Good morning and welcome to Akola Group Investor Relations Conference. We will start with the presentation from the management, which will be followed by the Q&A session. Please be informed that this webinar is being recorded and will be also available on the Nasdaq Baltic YouTube channel. I encourage everyone to submit questions in the Q&A section at the bottom of the screen. With that said, I would give the floor over.
Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining Akola Webinar for the six months of the financial year 2024/2025. We just released our results yesterday, and I'm really excited to present them to you. As always, please keep in mind that there might be direct or indirect express forward-looking statements, but that are only the assumptions or current view of the company's management. Please do not take them for granted and make any investment decisions based only on that. Today, I'm, as always, presenting you, the CFO of the group, the results of the company. Let's start, as always, with the structure of the group and what changes we have made or happened during the last three months. As for the last three months, we have 63 subsidiaries and two associate companies.
We have acquired, or the biggest change in the structure is that we finished the acquisition of Ela gro Trade in Latvia. This was quite a big deal for us for the last quarter or the half of the year. We closed the transaction in December, and we actually have started to consolidate the balance sheet into our financials from December. However, the P&L will come in in the next quarter. We also have acquired a small company in the fumigation area in Latvia, and we have registered one of the companies of ours, which we haven't used for a while. We also are cleaning the structure further on. We are converting two companies to different legal statuses, which will be then merged with Kauno Grūdai. We will have minus two companies in the next periods. We also have three companies in liquidation going on.
We will be decreasing our company size going forward, meaning more efficient structure, more simple business lines, and that will probably help you as well to understand the business better. If we go to the highlights of our financial performance for the first half of the 2024/2025 financial year, I would say we had a quite successful second quarter. You can see that our consolidated EBITDA for the six months of this financial year stands at EUR 48 million versus EUR 42 million last year. The five-year average is around EUR 44 million, and you can see that we are doing a bit better than we used to do on average. We had a slower first quarter, if you remember, when I was presenting the last webinar.
However, the second quarter was quite successful, or we can see really strong, and I will talk about that later on, where we have the benefit coming from. I would say we have EUR 48 million of EBITDA for a half financial year when our strategic target is in between of EUR 70 million-EUR 90 million. We are doing quite good, but we still have two quarters to come and quite a lot of business activity to process. When we look to other highlights, I could say we're doing really good. Our EBIT margin is 4.2% versus last year 3.8%. We are a bit below our five-year average. However, since last financial year, if you remember, we are really working on our profitability, especially in our trading division, where we want to do more profitable trades, maybe sometimes versus lower volumes.
You will see how our volumes developed the last quarter. I will talk about that later and how we are doing there. Return on capital employed, 7.4% almost for the first half of the year. Last year, we had a comparably lower result. I want to remind you that this is calculated on a 12-month rolling basis to equalize any seasonality. The last 12 rolling basis months produce a bit sluggish result, as you can see. A good sign is that we are also above our five-year average, which stands at 6.34%. When we look at our profitability and valuations, price to earnings ratio for six months stands at almost six. Last comparable quarter or time, we had a negative figure because we also had negative earnings per share. We had quite bad few quarters, which resulted in negative rolling basis result.
However, for this half of the year, we have EUR 0.20 earnings per share, which is very close to our five-year average. I would say we are quite on a good track to deliver a healthy result. I would like to talk now about our balance sheet. We do not have a lot of changes in the balance sheet, except that we have expanded it a bit in the property, plant, and equipment part. As you probably remember, we are going through quite a heavy investment program, and we just launched an instant noodle factory in Alytus. We will soon launch a breadcrumb factory in Kėdainiai. All the property, plant, and equipment additions are expanding our portfolio. We also have an increase in intangible assets, and that is the part which comes from our Ela gro acquisition. However, we are still quite high on our inventory and receivables.
We still have quite a lot of commodities on our books to trade for the second half of the year. You can see that the balance sheet, once again, is close to EUR 1 billion. How do we finance that and how do our other ratios look? We have EUR 470 million of available lines to trade. That is a very healthy ratio or amount of credit lines we have and we use. For the first half of the year, we made EUR 46 million of CapEx. Just a reminder, we are going through quite a lot of different investment projects. We have announced all of them historically, but the main ones, apart from the ones I just mentioned, are also a seed factory in Iecava, Latvia, a biogas factory in Lukšiai, one of our farming companies, and of course, Ela gro acquisition.
For the end of December, our total debt stands at EUR 420 million. We can see that we use quite a lot of our debt capacity. Out of that, 39% is long-term debt. That has increased a bit because we have drawn long-term financing lines for our investments. Rather than that, I think we are now coming close to the peak of our long-term debt, and that will start decreasing after we start amortizing our long-term debts, which we use for the investments. Capital ratio, 34%, and overall, the equity is EUR 331 million. I think that's a very healthy ratio in the middle of the year. When we look at our debt profile, net readily marketable inventories adjusted debt level is 3.5. Our long-term target is 4. I would say we are doing well because we have a quite good 12-month rolling basis EBITDA.
You can see that it stands at EUR 8 million. Again, you can see that we are targeting this year very neatly in the middle of our strategic target, which is between EUR 70 million and EUR 90 million. Let's look at our earnings or sales profile. For the first half, we delivered EUR 790 million in sales revenue, and that is 4% more than last year. You can see that overall, the curve or the trend is balancing out. Year on year, we do not have a lot of changes in our revenue. In terms of volume, we have increased the volume by 11% to roughly 1.6 million of commodities. Last year, we had close to 1.5 million of various commodities. The proportion between our food revenues and trading or partners for farmers' revenues have also so far stabilized, and it is two-thirds and a third.
I think that's also a healthy proportion going forward. In terms of what we traded more or less this quarter is that we had, of course, more trade in wheat and pulses, but we had less trade in rapeseed and other feedstuffs. We will see how that will go on in the next half a year, and I will present the trends in the presentation of the segments. Overall, even though we produced more volume, the revenue did not increase proportionally, meaning that the majority of the products which we trade are on lower prices. Basically, the commodities year on year cost less, inputs cost less. The only place where we see maybe some uptick in prices is, of course, poultry and poultry products, but that did not impact the overall consolidated sales profile that much. Let's drop to the gross profitability part.
This year, we see that we have managed to deliver higher gross profit for the first half of the year, and it stands at EUR 87 million versus EUR 82 million last year. We have a very nice proportion again, which actually has changed a bit more favorably to the food production part, where we received EUR 40 million of our gross profit from food products and EUR 42 million from our trading activity. 64 and 49, as you can see, it's close to 50/50. Our long-term target is probably 60/40. 50/50 would be another target, but we are doing quite well here. In terms of profitability, it stands at 11%. It's a bit better than last year. However, you can see that last year was also good in terms of gross profitability. We are keeping our trend here, and it's also better than five-year average.
The five-year average stands at 7.7%. Absolute top performer for the second quarter is our poultry business, both in Lithuania and Latvia. They have really favorable conditions in the market, and they have contributed the most to this quarter and the first half of the year. You can see that even though we have some areas where we are fighting for the profitability or for the margins, the portfolio diversification actually really helps us. Let's look at our operating profit profile. For this year, we delivered EUR 33 million in operating profit, which is EUR 5 million more than last year. Actually, in this area, the share of where the profit comes from has changed dramatically. We have almost 60% of the operating profit coming from our food production versus 37% coming from trading. Trading is still a very volatile and seasonal business.
We have quite a lot of commodities yet still to trade. The next few months also will be very important for this segment because also spring trade in inputs, fertilizers, plant protection is also very crucial. We will see how we will do there. For half of the year, the proportion looks like this. In terms of profitability, 4.2, slightly better than last year. We are really happy that we can keep up with the profitability or the margins. There is some pressure in different areas of our business. However, we managed to maintain it. Even compared to last year, where we had overall a higher average profitability, we are doing quite well. EBIT margin, if compared to five-year average, which is 2.8, and we have 4.2, I think it's really looking good.
Very big positive effect as well in the gross profit area, as well in the EBIT profit area is coming from poultry. We have a good market price for poultry products. I will talk a bit about that more in the segment area. Also, input costs allow us to deliver higher profitability. On the 12-month rolling basis, we have close to EUR 80 million of EBITDA, which again is in our range of strategic target. We will see how we will move in the third and fourth quarter. I would say that we delivered good results for the half of the year, and we will work on the second two half quarters. Sorry. Partners for farmers segment, we had the biggest change actually here in the last quarter, the second quarter.
We acquired Ela gro Trade, a trading company in Latvia, which is very similar to our existing company, SIA Linas Agro. We are now going through an integration of those two entities. We are planning some synergies, but we also see that there is a very good synergy in the team, in the business profile, in the product portfolio, as well as in the client portfolio, where we think we will strengthen our Latvian positions in this area really, really well. We also complemented our existing infrastructure of elevators in Latvia with this acquisition. We will be doing more in elevator service and logistics in Latvia in the next quarters and next years. Partners for farmers, the sales have increased by roughly EUR 10 million- EUR 585 million. In terms of quantities, it is almost 150,000 more in quantities.
The segments which contributed more are inputs and mainly due to fertilizer trade. We have increased our fertilizer volumes, as well as our grain and oilseed trade, which was quite slow maybe in the first quarter, but started picking up pace in the second quarter. If you look at our profitability profile or how we're doing on the gross profit level, in grain storage and logistics, we have lower quantities collected, squeezed drying service income because the grain was really dry. Starting the third quarter of this financial year, this category will be as well affected or increased or added with the additional storage capacities which we obtained in the acquisition of Elagro. Overall, you see that last year we have EUR 10 million of gross profit in this area. This time we have EUR 7 million.
Because the peak earning season is first quarter for this segment, we do not expect that it will change dramatically, only what we get from additional Elagro capacities. When we look at grain and oilseed trade, the activity picked up in second quarter. The prices did not change a lot, so the prices are still in the low end. However, we found some good opportunities in spot trades, and we also did quite well in pulses. In contrast to last year, wheat was again still the main trade, and the main volumes came from wheat. However, we have, of course, a bit lower quantities of corn and rapeseed, which is actually coming from the first quarter as well. Gross profit margin, flat. Gross profit overall, EUR 5 million versus EUR 5 million last year. We are doing better than our five-year average. Our five-year average gross profitability is 1.3.
You can see that we are working on that quite a lot in this area because it is a big contributor to the gross profitability overall. Feed business, we have a slightly narrow gross profitability, EUR 11 million last year versus EUR 10 million this year. We still have difficulties, or it's quite difficult to do trade via Ukraine or source commodities from Ukraine and trade them in Western Europe, all the Baltics. There are different, of course, different whys, why it's hard to do that. One thing is, of course, the price environment. Other thing is the situation in Ukraine. Of course, the other thing is how countries defend their own markets from the imports. Feed production, more or less stable, but overall, the gross profitability is also more or less flat, a bit lower than last year, but not significantly.
Inputs, we still have a quite challenging environment for plant protection and micronutrients activity. The price pressure or the profitability pressure is still there from the competition. Farmers also are a bit picky looking at the prices, the grain prices. They are still waiting for some improvement there. Hopefully, if the fields and the sowings will look good in spring, we will have a pickup in activity there as well. We have normalized the returns on fertilizers, and we are doing better with quantities this year. We have increased our quantities year on year. Overall, inputs are doing flat in terms of gross profit, EUR 14 million versus EUR 14 million last year. Agriculture machinery, demand and market size has decreased in all operating countries, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. A bit different situation per country. Lithuania is decreasing around 15%. However, Latvia and Estonia is decreasing roughly around 50%.
Both of the markets in terms of tractor sales are down by 50%, or you can say in other words, 50% of the units sold in the market are gone. Really tough situation there. However, we are doing a lot of active steps how to maintain our market share, how to be sharp in the market, and that actually helped. We have improved our market share in tractors in Lithuania. We have sustained our market share in Latvia and Estonia, so meaning that in falling markets, we are managing to sell more. We have seen or we see quite healthy activity in service and spare parts. That helps us because even though farmers are not investing, they still need to fix and service their machinery where we see healthy activity as well, healthy gross profit margins. Let's move to the food product production segment.
Here, of course, are quite a lot of good news. We have increased our sales slightly by EUR 20 million. In terms of quantities, we did a bit better as well. The majority of the increase came, of course, from poultry part. We are really happy with this segment this year because after, if you probably remember, if you follow us quite closely, we had a very tough and challenging three years. Finally, we see recovery in this market. In poultry business, we have higher quantities, we have favorable selling prices, and we have stable or reasonable input prices. Overall, the demand for poultry meat is really healthy, and it is improving year on year. Overall, poultry consumption is improving in Europe or even worldwide because it is considered a good and healthy protein.
You probably can read in the news that there are a lot of bird flu happenings in Europe. We had one in Lithuania, but there are a lot in Poland. This impacts the supply of poultry to the market quite seriously. That's a big risk for any producer. We are taking, of course, quite a lot of precautions. Another impact for the market is that after those or during those three years, quite a lot of poultry producers or farmers actually stopped their operations because they couldn't survive. Overall, we have now a bit more tilted demand or bigger demand than the market can produce in terms of supply in Europe. Instant food, sold quantities in units have increased by 17%.
We have good new large accounts with big world-known names for our new and existing capacity, new meaning the second Alytus instant noodle plant. Unfortunately, it's not running still on full capacity. We are still doing some testing and calibrating, but that's only a matter of time when we will produce on full capacity and sort those things out. They are usually natural when you start that kind of big operation in the group. Ready to eat foods, we have quite a bit of a downward pressure on the prices, but we are managing that. Maybe the major change or a bigger change is that we are operating only on our Activus brand in the market, on the soups and porridges, which we acquired from AUGA Group.
You probably even noticed maybe in the shelves of the supermarkets that the AUGA brand in this area has left the market, and now we have rebranded under our Activus brand. Flour, average product portfolio price roughly decreased by 10%, but the gross profitability we have managed to maintain. If we talk about coating systems, we feel and we see that we have a solid demand there. We have increased and actually sold the increased production quantities, and we see stable gross profitability. In this area, we will launch a new factory in the coming quarter, and we will see how much it will actually add for the activity in the last or the fourth quarter. That new factory will be opened in Kėdainiai quite soon. Agricultural production, also a segment which is going through a lot of interesting market changes or turbulences.
Some are positive, some are a bit negative, but if you overall look, total sales have increased by EUR 2 million- EUR 27 million. We have sold 10,000 tons more in grains, and we produce roughly the same amount of milk in terms of tons. For 2024 harvesting results, we have 3% more in terms of volume. Year on year, we harvested a bit or slightly more. Condition of the future crop, meaning 2025 crop, is considered good or even very good so far. For the last two weeks, we had a bit of frost, a bit of snow. In essence, that's not a big problem. It is a risk, but so far we cannot evaluate if that has changed the crop quality. When the snow will melt, we will see how the sowings look and how we are coming into the spring season. Overall, it looks good.
Maybe on the bit negative side, we have continuously low price environments. On average, the price for main grains and oilseeds is 10%-15% lower year on year. That hurts our profitability a bit. Overall, we have already sold 95% of our 2024 harvest. It means that we have only 5% left to sell in the coming quarter. More or less the trade in grains and the agricultural production part is done. Milk production, that's a positive trend. That you can see actually helped us quite a lot because in terms of gross profit, we have close to zero in terms of our grain trade, but we have EUR 3 million in terms of our milk production and sales. EUR 3 million is comparable to EUR 1 million last year.
We have not increased that much our quantities, but we have approximately higher 20% milk price, raw milk price for the price which we sell our milk which we produce. That is actually a big benefit because last year we had quite low prices for the full year. Finally, they have increased because the first quarter, if you remember, the prices were still on the lower side. The second quarter actually saw a big increase in the prices. The biggest question is how much that is sustainable. Hopefully, it will continue at least for a quarter or a few months because our buyers or our dairies are also dependent on the global milk product prices and how that will calibrate going further.
Overall, you can see that the segment is doing slightly worse than last year, but we will see how that will even out in the next quarters because we also have received or accounted less subsidies for this second quarter. We have accounted or first half, we have accounted EUR 0.7 million in subsidies last year. For the same period, we have EUR 1.1 million. That is also different, which will even out in next quarters and is part of the difference year on year. More or less, thank you very much for listening. That is it from my side regarding the presentation. I invite you, of course, who have not yet subscribed to our news and we will keep you posted on any developments in the group. I am ready for your questions if you have any. Thank you very much.
Thank you for the presentation. We will now indeed proceed with the questions. Before we do so, I would like to remind everyone that you can submit your question using the Q&A button down below. We have received some questions, so I will start off with the first one. Congrats on the strong results. Could you please add a bit more color on why Akola engaged in a more intense grain trade in the last fiscal quarter? Do you expect the grain prices to ease later in the year or something else?
Thank you. That's a great question. Regarding the grain prices, it would be very hard to speculate how they will move. So far, you can see or we see that the global grain production is healthy.
We do not have any extremums, meaning that we do not have a lack of grain in the market or the countries who join with their harvest throughout the year because we have different harvests in different geographical areas during the whole financial year. They join with healthy quantities, meaning that the implication is that the market does not feel a lack of grain or the supply of wheat and other grains is good and healthy. That also probably reflects the price. The price is moving in a very narrow corridor, EUR 10-EUR 15 change, but that goes both ways and up and down. It is very hard to speculate how it will move further on. So far, the logic was like this behind the grain price. If we talk about our trade, it had to come quite naturally, the increases.
It's either in second quarter or third quarter because in terms of how much grain we bought during the harvest, the number was very similar to last year, a bit lower in Latvia, similar in Lithuania. We had the grain on the balance sheet, and basically, we tactically look and see and search for the opportunities when is the best time to sell them. We saw some good opportunities in the second quarter. As I mentioned before, we still have quite a lot of grain on our balance sheet yet to trade, and we will trade them during the next two quarters, depending on the prices, depending on the shipments. They will come either in the third quarter, sorry, or the fourth quarter overall. Thank you.
Next question is about poultry. The poultry segment has been doing really well for the past two quarters. How long do you expect this kind of an extraordinary performance to continue, or is that a new normal?
It's very hard to judge what is the new normal. We are looking at the market and trying to understand where everything is going because there are a lot of things which are actually maybe not that usual, like the bird flu. We have much more cases of bird flu in Europe, which you cannot expect to be all the time. Especially, we have a lot of bird flu cases in Poland, which is the biggest exporter of poultry in Europe, and that affects the price of poultry meat quite a lot. This is the one thing. The other thing, we so far had very mild weather, meaning very warm winter.
If you remember, during the winter, we used to fall in profitability because we had to use quite a lot of natural gas to heat our broiler houses. So far, the winter was very warm. Gas prices are normal, and that helped us well a lot in the second quarter. This actually also is very relevant to the third quarter because third quarter is January, February, still quite cold months, but you have probably noticed that January was also quite warm. That might help our cost as well. February is a different story. February, we have colder February, so we will see how that will impact our profitability. There are different trends playing here. Some are more controllable. Some are less controllable. What also helps on our end is stable input cost, meaning feed cost is stable for the last year.
Thus, stable or low grain prices, that is very much connected. The other thing is that I think our team did a great job on diversifying or working on our sales portfolio in terms of geographies, in terms of product mix, which actually gives also us a very big benefit. This is something maybe we can control, and we can say that that can last for quite a while. I think after all the COVID and all the difficult years, we do have a much healthier diversification of sales in terms of geographies, and we also do more in terms of our product portfolio. One more thing, I think we have sustained strong leader position in the local market because we're still very much also dependent or we are working quite a lot in the local market, meaning Latvia and Lithuania. That is good as well.
Thank you. The next question is, the agricultural machinery, equipment, and services market is still shrinking in all Baltic countries, as stated in the report. Could you please share your view about when one could reasonably see it bottoming out?
That's a $1 million question. We are also looking for that. One big momentum which we are looking is, of course, the future harvest. If the future harvest, meaning harvest of 2025, will look good, if the prices will be more or less favorable for the farmers, they will have more incentive or more safety to invest and to plan their future. That will help a lot, and that would really stabilize the market because farmers would receive healthy income. Of course, they are willing to invest because they need to renew. They need to increase their efficiency. That is a very big factor which plays in.
Another big factor, of course, is financing cost. The Euribor is falling for the last now probably more than half a year. It still takes time when it goes or spills into the market. With lowering Euribor, we see that the sentiment of farmers to take loans is also better. Meaning that they will have more opportunities or better conditions to finance their investments. This is a good trend which really already helps us. The second trend, which I have described for you in our agriculture production segment, is milk price. For farmers who have milk production, they really have rebounded like us as well. They have good healthy income coming in. Combined with decreasing borrowing cost, farmers who have bigger milking operations already are more active in the market. This is also very important.
The other thing which is more connected to Lithuania rather than to the other two countries is the support schemes. Lithuania had announced a very big support scheme in autumn. Since then, everyone stopped buying machinery and went to apply for the support schemes because the logic is very simple. If I can get support, why should I buy now? I will buy later when I know the results. Basically, those results are starting to come in. They will come in in spring. If farmers receive the support, I think that will be a great boost to the market going forward. That is still to come. We will see how many farmers will get the support, what will be the amounts, will our clients get the support, and so on. That will be a great uptick in the market for sure. Thank you.
Next question. Akola demonstrates vertical integration and utilizes much of its own production to create higher value-added goods. What is the scale of this activity?
To answer to your question, it is not fixed because even though we are vertically integrated, we want to be always as efficient as possible. We always check market prices. If we can get lower market prices or better market prices, we buy from the market. Overall, we cannot satisfy all our production in the end with our integration. We still are working in the market. Of course, we have closed all the chain. We are agri producers, so we produce grains and milk. We are also a trader, so we sell to our farming companies. They need machinery. We have the machinery. The agriculture companies can sell to our mills. They produce flour.
The flour goes to the instant noodles and breadcrumbs and so on and so on. We have that. Our scale of production in flour, our scale of production in instant noodles is much higher than we produce grains ourselves. Basically, we cannot satisfy all the chain, but we are there. We have good market knowledge. We have good efficiencies. We have good understanding where everything is going, and that helps us a lot. What's the direct impact for the P&L? It changes. It can differ and so on. We are there. We always play on market prices, and we always look where the market is moving because we need to be sharp and efficient.
Thank you. Now moving towards investments. Your investments in PPF segment are the largest at approximately EUR 29 million. Could you please disclose the areas where those were made?
Yes, this is two big investments apart from several smaller. One is Iecava Seed Plant. If you remember, we announced last year that we are investing into seed production plant in Iecava, Latvia. We have one in Lithuania and in Dotnuva. This is a very good business for us. We are the market leaders in Lithuania, having more than 30% of the market share. We have started with this business quite long ago. Our Lithuanian plant is running at full capacity. It is also exporting to Latvia and Estonia. We see huge potential in Latvia, so we are building a seed plant there. The other big investment is, of course, our Elagro acquisition. We bought a company in Latvia. I mentioned before, it was a competitor or a close competitor to our Linas Agro SIA. We are basically buying Elagro .
We are scaling up our operations, scaling trading inputs, improving or increasing as well as expanding our client portfolio. We will have team synergies. We're really, I think, adding good people to our organization. We will see that the scale, which is very important to this business, will hope to gain and establish our positions in the Latvian market, and we will be number two or number one player in the market.
Thank you. A bit about strategy. Last time, you noted that strategy target will be reviewed when Alytus factory will start operations. Any fresh information on ti me schedule?
We will communicate that to all the investors via, of course, Nasdaq when we will do that. We usually do some revisions of our strategy and other things by the end of the financial year. That is one of the moments, but it might happen later.
The only thing is that we want the Alytus factory up and running at a smooth process. Also, we want the Kėdainiai breadcrumb factory going live. After those two big investments are going live and producing, we will have more information and data on how we are doing and how that is impacting our overall strategy. The other thing, Iecava seed plant will start production this summer as well. We will see fresh sales coming from that plant in autumn or late summer. That is also a big indicator of how much that will impact our strategy and how we can then communicate that target to the market.
Thank you. The following question is about wheat price. As it is higher this year, do you expect a positive impact on your Q3 and Q4 results because of that, or is all 2024 harvest already contracted?
In terms of what we produce, the overall wheat price or any grain price is important to our agriculture companies who produce grain and sell them. They need an absolute price. There we have already sold 95% of our production, so only 5% left. That will not impact that much of the profitability. In terms of our trading activity, not only the overall price or the universal price plays here. Trading is more about the margins, how we construct the margin. Margin construction is a lot of different pieces: logistics, market situation, wheat quality, or grain quality overall, supply demand in the global market, and stuff like that. It is not necessarily that if the wheat price increases, we will do better in trading.
There's a lot of other factors playing in there because you saw the wheat price, for example, was more or less stable the first half of the year or a bit even lower year on year, but we still did the same gross profit. It is not a direct relationship.
Thank you. We are almost through all the questions. A couple still left. If anyone still has any questions, please use the Q&A button down below. In the meantime, let's proceed. What are the key reasons for decreasing profitability margins in ready-to-eat instant food segments?
That's maybe two reasons. One is a bit of a price pressure and competition in the market, which is, of course, natural. That maybe was not the main impact. The main impact is that we have not yet fully, we don't have yet fully running the new plant.
That is connected with extra cost. We have some extra cost, which is coming from all the calibration processes, adjustments, and other stuff. That decreased the overall profitability of the segment. When we have that part done, and it is only a matter of time, we will be smoothly running. I think we will restore the profitability, and we will then add all the extra quantities which we have planned with the new production plant.
Thank you. Lastly, a bit about biosecurity and the poultry farms. Also, a question was asked about, do you have insurance for birds as well as insurance for operations continuity in case of an y flues?
We have insurance for birds, of course. Business continuity is a different question. I really want to say for everyone that we are taking extra precautions, and we are managing a lot of risks.
We know that's a huge risk for us. We are very on a high level with the biosecurity, and we are doing a lot of additional measures after the case in Lithuania, which you probably heard about, to prevent anything with what we can think of. Of course, bird flu is a very nasty disease, and it spreads around. However, we take that very seriously, and we don't leave it for fate. We are putting any extra measures we can get in the market. We also work with our feed suppliers, with our workers, and anyone else who has any potential risk in this area because we can see the situation in, sorry, not Latvia, but Poland, where the disease is spreading, and they have a lot of problem to contain.
Of course, a big country, a lot of small and big producers all over the country, and they have much more problem to contain it. In our case, we have a bit more concentration, which is also a risk, but also that we can put more control measures on them. We have also diversification. We have two plants, Lithuania, Latvia. We have different places where we breed the birds. It is not in one place. That also diversifies our risk. Probably more or less on that.
Thank you. With this, we have actually covered all the questions that we received. Final notes that on behalf of Akola Group and Nasdaq, we thank everyone for joining today. It was a pleasure being with you today as well. Finally, the recording of the presentation will be available on Nasdaq Baltic YouTube channel. From my side, I would like to thank for this informative conference and maybe a couple of final words from you as well.
Thank you, everyone, for listening. Great questions. Hope to meet you after next quarter. Have a good day. Thank you, everyone.