Del Monte Pacific Limited (D03) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Audio Gap] 2026, ending April 30. Representing the company in this call are Angie Go Flaminiano, who we'd like to introduce as Del Monte Philippines' President and Chief Operating Officer, assuming the leadership of DMPI since the end of April 2026 after Luis Cito Alejandro assumed the role of Senior Adviser after his leadership of the company for 20 years as General Manager, Chief Operating Officer and President of Del Monte Philippines. And we have Parag Sachdeva, CFO; and I am Iggy Sison, Chief Corporate Officer of DMPL. We would like to highlight some key slides from our results briefing. Parag will discuss the FY '26 results, followed by Angie Flaminiano's overview of our strategic priorities and outlook. We will then conclude with the capital and financial recovery plan with Parag. Thereafter, our colleague, Jennifer Luy, will moderate the Q&A session. So we'd now like to request Parag to go through our results. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Iggy. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to share with you the fourth quarter and full year results for DMPL. In the fourth quarter, DMPL sustained its growth trajectory across all businesses. We had sales of $213.7 million which was up 11%, driven by very solid results of international markets and also a very reasonable growth for Philippines. Net profit rose to $10.1 million from $2.9 million if we exclude the U.S. write-down and gain from India share swap last year. The results were driven by improved margins and sales. Just to remind everybody, last year, the write-down of $703 million led to a negative equity of USD 590 million. And accordingly, net debt-to-equity ratio was at negative 1.7x, both last year and again this year as well. However, despite the strong profitability metrics that I will talk to you about from a full year per the group is not in a position to declare dividends due to its negative equity position. Moving on to Slide 7, where I'll take you through -- should we do Slide 6, Iggy, first or Q4?

We can go straight.

On Slide 7, as you can see, from a revenue perspective, we ended at $896 million, which is a 13.5% increase versus last year. And pleased to share with you that both our domestic business and international business performed very well in fiscal '26, with Phil business growing at 7.5% and our domestic business growing at close to 16%. Growth of International business was driven by both Processed and Fresh, with Fresh business growing at close to 19%. Our gross margin significantly improved at $298 million and 33.2%. This was through a combination of sustainable price increase that was taken, improvement in sales mix. For example, in fresh, our sales of Deluxe variety was higher than last year, which helped our sales mix and margins and also improvement in cost structure. Just to remind everyone, we did see a turnaround in our productivity of processed pineapple variety in fiscal '26 that helped us improve our cost structure for processed pineapple business. And at the same time, we saw favorable commodity prices selectively for the most part of the year, particularly when it comes to tomato paste. When it comes to EBITDA, driven by improvement in gross profit. We ended the year at $181.1 million, which was a 26.2% improvement, and that was also reflected in our net profit performance at $48.4 million, which is a significant improvement if you take out the impact of onetime gain on the India share swap that we had booked in Q4 of last year. Our net debt was lower at net $977 million as compared to $1.34 billion last year. No change in debt to equity, as explained, coming from the impairment and asset write-down of the U.S. business at the end of fiscal year 2025. Our net debt to EBITDA improved significantly on the back of improvement in profitability or EBITDA by 26.2% and as highlighted previously and also some reduction in debt as also was outlined above. Our cash flow from operations continues to be very healthy at $286 million. It was lower than last year, but still a very solid performance. Last year included the impact from stretching our payables, and that led to a onetime improvement in working capital. But '26 reflects a more sustainable performance from a cash flow perspective. Over to Angie.

Okay. Thank you, Parag. So following a strong FY 2026 performance, the group expects to achieve profitability in FY '27. But looking ahead, our focus remains on disciplined execution in what continues to be an uncertain operating environment, as we experienced the impact of the U.S-Iran war. We continue to face meaningful external headwinds, including commodity cost volatility, geopolitical developments, weather-related risk as El Nino is now upon us, and the constraints imposed by our current capital structure. And these factors require us to remain prudent in how we deploy capital and manage costs. . Our priorities for FY 2027 are therefore centered on operational discipline. We are proactively mitigating the impact of El Nino on the supply and quality of pineapple, productivity improvements protecting cash flow and maintaining the resilience of our supply chain. At the same time, we will continue to support our core businesses and pursue growth opportunities with a clear focus on returns and capital efficiency. In particular, for the Philippine market, we are reinforcing our leadership in beverage, culinary and packaged fruit. We are launching new products in new segments to broaden consumer base and expanding in growth channels of convenience stores, away-from-home, drug stores and schools. For the international market, we are maintaining our market leadership in Fresh MD2 Pineapple across North Asia. And while we are pleased with the progress made in FY '26, we recognize that there still is considerable work ahead and our emphasis on is going to an execution strengthening financial flexibility and addressing the challenges within our control. Go ahead.

Thank you, Angie. As I have continued to outline and also submitted to the SGX and PSE on 2nd of January, we will continue to pursue an integrated restructuring framework involving our principal creditors and stakeholders to systematically deleverage DMPI while we continue to preserve our operational and financial integrity as DMPL's crown jewel and principal gas generating asset. As we know that the capital deficit is mainly at the holding company. We also recognize that the performance of DMPI by itself will not materially reduce the total liabilities or obligations, which stand at $1.2 billion and turn around the negative equity of $590 million of DMPL. We intend to implement a structured plan through a combination of debt restructuring, operational initiatives and capital measures that benefit the group. We also would like to state that no equity raise by itself is expected to turn DMPL's equity position to positive. And considering our negative equity, we will not be able to declare dividends to DMPL shareholders in fiscal '26.

Thank you, Parag. We'd now like to open the floor for questions. Our colleague, Jennifer, will moderate the Q&A.

Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me, Iggy? Yes.

Yes, Jen.

Okay. For our first question, what's the breakdown of loans in terms of peso and U.S. dollar. The peso is now at PHP 61-plus. What's the effect of a weaker peso for the Monte Pacific. A few years back, the answer was a weaker peso was better, but would like to clarify if this equation still holds?

So thank you very much. Yes, we have all been seeing the volatility in peso and commodities in the last 3, 4 months and obviously turbulent times. As you all know, from an operational perspective, when it comes to DMPI, our exports are much higher than imports. So operationally, weakening of peso does have a favorable impact. But when we look at our obligations, which I just outlined, both at DMPI level and DMPL, focusing on DMPI, our peso loans are lower than dollar-denominated loans. Peso loans are approximately $200 million of the $533 million of total external bank debt that we have, plus also our RCPS and perpetual bonds are dollar-denominated as well. So our endeavor is now considering the volatility to continue converting our dollar-denominated loans at DMPI into peso loans so that we can minimize the impact from FX volatility, though we recognize that may come at a slightly higher interest cost.

Thank you, Parag. The next question is, what's the impact of the fuel increase for fourth quarter profitability? Assuming majority for our fourth quarter, the raw materials, ingredients were already procured at old cost. What's the impact for the next quarter?

That's a great question. Just to give us certain context about our business, as you know, when it comes to fuel and fertilizers, which have been the 2 commodities that have been impacted the most, we are seeing a cash impact from a first quarter perspective of close to PHP 500 million or roughly around $8 million to $9 million. That's the impact in Q1 from a cash perspective. But through a series of initiatives, we are mitigating those that include still sustainable price increase that we have taken both in the domestic market, and we are seeing some upside cautiously on the international business as well, we have partly mitigated the cash impact through those. From a P&L perspective, as you can appreciate, we amortize the pineapple growing cost over multiple years. So from a P&L perspective, in the TDC, the impact in Q1 is expected to be around 200 basis points. as compared to cash impact of 400 basis points that we are seeing in our overall incurred cost. So 200 basis points is the impact on cost, which we will partly mitigate through the measures that I just mentioned, both on pricing side as well as lower spending on fixed cost.

Thanks, Parag. Our next question is with only 1 subsidiary, will the Del Monte Pacific Board consolidate management and the Board to cut overhead costs? And how much is the annual cost of keeping Del Monte management in Singapore? We can save this by consolidating management.

Yes, we are absolutely optimizing the cost, but just wanted to reiterate, we've generally had always got common resources between DMPL and DMPI. We did not have a large dedicated head office or group structure even in the past. And whatever opportunities are there, we will continue to lower overall overheads, both from a group perspective and company perspective.

Thank you. Our next question is, when will the negative equity turn positive?

Yes. I would like to give a more definitive answer, but unfortunately, as we have outlined, through our operational measures, it will take us quite a long time to get to turning it around. And we are working diligently on the capital restructure plan, as we have outlined previously to previously in our submissions on June 2. And as they materialize, we should be able to see some improvement, but we can't commit that the negative equity would be turned around just through the capital raise itself of through -- of our efforts mainly focused on DMPI.

In connection to that question, with a negative equity position, does that mean that shareholders may not receive a dividend in the next 6 to 10 years?

I can confirm that this year, we won't. Beyond that we will not be able to speculate and it's pretty much a Board's decision.

Thank you, Parag. Our next question is, can you clarify what the impact of consolidating S&W directly into Del Monte Philippines is? How much liabilities will be absorbed by Del Monte Philippines versus the assets?

So that's a great question. We are undergoing that process. From a DMPL perspective and DMPI perspective, it's not a big change at all. It's the same management that runs processed exports business which is 90% sourced from DMPI. What it allows us to do is simplify our flow of revenue and intercompany transactions going forward. And as you can imagine, from an investor-readiness perspective, it would be a welcome move that all our entire operation would be under one business, which is DMPI. It's exactly what we did for Fresh in 2020. So we do not expect any impact from an operating or profitability, cash profitability perspective. Only thing I would like to highlight is that tax-wise, on the profits of S&W, that would be now included in DMPI. That would be taxed at 5%, which is the rate that we have our effective tax on export profitability.