Croda International Plc (CRDA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Many thanks for joining the call. I'm here with Stephen and David. And once we've run through the formal presentation, we will be very happy to take your questions. So the usual agenda today, I will start with some overarching comments on performance, and Stephen will go through the numbers in detail. And I will then come back to show how we are executing our plan to grow earnings and returns. Then it's very much over to you for Q&A. Okay. So making the start and coming first to performance. The headline message is that the business has done what we expected it to do with results very much in line with our expectations for the first half. And our growth is classic Croda, profits growing ahead of sales and sales growing ahead of volume, exactly what we want to see for an innovation-led business. We are driving our transformation program at pace, and that is delivering results today as well as building an even stronger business for tomorrow. Growth increased in the second quarter, driven by Consumer Care and led by a standout performance in Beauty Actives. We've said for several quarters now that demand for innovation, particularly amongst the large multinationals, has been steadily increasing. And we have strengthened our portfolio and repositioned our approach to R&D to anticipate and take full advantage of that trend. And we're now starting to see the benefits with NPP growing faster than total sales in the first half. Alongside this improved performance, we've continued to deliver on our transformation plan to enhance growth and efficiency across all areas of the business. Croda is becoming a stronger business, not just to deliver in the short term, but to drive long-term sustainable and consistent growth for many years to come. This progress underpins our conviction for the full year with our outlook unchanged. And just as importantly, we're on track to deliver on our financial framework through to 2028. Building on that point, the initiatives that we are talking about, both to drive growth and transform the business are delivering an improved performance, meeting our ambition to grow earnings and enhance returns. Our program is focused on a clear set of objectives set out across this slide, which we presented in detail back in February. We're driving stronger returns from prior year investments while sharpening Croda by optimizing and simplifying our structure as well as transforming the way we do things. And critically, much of this is within our control. We're not relying on a big recovery in our end markets. So I'm very pleased with how the whole business has responded and our people are driving this change, and we're now starting to see that in our performance. This overall momentum means that we are firmly on track to deliver on our 3-year plan and the targets set out on this slide. As you can see along the bottom, we are making progress in all areas, and we expect that to continue, underpinned by our strong market positions across Consumer Care, Pharma and crop. So plenty to be encouraged about, but also much more to do, which I'll come on to in a moment. But first, let me hand over to Stephen for a detailed run-through of the numbers. Stephen?

Thank you, Steve, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to start with the financial headlines. It's great to report a good performance overall, in line with expectations despite ongoing geopolitical and economic uncertainty. In constant currency, sales were up 5% at GBP 881 million with 7% growth in new and protected products. Adjusted operating profit was up 7% at GBP 156 million, and EPS grew 9% to 78p. Free cash flow was GBP 38 million, up from GBP 28 million last year, and we have today announced an interim dividend of 48p. Net debt was GBP 578 million and leverage remained conservative at 1.4x EBITDA. Turning to sales, where again, my comparisons are in constant currency. Sales growth of 5% was driven by an increase of 8% in Consumer Care and 7% in Pharma Ingredients. Volumes increased 1% with an improvement in every business unit in Consumer Care as well as Pharma Ingredients. Price/mix was up 4%, supported by increased customer demand for innovation, in particular in Beauty Actives. Looking at sales by region. EMEA was up 3% on a strong prior year. Asia performed well with growth of 10%. North America was down 1% due to phasing in Pharma Solutions and a strong prior year in Crop Protection, while Latin America increased 11%. Looking at sales by quarter. Back in February, we guided to first quarter sales being broadly flat against a strong comparator. And as expected, we delivered growth of 1%. In the second quarter, growth accelerated to 9% against a softer comparator. Within Consumer Care, Beauty Actives grew 27% as it benefited from customer innovation and product launches. Most business units in Consumer Care and Life Sciences contributed to a sequential improvement in the second quarter with 3 exceptions. First, Fragrances and Flavors experienced some disruption related to the conflict with Iran. Second, Crop Protection sales were down as farm incomes were impacted by higher input costs. And third, Pharma Solutions was below expectations. Here, our order book means that we expect project revenues to improve in the second half. The overall impact of the conflict in the Middle East was limited as we increased prices to recover input cost inflation and as some customers brought early to avoid disruption. This was broadly offset by lower F&F sales in the region. Turning now to margin, which increased from 17.2% to 17.7% 50 basis points of expansion was driven by growth with higher volumes, positive price and mix, all contributing to the improvement. Transformation delivered additional cost savings of GBP 18 million, which equates to almost 2 percentage points of margin expansion, in line with expectations, bringing cumulative benefits to GBP 46 million. OpEx inflation includes an increase in the charge for variable remuneration. And the last of our major investments mainly relates to new sites in China and India. We expect operating margins to increase sequentially in the second half, driven by growth and further transformation benefits. The first half exit rate gives us confidence in delivering the full year margin expansion. Turning now to cash. Free cash flow strengthened from GBP 28 million to GBP 38 million. Looking at the component parts, EBITDA increased to GBP 208 million. Our working capital outflow of GBP 68 million is broadly similar to the first half last year. Our working capital improvement program is designed to deliver structural savings of around GBP 50 million by 2028, which we expect to offset the typical annual working capital outflow to fund growth of GBP 20 million to GBP 30 million. CapEx reduced to GBP 43 million following a period of heightened investment. There was a net cash outflow of GBP 50 million after paying last year's final dividend and net debt of GBP 578 million is broadly in line with last year with slightly lower leverage. Finally, I want to reiterate our full year guidance. We've provided our usual foreign exchange sensitivities in the materials to help you with currency translation. Now despite ongoing geopolitical and economic uncertainty, there is no change to our outlook for 2026. At a group level, we continue to expect organic sales growth of 3% to 6% and a further increase in adjusted operating margin. Our expectations for adjusted operating profit also remain unchanged. And with that, I'll hand back to Steve.

Great. Many thanks, Stephen. I want to spend the next 10 minutes or so talking about the execution of the 3-year plan we set out back in February in a bit more detail. It's all about driving consistent growth across our markets. The priority areas to achieve that are set out in this box, and we've successfully refocused our approach to innovation by reallocating R&D resources and implementing a framework that ensures greater emphasis on the balance of 3 things: customer co-creation, creating new markets for existing ingredients and accelerating the development of new ingredients, which is where the majority of our focus has been historically. We've also significantly improved the way we do things with customers, prioritizing our resources to deliver more tailored service packages for different segments, encompassing global brands, regional giants and local customers. And we're maximizing returns from acquisitions that we've made in recent years. And the CapEx we've invested to expand manufacturing in Asia. Two final sites opened during the half, a multipurpose site in Dahej, India and a combined fragrances and Beauty Actives facility in Guangzhou in China. This deliberately gets us closer to customers in our fastest growth region. Closely aligned to these priorities, we're successfully reinvigorating Beauty and making strong progress to rebalance pharma, which I'll come on to next. Starting with Beauty. The increased demand for customer innovation is being led by global brands, responding to intense competition from smaller challenger brands, which have been innovating at a faster rate over the last few years. Recent comments from L'Oreal's CEO a testament to this. And although low-income households continue to be under financial pressure, particularly in the U.S., premium categories are doing especially well, driven by higher income consumers. On the bottom left of this slide, 2 good examples of how we have been refocusing innovation to start capturing this increased demand. First, we are scaling up and commercializing our biotech pipeline. We recently commissioned a new group-wide biotechnology center in the U.K. with specialist expertise in biocatalysis and synthetic biology. Hair care has been a particular focus area in Beauty Care as we start commercializing our capabilities in recombinant proteins and as the hair care category growth accelerates. We've begun capturing this growth with the launch of [indiscernible], a bond builder for hair that has already secured orders with prestige brands and professional salon specialists. Second, we're developing more tailor-made solutions for customers. And we're now positioning beauty care as delivery systems for actives, leveraging our formulation expertise to create solutions comprising multiple ingredients that deliver particular efficacy or sensory benefits. Moving to the right, the other big step change is what we're doing to internationalize beauty actives. We have transferred technology and extended claim substantiation capabilities to new sites in India, China and Korea. Ceramides, which we acquired through Solus a few years ago, has seen particularly strong growth, up 44% during the first half as we globalize sales. We're also successfully expanding into more affordable beauty categories with higher penetration in masstige brands and our global beauty partners. This is a really attractive opportunity given the margin profile is similar to the margins that we make when we sell our ingredients for customers' premium brands. Turning to the next slide. Volufiline is a fantastic example of an existing product development, finding new applications for existing ingredients gets you to the market much quicker than developing a new ingredient. Volufiline is a skin plumping ingredient extracted from a plant route traditionally used in Eastern medicine and previously applied to parts of the body other than the face. So supported by new data, we have repositioned it as a facial filler in a bottle and to address consumer concerns about facial hollowing often associated with GLP-1 use. DCM, one of our beauty customers and now part of Estée Lauder, has adopted Voly4ine as its trade name for a product from the ordinary brand, formulating our ingredient at up to 92% inclusion levels. And this trend for customers using the names of our beauty ingredients in their marketing is on the increase with customer requests to use our trademarks increasing threefold over the last year. And Volufiline is now a TikTok sensation. Videos have been viewed more than 200 million times on the U.S. TikTok shop from a standing start just over a year ago. So it's selling fantastically well for our customers that as well as Desium include Korean beauty brands such as MediCube, which has included it as the hero ingredient in its volume and wrinkle care sticks. Volufiline is a great illustration of how all types of innovation, not just launching new ingredients, can help deliver incremental sales growth, and it shows the early impact that our refocused strategy is having. Turning next to Pharma. As you know, this part of our business is split into 2 areas, which both draw on common capabilities, but sell into market segments with different characteristics. The biggest part is Pharma Ingredients, which accounts for over 70% of sales and leverages our long-standing customer relationships and regional model. We saw good growth during the first half, up 7% and expect this progress to continue through the rest of the year. Our major initiative to relaunch our core flagship ingredients for topical applications and in markets such as animal health is getting really good traction with more to come. Customer co-creation projects for topical applications have doubled in the last year, a number of which draw on our skin care expertise in beauty. And alongside this, we have scaled innovation for advanced ingredients, particularly for injectables and bioprocessing applications. A good example of this is Virodex, our first ingredient range for bioprocessing initially commercialized through joint projects with multiple multinational pharma companies and one of which has already led to a more significant order. Our Pharma Solutions business is a much smaller specialized business, accounting for well under 30% of pharma sales, which works closely with customers, principally on new drugs in development. It is more project-driven with larger amounts of revenue attached to certain orders, and it's more lumpy by its nature. So whilst half 1 sales were affected by phasing, our order book means we expect project revenues to improve in half 2. Here, we are targeting new applications for lipids in generics and expanding our range of more than 2,000 lipids for drug research with new lipids that have the potential for oral delivery of complex therapeutics that normally require injection. We're also partnering to accelerate sustainable adjuvant development. An interesting example is biotech-derived squalene adjuvants as sharp-derived alternatives face tighter trade controls. And finally, across pharma, we are targeting originator and generics markets in Asia, an increasingly important region where we are well placed. Coming next to transformation, where we have made good progress across all priority areas set out within this box. We have continued to simplify and optimize our product portfolio to sharpen our commercial focus. And for example, we've introduced minimum order values and 18% of our customers now use Croda on, our online portal for lower value orders, up from 10% at the beginning of the year. Furthermore, we are targeting a significant reduction in SKUs in 2026 with 30% of our global product portfolio optimized so far. And to enhance efficiency, we are optimizing procurement, production and distribution. And we're generating savings from packaging, freight and key raw materials. Payment terms are being successfully renegotiated. Headcount is lower across all regions, and we continue to rebalance our manufacturing footprint to higher-growth countries. We've also made significant progress simplifying Croda by reducing central overheads, introducing shared service centers for finance and making a greater use of outsourcing. So again, good progress in all areas, and this will support our margin progression over the next couple of years. Our transformation work streams are underpinned by actions to enhance our high-performance culture and to leverage AI, data and digitalization to support decision-making. And across the group, we are embedding AI and digitalization guided by a coordinated road map. We are already generating incremental revenue by incorporating AI. And a great example of this is in our seed business, where we've used AI to optimize and control all steps of tomato seed enhancement, leveraging more than 20 years of historic data. And this has resulted in a fivefold reduction in treatment times, enhancing efficiency, improving customer satisfaction and generating additional revenue. Our focus going forward is on using AI to enhance our leadership position in innovation and combining it with our R&D data to speed up these innovation cycles. This combination of proprietary information and AI technology will significantly improve our competitive position over the next few years. And as I said at the outset, growth plus transformation is helping to drive our improved performance, and we are very focused on delivering the targets set out in our 3-year plan. Again, the work we're doing is not just driving a better performance today, it is strengthening our platform for longer-term sustainable and consistent growth for years to come. So bringing this all together, our performance in the first half was very much in line with our expectations. We like the shape of our results with profits growing ahead of sales and sales ahead of volume. That's classic Croda, and it highlights the renewed strength of innovation in the business. The program we set out at the start of this year is delivering, and we are reinvigorating Beauty with a significant step-up in Consumer Care led by Actives. And we're also starting to see the benefits of rebalancing pharma with good growth across our flagship ingredients portfolio. And our transformation plan is on track, enhancing our platform for growth and making us a faster, more efficient business. So much of what we're doing is within our control, and that reinforces our confidence for the full year and keeps us firmly on track to meet our targets for 2028. So there's lots more to do, but the progress is clear, and we will continue to drive that momentum in the second half and beyond. So let me stop there and take your questions. David, over to you.

Thanks, Steve. Welcome, everyone, to our H1 results call. But first, we'll take questions from our covering analysts over the telephone lines. So George, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question this morning is coming from Lisa De calling from Morgan Stanley.

My first one is a little bit on the second half. You delivered quite a solid first half result. I mean, how do we expect the second half growth to evolve across Consumer Care? And outside of your highlighted step-up in Pharma Solutions, how do you expect the other Life Science segments to trend, especially in the light of fairly comparable volume comparables year-on-year? That's my first question. And the second one is on the free cash flow outlook. I mean the first half had a net working capital outflow, which is very understanding given your second quarter sales acceleration. But how should we think about free cash flow for the full year?

Yes. Thanks, Lisa. Let me do the first question. I'll pass to Stephen for the second one. I mean in terms of growth, we're very pleased with the majority of the growth coming through the business. I think as you look at the second half, we expect continued strong growth in Consumer Care. Life Science should improve, particularly with some modest improvement in Crop and also in Pharma Solutions. And obviously, the transformation is building as well through the year that you can see in the pack. And also from a margin point of view, the exit margins in quarter 2 are giving us confidence of full year delivery as well. So let me pass to Stephen on cash flow.

Lisa, thanks for the question. Just on free cash flow for the half, we were bang on where we expected. We're not really seeing yet the structural benefits of transformation of working capital. What you did see was the benefit of lower CapEx -- and we had higher inventory and receivables with the benefits of growth. We also had a bit of build on inventory ahead of the new factory openings in Asia. So what you can expect to see as we progress is working capital relatively reducing in the second half. So we've talked about a 20 million to 30 million benefit. And then particularly as we get into '27, '28, the benefits of working capital transformation coming through.

Our next question is from Katie Richards calling from Barclays.

I've got a question on the organic sales growth development in Consumer Care, please, in Q2. How much of this was pricing driven rather than the mix effect, I guess, on the Beauty Active side? And I would just be interested as well to hear how you're thinking about the pricing strategy, particularly from the shared manufacturing assets. I'm sort of noting palm oil costs are higher year-on-year. They've not really come off. ethylene sort of bouncing back slightly, but it's still below the levels we saw earlier in the year. So I'm just struggling to balance these 2 effects. How should we expect pricing to develop in Q2? And are you seeking to retain any of the raw materials inflation within the margins? And then my second question is on your transformation program. It was good to see a significant proportion of the margin growth coming from this program now. But you did disclose that the rate is you're realizing the savings is continuing to build. So what led to the decision to hold the target at EUR 100 million this morning?

Okay. I pass to Stephen a bit on price mix and transformation then. Yes. Let me start on that, Katie. So Q2 margin progression, it's predominantly mix, to be honest, the benefit in consumer in Q2, the impact of price is relatively limited. So that's really good. That's the quality of the business coming through just as we expect. Steve, do you want to pick up the pricing strategy point?

Yes. I mean just on pricing, look, I mean, we're pretty straightforward, as everybody knows. The price increases into quarter 2 were largely limited to petrochemicals represents about 10% of our basket. And the impact was mainly in Asia and to a degree in Europe. So it wasn't widespread everywhere. So that was targeted, and we put our prices up there. And as we monitor the situation in the Middle East, we'll continue to review pricing as and when we need to.

And then Katie, on transformation, look, it's still relatively early days. We're pleased with progress, and you can see the benefit of that coming through in the first half. That will clearly continue into the second, along with growth will contribute to further margin expansion. Look, let's deliver what we said we would do. So we're not in a position to upgrade the GBP 100 million.

Our next question is coming from Matthew Yates from Bank of America.

I'd like to focus on, I think it's Slide 12 that has the margin waterfall. Maybe starting off with a group level question. And essentially, the cost savings zero out given there's some underlying inflation there. Can you talk about as we go into the second half, why does the margin improve? I don't think from your guidance, the rate of transformation accelerate. So is it rather that some of those inflationary or investment costs either moderate or annualize or something like that? And then specifically, a similar exercise really on the Consumer division. Obviously, top line is strong. Arguably, I would say the drop-through on margins was maybe a little bit disappointing, particularly given the good mix that you've been calling out. So is there anything we should really bear in mind that perhaps is holding that margin back still below 18%, be it the cost allocation, the remuneration, et cetera, et cetera?

Yes. Thanks, Matthew. Let me pick that up. So look, I think where we got to a margin, it was exactly where we expected it to be, and it's the exit rate that really gives us confidence into the second half. Why does that improve? It's really 2 reasons. One is the improved business mix in the second half, and that's particularly driven by higher Life Sciences sales. And then as you said, we then get the further transformation benefits coming through. When you look at the slide, I think there's 2 important offsets for you to have in mind. One is the impact of the new plants coming online. And we've very much said that, that's a one-off. And actually, it's more first half weighted because we get the benefits of the scale-up in those plants in the second half and certainly into '27 and beyond. And then secondly, the increase in variable remuneration, again, you should see that as a one-off this year. So that gives you then confidence in the progression after this year. Just on Consumer, I mean, Consumer did benefit first half margin and obviously, that very, very strong performance in actives. We do have against that the 2 drags that I mentioned. very importantly. And then it's the benefit of crop, the benefit of Pharma Solutions that really contribute to the second half. And it's the exit rate that I'd really point to.

Our next question will be coming from Sebastian Bray calling from Berenberg.

I would have 2, please. The first is on the relative growth in the U.S. compared to other regions. Is Croda winning back all of the share that it lost in the previous 2 or 3 years in the U.S.? Because I know Q2 was stronger, but it looks like Asia is really taking up the slack. So can you give me an idea of where we are in terms of market share recapture, particularly in Consumer Care within the U.S. market? And my second question is on long-term margins. Has anything changed about what you think is achievable for Life Sciences versus Consumer Care? And in particular, is Life Sciences a mid-20s EBIT margin business longer term?