
Yeah.
How are they dealing with that issue?
They're under pressure. Everyone in the consumer products industry is under pressure. They're trying to come up with solutions that make sense. Some of the solutions are what appears to make sense. It may actually not do, but it has the perception of being better. That's probably a good thing right now if you're a CPG company. Solving the issues of the world today in the longer term, there's a lot of work still to be done, and that's the more serious subject which we have to address, I think, in a lot more intensity than we're doing right now.
Yeah.
We're, along with all of them, just doing our best to muddle our way through it.
No, understood, Geoff. Well, thanks so much, and safe travels.
Thank you.
Presenters, we have no further questions.
Thank you, operator, and thank you for everybody attending the call, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter.
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