Coca-Cola HBC AG (CCH) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for standing by, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Coca-Cola HBC's Conference Call for the 2022 Third Quarter Trading Update. We have with us Mr. Zoran Bogdanovic, Chief Executive Officer; Mr. Ben Almanzar, Chief Financial Officer; and Ms. Joanna Kennedy, Head of Investor Relations. [Operator Instructions] I must also advise that this conference is being recorded today, on Tuesday, on the 8th of November 2022. I now pass the floor to one of your speakers, Ms. Joanna Kennedy. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. I'm here with our CEO, Zoran Bogdanovic; and our CFO, Ben Almanzar. We'll start with some opening remarks from Zoran and then open the floor to your questions. [Operator Instructions] We have about an hour for the call today, which should leave plenty of time for a good discussion. Finally, I must remind you that this conference call contains various forward-looking statements. These should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements in our trading update press release, which we published this morning. And with that, I will turn the call over to Zoran.

Thank you, Joanna, and good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining the call. I have 3 key takeaways for you today. First is the strength of our performance, reflecting our continued momentum and we are upgrading our guidance with today's results. Second is the agility and resilience of our business that we've built over many years and proven through recent and ongoing challenges. And third is that while so far we have seen limited evidence of a consumer slowdown, we at CCH together with the Coca-Cola Company and our other partners are alert to this risk and fully ready to adopt with well-prepared plans. With that, let me get into the detail. We are very pleased with our performance in Q3, which has been ahead of our expectations. I would like to give credit to the excellent summer season planning in partnership with the Coca-Cola Company and also to the effective execution of those plans by our fantastic teams in our markets. This morning, we reported Q3 organic revenues up 19.6%, excluding Russia and Ukraine. This builds on the 25% growth we reported in first half. We achieved an acceleration in organic revenue per case to 15% from 14% in the first half of this year. This is the result of our responsible approach to pricing and mix decisions enhanced by data and insights. We always approach this with the desire to provide value to shoppers and customers, balancing premiumization and affordability and ensuring relevant propositions for all consumer segments. Our revenue growth was ahead of transactions growth and both were ahead of volume growth, showing our revenue growth management capabilities at full strength. It's clear we continue to create value remaining the #1 contributor to revenue growth in FMCG across our retail customers. In addition to improvements in category mix through the growth of Sparkling and Energy, we increased package mix through strong activation of single-serve packages. Following out a few examples, cans grew 15%, 0.5 liter PET 10% and our premium 200 ml glass bottles, 20%. We have been front-footed in driving revenue per case. This is critical as we continue to navigate a very challenging inflationary environment across all markets, particularly driven by energy costs. Revenue per case expansion has been ahead of CPI for the group, a key proof point of our progress. We are encouraged to see the continued outperformance on market share, particularly given the strong increase on price/mix year-to-date, we've gained 130 basis points of value share in NARTD and 190 basis points in Sparkling. This shows that the strength of our brands, effective marketing and our compelling commercial offer have earned the price improvements and driven the volume growth we are achieving. Volume growth continues to be robust, up 5.7% in Q3, excluding Russia and Ukraine. On a 3-year basis, that is versus 2019, which allows us to look at performance versus pre-pandemic levels, Q3 volumes were up nearly 16%. This is an acceleration on first half versus 2019, which was up 15%, clear evidence of healthy momentum in our categories. Digging into that volume growth, we can see positive momentum in our areas of strategic focus. The numbers I'll share with you now are all excluding Russia and Ukraine. Volume growth was led by Sparkling, up 6.2%. Within the category, Trademark Coke volume grew 9%, benefiting from targeted summer plants delivered through strong market execution. Energy performance continues to be strong, up 30% with volume growth across all 3 segments. The benefit of our tiered portfolio is also clear with very strong performance from Predator in Poland and Nigeria. We continue to roll out coffee with volumes up 51%. Costa Coffee is making good progress, particularly in the out-of-home channel, which has been the key focus area in 2022. And Caffe Vergnano is now in a total of 14 markets ahead of plan. Meanwhile, in stills, where volumes grew by 2.4%, we are focusing on expanding revenue per case, driving single-serve packages and higher value-added offerings. Moving on to our segmental performance. Established segment organic sales grew by 19.3% with well-balanced volume and revenue per case contribution. Volumes were nearly 9% ahead of pre-pandemic levels, a clear signal that momentum is being sustained by more than just recovery and consumers are staying resilient. We are particularly pleased with the performance of a smaller and single-serve packs in established. Growth momentum was especially strong in Ireland and Italy, with both markets benefiting from strong Sparkling growth led by low and no sugar and adults. Sparkling was complemented by good stills performance driven by innovation. In the Developing segment, organic sales grew by 23.1%. Again, we are really pleased to see the balanced performance between revenue per case and volume growth. And we are also pleased to see further share gains across our markets. Similar to the established segment in developing the consumer environment remains healthy without signs of deterioration. We are very pleased by the single-serve performance this quarter in Poland, particularly our glass and multi-serve entry packs. The emerging segment's performance has been negatively impacted by us stopping the sale of the Coca-Cola in Russia as well as the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Organic revenues declined by 6% in the segment. But stripping out Russia and Ukraine, organic revenues were -- grew by 17.7%. That said, we've seen an encouraging recovery in Ukraine this quarter with demand ahead of expectations. Across our markets, we've continued to prioritize driving healthy revenue per case, while ensuring we are meeting consumers' needs on affordability. This is particularly true in Nigeria and Egypt. Both are facing a more challenging consumer backdrop after a period of rapid growth. In both cases, I've been pleased to see very good performance on share as we continue to grow revenue ahead of the market. Integration in Egypt is progressing according to plan. We are investing in transferring key capabilities into the market, ensuring we achieve our vision of healthy share gains and profitability improvement over the medium term. Let me conclude my remarks by updating you on our guidance for 2022 and a reminder of our strategic focus. As I said at the start of this call, trading this quarter has been ahead of expectations and we continue to see good momentum in the business. Therefore, while remaining attentive to macroeconomic and geopolitical risks, we are raising our guidance. We now expect to achieve double-digit organic revenue growth at group level and expect comparable EBIT in the range of EUR 860 million to EUR 900 million. Our strategic focus is on delivering sustainable, profitable growth. We are making good progress against our 5 strategic growth pillars and this is of critical importance. Let me call out a couple of examples of the actions we've taken to make this stronger, more resilient and agile business. Firstly, we continue to invest across the business in areas of the highest potential. This includes our portfolio. For example, the way we've consistently invested behind Adult Sparkling and now behind coffee. It also includes targeted investments in our markets. Our focus on HoReCa in Italy, for example, or cooler investments in Egypt. Secondly is our investment in capabilities, the development of our digital route to market and investments in data, which allow us to continue to segment our customer base into finer and finer detail, further strengthening our revenue growth management capability. We've also invested directly to increase agility and the speed of adaptability in the business, enhancing the connectivity between our markets and the center, allowing us to dynamically deploy resources, giving us an advantage in the marketplace. And thirdly, as I've said before, we are determined to remain leaders in sustainability. This quarter marked an important milestone as we issued our first ever green bond, raising capital to accelerate progress of our net zero by '40 and Mission 2025 commitments. We continue to deliver strong financial performance, proving our strategy is working. We continue to invest behind our strategic priorities and we remain well-positioned for future profitable and sustainable growth and creating shareholder value. Thank you for your attention. And I now hand back to the operator, and Ben and I will be happy to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from Mitch Collett with Deutsche Bank.

I have one question. Can you just give us some color on 2023? I appreciate you haven't finished 2022 yet, but it would be just good to get some puts and takes. You've got a full year of the Russia operating in the new model, potentially less of a COGS headwind. So can you give us some color on how we should think about 2023 at this stage?

Thank you. Let me just say a few words and then Ben will build further. So as I mentioned, so far we see, let's say, a limited impact on the consumer from the whole environment and inflationary pressures. I'm reiterating how pleased I am with how we've navigated through 2022 and feeling fully ready for whatever may be ahead of us in 2023. We do expect that we will be probably feeling more of a consumer impact in Q4 and into 2023. For that reason, we have fully ready overall holistic plans, including further dynamic flexible pricing across all our markets that I have strong confidence in how we will execute them equally as we did this year. And in terms of the Russia thing, you know that this year, it's fully really not comparable given the whole evolution and us starting with a significantly smaller model there, which next year will have an impact versus this year. With that, Ben, please.

All right. Thank you, Zoran. So Mitch, as you rightly alluded, it's a bit early to provide the guidance for 2023. We haven't landed 2022 yet and there are still many moving parts. Now let me provide a bit of color just to give you some sense of what we're seeing. We're planning for another inflationary year with COGS per case likely to be up double-digits. We will rely on pricing-led RGM to drive quality revenue to ensure that we make the right decisions as we navigate the 2022-2023 inflationary environment, our primary focus is going to be on absolute EBIT. We will consider it a very good performance if we achieve organic EBIT growth in 2023. As per usual practice, we'll come back in February, where we can say more about next year's guidance, but we remain optimistic about the midterm prospects of the business.

The next question is from Sanjeet Aujla, Credit Suisse.

I'd just like to understand a little bit more how you're balancing the need for further price increases on the one hand with also the need for affordability. I think your assumption is that volume losses will impact at some stage. So how are you balancing the net effect of that? And can you achieve affordability measures in a revenue per case accretive way?

Sanjeet, thank you. In short, I believe we can. Now this is the -- my personal and the team's source of confidence is the way we've been building the whole revenue growth management capability which is far more than just doing pricing. Pricing is an important and essential element, especially in this kind of inflationary environment. And for that reason, we've been doing well-planned and orchestrated price increases across all our markets. Evidence of how we've done that so far is no customer disruption as this is done with a strong argumentation and in partnership with customers where we always aim for providing value to shoppers and consumers because of the whole holistic approach, which surrounds pricing, whether that's a promotional plan might be pricing promotions or price pack architecture or value-added promotions and, of course, the whole marketing plan that we create together with the Coca-Cola Company. So all that comes together and within the whole RGM, there is a critical part of paying attention both to affordability as well as premiumization even in these kinds of times. Now affordability is something that really is even more is coming to the surface, which is not a surprise. So in all markets, we are paying attention to that, and there are many things that we can do, whether we are changing the PEC architecture, where we are doing more proliferation of the smaller single-serve packages because we do see the importance of the absolute price points that we want to hit. And it seems that absolute price points because how people in these kind of times manage their own absolute spend on basket proves to be even more important than price per liter. Then we are introducing smaller multi-serves. And across our markets, we have done moves which proved to be working quite well. In my prepared remarks, I mentioned Poland with 0.85. In a number of markets, we went from 1.25 to 1 liter, 1.5 to 1.25. So we are doing that, together with also reducing the size of the multipacks, whether it's on single service or multi-serves. And then also paying attention on the price promotions. This is where our data and insights and intelligence that we are gathering return on investment analysis is showing what type of promotions in which type of markets are serving us best so that we both achieve the value for us and customer, but equally that shoppers and consumers get the value they are looking for. So there is a whole variety of things that we are doing there. And let me just conclude that this is what gives me a confidence and belief that we can continue a good healthy orchestration of driving our price/mix, but also paying more attention to affordability that consumer might increasingly need going forward.

The next question is from Simon Hales with Citi.

My first question for Zoran. Can I come back to your comments just around the consumer behavior that you're seeing? Obviously, you talked about having seen limited changes, but I wonder what you mean by limited, what changes have you started to see in some of your markets, perhaps through Q3 and into the early part of Q4, given that you were flagging that you do expect things to be more challenging in the fourth quarter and into next year? So that was my first one, please.

Simon. Yes. So in few markets, primarily in Africa, Nigeria, Egypt. And then to some degree, let's say, Romania, where we do see that consumers are either a bit slowing down on the purchases or there is a shifting buying pattern, which we are closely monitoring. So the way also people are more cautious on the savings, preplanning their spending. So these are some of the things that we have seen in the past, and we observe them now in a few markets. And we did say that it's a limited number of markets because in actually, majority of our markets, we haven't yet seen across all categories, the impact of this, let's say, impact in consumer behavior. We stay alert to monitor that and make any necessary adjustments to that. I mentioned in the remarks Nigeria and Egypt because we know that Nigerian and Egyptian consumer is less resilient than the one in Europe, having less, let's say, household savings than those in Europe. And we know that this would be an expected behavior in these kinds of times. That's why like in my answer to Sanjeet, we do pay increasing attention to the affordability. But because of the segmentation which we are doing in the countries, this now allows us also to balance this with also things that are addressing consumer segments where affordability is not so much an issue. Therefore, our more premium offerings, whether in Sparkling or Energy are still having good performance even in these type of markets. So I hope I gave you a bit more color on this.

No, that's great, Zoran. I wonder but if I could just sort of follow up with the second one, maybe for Ben. I think Ben, you talked about 2023 COGS being up double-digits. I wonder if you could share where you are from a hedging standpoint on your core commodities?

Yes. Thank you, Simon. So basically, when it comes to hedging, if you look at 2022, we are well-covered. We've now hedged over 90% of this year's major commodities associated with input cost. We continue to look for opportunities to hedge in 2023, primarily focusing on sugar, aluminum and resins and we'll be in a position to give an update in February like we often do.

The next question is from Edward Mundy with Jefferies.

Zoran, a question for you. You mentioned in your press release that you are the #1 contributor to revenue growth within FMCG across your retail customers. How does this compare versus a few years ago? And how does this help you navigate alongside your key customers at potentially deteriorating consumer environment, I'd like you to deploy your RGM and digital capabilities? And then I've got a follow-up.

Look, I can't be fully factual, however, because I don't remember. However, this last couple of years, I would say, last 2, 3 years in a number of our markets. But in totality, we are very pleased to see that we are #1 revenue-generating player in FMCG space. And I see that as a direction of investments into resources, capabilities, systems that we are doing with the key account management capability, which is one of our prioritized capabilities. And that's for a simple reason that more than 50% of our revenues is coming from that key account retail space. So it's a conscious effort of getting the best possible people to lead and populate these critical roles and the best reward is to see customer partnership levels, loyalty and programs and things that we do together, which actually materialize in this achievement that we also claimed. Whenever meeting customers and hearing their feedback, this is what gives a great source of confidence. And one of the reasons -- this is one of the reasons why also, so far, we have not seen any customer disruption when it also comes to price increases because we have a continuous treatment intense partnering where we are together, reading the environment, creating the plans. Joint business planning is one of the things that we do with the increasing number of customers, which is not only with 1 year horizon, but multiyear horizon. And that's the proof point of how together we are partnering, which is way beyond the transactional way of working with customers. Does that help, Ed?

Actually, Ed just messaged me saying that he's dropped off the line. So unfortunately, we won't be able to have him. But maybe we can move to the next question.

Okay. No problem. I'm not sure I can repeat all that.

The next question is from Andrea Pistacchi from Bank of America. The next question is from Charlie Higgs with Redburn.

My first question is on Energy drinks, please, where you've seen 30% volume growth of a 29% comp last year, which is obviously very, very strong. I was wondering how sustainable is this growth? Have you got a strong pipeline of innovations coming up for 2023? And is the growth of creditor accretive to your Energy drinks growth at the moment? Or does it potentially cannibalize a bit from months to energy?

Well, Energy category has now been for, I think, 5 or so years constantly growing with double-digit growth and we strongly believe that this category has still a long runway ahead. And that comes because of the number of factors. One is the fantastic innovation that pipeline that we are getting from Monster team that really proves to be driving incremental revenues and also serving the purpose of expanding the category to wider segments of consumers. That's why this category has evolved of being just, let's say, teenage drink, but really now it's becoming a part of beverage landscape for many more consumers. Also reformulations where Energy now also has a number of variants without sugar, then also tapping into blurring categories where you see Energy kind of blurred with juice, Energy with tea. So all that is helping that great-tasting product, there is a great promotional calendar, some stronger marketing properties that Monster has that are really relevant to consumers, but equally also to our customers. And then also showing how stratification of the brands in their own price leather and segments really plays a role. So Monster, if you take like a key mainstream proposition burn on the more on the premium. And then now Predator, which plays this role of more affordable energy, which proved to be exactly the right proposition in Nigeria, now is proving also its relevance in Poland so that we can compete with other Energy beverage types, which are in that segment, which eliminates the need that we, let's say, price promote more Monster or Adez. Even though Predator is of lower revenue per case, however, it has a good profitability, good profitability level, which can vary from country to country, but we are quite pleased with the bottom line that also it creates.

And then my follow-up question is just on Nigeria. And if you could just sort of on the health of the consumer and also the volume performance in Sparkling, has that been impacted at all by the sugar tax? And are you seeing consumers move more towards your returnable glass bottles?

Yes. The sugar tax is just -- it's been blended in the whole price increases that us and others have been doing, for sure, was not something that we hope for. However, it was not -- honestly, it was not dramatic. So I wouldn't attribute too much of an impact to the pricing -- sorry, to tax itself. Now in Nigeria, we know that in these kind of days and when consumer is impacted more, we know that volume will, for a period of time, be sacrificed, if you will, because of the driving price/mix, which is absolutely critical to do now. So it is in line with our expectations that for a period of time, volumes might suffer in some periods, but all that is for the purpose of generating healthy revenue. And that's why I'm quite pleased to see that Nigeria also in Q3 has continued with a very strong double-digit revenue growth that we've seen.

The next question is from Yubo Mao with Morgan Stanley.

I just have a very quick one developing, please. The top line momentum there has continued to be fairly remarkable in Q3 and your comments there appear to be somewhat more positive than some other beverages peers. So could you please just give us your thoughts on what's been driving that momentum? How much of that was down to favorable industry dynamics, soft drinks being more resilient and how much was down to your execution?

Very pleased with how developing markets have been performing. Actually, it's across almost all of those markets that have been driving strong double-digit growth in Poland, both total portfolio and Sparkling high 20s, close to 30s. Hungary, same thing, in the 20s, Czech, high 20s. So we see that that growth is coming across all categories. I'm very pleased that actually Sparkling is driving significant growth, which is in the low teens. Very pleased to see that no sugar variant is growing even faster. And then also Energy has been performing really well. This is also a segment where we see a very good growth of coffee as Poland is a big market for Costa. So this comes as a result of very well show-through plans. I would start with Poland, which last year was suffering because of the enormous price increases driven because of the sugar tax. But proper prioritization that the system team, meaning our team and Coca-Cola team has prioritized focus behind key bets, which is Sparkling led by zero sugar flavors. There was a beautiful revival and relaunch of Kinley as our Adult Sparkling proposition in Poland, giving very good results, also Energy performance and I mentioned -- also mentioned coffee. There was a very good balanced revenue generation between price and volume. And all the price increases that we have done in the market have gone really well without any disruption. So that also -- last point I want to say is complemented with our continuous investment into the market. Our sales teams, not only in the number of them that we have and that we are increasing year-on-year, but also the capability that we are constantly raising of their skills and knowledge, leveraging our sales academy that we have, which has the purpose of continuous knowledge refreshment and upskilling of our teams in the market, which inevitably helps customer relationships and market execution.

Understood. Can I just have a follow-up on Egypt, please? It looks like you've continued to outperform in what's a fairly difficult market. But the volume decline appears to have got a bit worse this quarter. Would you be able to share some color or data points around how the overall industry has performed and the magnitude of the share gains you've achieved in the recent quarters?

Yes, yes, sure. So look, really tough market or, let's say, circumstances in the market where a number of things have come together from inflation, from currency, food pricing, we know on the dependency on the wheat imports, et cetera. So us and others in the market have reacted with the price increases, which really need to be done. We are happy that there is a kind of a rational competitive conduct in the market. And within that context, we are very pleased that we are continuously having a positive share performance. That is great to see. I use the opportunity to say that, look, share performance is not something that will necessarily always happen either in Egypt or elsewhere because we know that we want to pay attention on the healthy revenue growth. It sometimes happens that any competitor decides to play a pure volume game, we are not going to follow that. I'm not saying we are not going to react in some ways that will be meaningful. That's why I don't want to leave a flavor that share gains are something that necessarily will always happen. We are ready to sometimes have some share sacrifice if needed for our revenue and bottom line protection. However, coming back to Egypt, I'm very pleased that the team over there has been doing a really good job in the way they have done price increases, how they have adjusted their marketing plans, so that all together as a package, we are winning in the market.

The next question is from Richard Felton with Goldman Sachs.

I'll be interested to know how you're thinking about your strategy in alcoholic beverages in FY '23 and beyond. So like the Coke system was a bit faster to market with a hard service product in Europe than some of the brewers. There's more innovation on the way with Jack and Coke in the RTD space. So Zoran, I'd be interested to hear how you're thinking about your medium-term strategy in alcoholic beverages and how that might impact your financials going forward.

Yes, Richard, thanks for the question. First, a reminder that for more than a decade, we've been in the alcohol category having very valuable partnerships with several Premium Spirits companies like Edington, Brown-Forman, Campari in almost all of our markets. So this helped us that for more than a decade, we have built the capability experience of operating in this category and also really experiencing through clear results, how we drive incremental revenue not only through Premium Spirits propositions, but also through -- also through complementarity of Premium Spirits and our core portfolio through mixability, how that's also stimulating the growth of our core portfolio, be it Adult sparkling, Coca-Cola as a mixer either in the HoReCa or also in the socializing occasion at home. Now coming back to the question related to midterm going forward. We really are very pleased that Coca-Cola Company has entered into this space of flavored alcohol beverages, where Hard Seltzer of Topo Chico was just a start. As you said, there are some nice innovations coming up there. And one of them is this great blend of Coca-Cola and Jack Daniel's. And we do have in our plans to launch that in selected markets. To start with, we look forward to see the global launch in Mexico later in the year, but we are also part of the plans and preparations to roll it across several of our markets. So personally, I believe that year-by-year, the propositions -- relevant propositions for our consumers will be bigger and bigger, and that's a shared vision between Coca-Cola Company and us together.

The next question is from Andrea Pistacchi with Bank of America.

I've got a question and then a follow-up. I'm sorry if it's been asked already, I got cut off from the call earlier. The first question, please, is on top line. I know it's early to talk about 2023. I was just wondering if you could share any thoughts on what you think top line growth may look like, maybe not exactly quantifying in 2023. I think CCP last week, obviously, they've got a different geographic footprint that they talked about their markets potentially growing around high-single-digit next year, very much price-driven. So how you think about your markets? That's the first question, please.

Andrea, and sorry for the dropout you had, so no problem or whatever you will ask. So we do -- you remember that our 2025 algorithm of the quarter of 5% to 6%, whereas we've seen, we will be quite ahead of that this year. We do feel that in spite of the environment and some of the limited impact in some of the markets, we do feel there is a momentum in the business reflected in the top line, reflected in the share gains and also in the way customers are recognizing that. So I believe that even though it's quite early yet and we are very mindful to see how the environment will evolve. But I can only say that my expectation would be that we would be ahead of the corridor in terms of the top line that we have for our 2025, which you remember is between 5% to 6%.

That's very helpful. And the second question is on the increased guidance for 2022. If you're able to -- I mean to say, maybe not exactly, of course, but what is mainly driving this? Is it the really strong performance in the core business versus a better performance maybe in the Russia-Ukraine part of the business? And also, is it a stronger Q3 or maybe even an expectation that as you're seeing the environment, you haven't really seen an inflection point, an expectation that Q4 may be more resilient than you could have been thinking a couple of months ago?

Yes. Let me start and then probably Ben wants to also build. Andrea, this year -- first of all, readiness and preparation of our plans for this year where core elements of the plant have been so well-executed. But then also with everything that has happened from February, how we have quickly adopted to create acceleration plans in a number of our markets that were not affected by this crisis was also an important element and how quickly we have worked with Coca-Cola Company team in creating acceleration plans in a number of markets, whether Italy, Poland, Greece, blended with our desire to create best possible summer plants like never before, which gave excellent results. This was helped by good recovery in the out-of-home channel for those markets that were not yet fully open last year. Also the element of -- we have to be thankful for very good weather that we have also experienced during summer. And even last October, we enjoyed very good weather in a number of our markets. Consistent investments behind our top strategic priorities of Sparkling, Energy, coffee. And even as, let's say, more, not so visible success joker that we see with Powerade in sports category that has been performing really, really well in a number of markets where we have it. And last point I will say is also that capabilities do matter. The fact that we are continuously strengthening our RGM so that we can really drive that healthy revenue does matter. And also the fact how it is now fueled with data insights analytics, that connectivity is great. And further, when you put that triangle of revenue growth management data insights and route to market, that makes interconnected trio, on which we are having great focus investments and resources. I personally believe that that's not -- let's say, not so visible, but we feel how much that helps us to drive the revenue growth.

Just a quick view. All of these elements that Zoran mentioned, Andrea, drove a strong period of trading over the summer and better-than-expected financial performance in Q3. So when you couple that with ongoing favorable currency through the period, despite all the uncertainty and obviously, we remain very, very attentive at macroeconomics and geopolitical risk that led us to raise the guidance and we're not expecting that EUR 860 million to EUR 900 million, which includes the full consolidation of Multon on August 11.

Gentlemen, there are no more questions registered at this time. I turn the conference back to Ms. Kennedy for any closing remarks.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your insightful questions and good conversation. Let me just conclude this call with a reminder on only 3 key messages. Firstly, the trading in this quarter has been ahead of expectations, and we increased our 2022 guidance accordingly. Secondly, while so far we've seen only limited evidence of a consumer slowdown, we are alert to this risk and are fully ready to adopt with well-prepared plans. And finally, we build a more agile and resilient business over the past few years, better able to meet both the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. We remain well-positioned for future profitable and sustainable growth and creating shareholder value. Thank you very much for being with us and wishing you a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining. The conference is now over, and you may disconnect your telephones.