Fonterra Shareholders Fund (FSF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone, Miles Hurrell, and I'm joined by our CFO, Marc Rivers. And we're going to take you through an update of the annual results for the F '21 season, our long-term strategy and an update of our capital structure conversation. Now there's a fair bit to get through, but we'll crack into it, and look forward to open up for question and answer shortly. I firstly like to start by acknowledging the dedication of our farmer owners and people right around the world, who continue to deliver what's been another tough year. The hard work and resilience of our people while juggling the extra demands of COVID is reflected in our '21 performance. We've seen improved earnings as well as a higher milk price. Final Farmgate milk price for the 2021 season was $7.54 per kilogram of milk solids, which sees around $11.6 billion paid into general economy by milk price payments alone. Our normalized earnings per share were $0.34 and a final dividend of $0.15, taking the total dividend to the year of $0.20 per share. Customers have relied on us to get product to them and we have delivered with record shipment -- export shipment volumes from New Zealand, the Co-operatives, despite these disruptions has caused by the pandemic. We have reduced our net debt even further, and we are now within our target of long-term ranges. We continue to focus on minimizing our environmental impact. We've moved Te Awamutu from coal to renewable energy, and we aim to be out of coal altogether by 2037. The slide here shows the profile of dairy prices throughout the year and their impact on both milk price and on earnings. We opened the season with a forecast Farmgate Milk Price of $6.15 midpoint. And there were many unknowns at the time, with COVID-19 continue to impact pricing and supply to customers. However, over the course of the year, we saw strong demand for New Zealand dairy and our products, pushing the monthly milk price for over $9 towards the end of the financial year. This resulted in an average Farmgate Milk Price of $7.54 for season. And you can see the link between this year's monthly milk prices on the left-hand side graph and the whole milk powder graph on the right-hand side. The graph on the right shows the price relativities between whole milk powder and reference products that have formed the milk price to cheddar, a non-reference product. You can see in the first half of the year, the relativity between the 2 prices was favorable for our earnings. But as whole milk product prices rose steeply towards the end of the financial year and cheddar prices did not increase at the same rate that squeezed margins. This reflected in our earnings profile, which was heavily weighted towards the first half of earnings of $0.25 in the third and $0.09 for the second half of the year. Next slide talks to our supply chain, where COVID continues to test our supply chain with shipping schedule reliability. Last time, we fall into significantly from its long-term average of 75% to 80% to below 35%. In the face of this, we actually increased our export volume to a record shipment for the year. This was thanks to our supply chain teams and to Kotahi, our supply chain partnership with Silver Fern Farms, Maersk Line and Port of Tauranga. Kotahi partnership means freight has pulled minimizing our exposure to events like COVID-19 and benefited 50 other exporters around New Zealand. We're proud of the robustness of our supply chain, and it was great to see our customers appreciating it. We actually increased our market share in some markets due to the availability of our supply chain. I'll now pass over to Marc to take us through some more details of the financial performance.

Thanks, Miles. So on the next slide, if we just go to -- if you go right to the bottom of the slide, actually, you see the normalized earnings per share increased from $0.24 to $0.34 this year. Key driver of this is a combination of improved EBIT as well as our reduced net financing costs, which were down $117 million, primarily due to lower debt. We had a strong first half with improved margins in both gross profit and EBIT were up on the comparable period last year, and this is off slightly -- of a slightly lower volume, actually. So Miles showed you the chart earlier with the sharp increase in the monthly milk price in the second half of the season. And while we're able to increase our end market pricing, it wasn't at the same rate as the increase in the cost of milk. So gross margin reduced in the second half and in particular in the fourth quarter, really across all regions, AMENA, Asia Pacific and Greater China. As a result, gross profit reduced $94 million due to lower gross margins, but this is more than offset by reduced operating expenses and improved other items, giving a normalized EBIT improvement of $73 million. Throughout the year, we've remained focused on allocating milk into the products that generate the best overall returns, and this optionality you can see here in the slide. It also highlights the diversification of the business across regions and channels. So regionally, Greater China had the largest increase in sales volume, predominantly from increases in UHT milk and cream as our Foodservice channel continues to grow. Also, whole milk powder due to strong demand for products supported by the Chinese government endorsing consumption of dairy during COVID-19. In Asia Pacific, COVID-19 initiated stay-at-home culinary trends, which benefited both consumer and Foodservice channels, particularly in New Zealand and Australia. AMENA had improved earnings in both Foodservice and consumer, but overall earnings reduced due to lower sales volumes and the impact of pricing lags on longer-term ingredients contracts, which will correct through 2022. Lower sales volumes are a result of us, of course, allocating more milk to Greater China and parts of Asia Pacific, where demand was the strongest. The improvement in our AMENA consumer channel was mainly from ongoing improvement in the Chilean business. So another way of illustrating the diversification and optionality as the changes year-on-year. So you can really see the growth in Foodservice and consumer channels as well as the reduced earnings from the ingredients channel. The APAC ingredient channel was impacted by the reduced margin on bulk liquid milk sales. The AMENA ingredient channel, as mentioned in the previous slide, was down due to lower sales volumes and pricing lags, and the Greater China ingredient channel was also impacted by longer contracts and a rising milk price. However, the impact is less notable due to the increased sales volume. Overall, ingredients channel volume was relatively flat and the volume reduction in AMENA was a direct transfer to Greater China within the channel. Our Foodservice consumer channels had improved performances across all 3 regions, predominantly driven by change in consumption trends during COVID-19. Asia Pacific's consumer performance looks particularly strong there in the table, but also note, just last year's performance incurred several impairments that were not normalized. So next, just look at the balance sheet. We've continued to strengthen our balance sheet, and this creates options for the future. The continued focus on financial discipline, alongside strong earnings and proceeds from divestments, has seen a reduction in our net debt and gearing levels. Net debt is down a further $872 million to $3.8 billion. We're also within both of our long-term leverage targets, with a debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.7x and a gearing ratio of 35.5%. Return on capital remains unchanged from last year at 6.6%. So here, the impact of improved earnings has been offset by a change in the notional tax rate. So just going to outlook for 2022. We've announced an earnings guidance of $0.25 to $0.40 per share, and that's an increase on our initial earnings guidance range last year. But just for some context, just noting that it's based off of a higher opening forecast milk price. Last year, our opening forecast milk price was a midpoint of $6.15, and this year, it's $8. Ingredients price relativities are much less favorable than what they were at the start of last year, and this year will not include earnings from our divested China farms. So the opening range does reflect ongoing improvement in the underlying business. When looking at the earnings outlook, and also just make a point that there's a high level of uncertainty that's early on when operating within a globally traded market, and it's appropriate to start with an earnings guidance that reflects this. So factors taken into consideration and providing the guidance are, first of all, the uncertainty and impact of ingredients, price relativities on earnings. These did narrow significantly at the end of last year and have improved recently as you see in the dash line on the graph above. The impact of raw milk costs, which are currently higher relative to FY '21 on our value-add businesses. And finally, there's also the ongoing risk, of course, associated with COVID, particularly with an economic disruption, which might cause adverse movements in currencies that we operate in. So I'll hand it back to Miles now just to talk about the next stage of long-term strategy.

Great. Thanks, Marc. Well, as our results show over the last 3 years, we've been putting a lot of effort into resetting the business and embedding our strategy to set the Co-op for the future. We've taken stock of the business. We reevaluated all investments, major assets in partnership to ensure we met the needs of the Co-op. We focus on getting the basic right, and we've made some pretty good headway. At the same time, we've always had an eye on the future. The world is changing quickly. We need to make sure that we're staying ahead of those changes and adapt in our business. Up until now, about 80% of our focus has been on the reset, to get the business where it needs to be, and 20% on the future. Now it's time to focus 100% on the future, and what we need to do to create more value for our farmer owners. This is our path to 2030. As Co-op looks out to 2030, the fundamentals of dairy, in particular New Zealand dairy looks strong. Looking at our markets, we know the world population is growing and getting older. The world's middle class is rapidly increasing. Many more people wanting dairy nutrition and more convenience in their life. People are more aware than ever of the links between nutrition and health, and they're taking more interest in their immunity, cognition and mental health. Put simply, the world wants what we've got, sustainably produced high-quality nutritious milk. This comes at a time when we see milk supply in New Zealand likely to decline or flat at best. On one hand, this requires the right capital structure to ensure we don't lose the benefit of what generations of farmers have built in New Zealand Dairy Corporate of scale. But on the other, it gives us more options to be selective about what we do with Co-op's milk. In doing so, we can increase the value we generate for our farmers, unitholders and New Zealand over the next decade. To make our path to 2030 happen, we've made 3 strategic choices: focus on New Zealand milk, be a leader in sustainability and be a leader in dairy innovation and science. We've heavily stressed tested these choices and know they're the right choices to give us the competitive edge, mitigate risk and position us to have a sustainable future, well below beyond this. If we look at focusing on New Zealand, we believe New Zealand milk is the most valuable milk in the world due to its grass-fed farming model, which means our milk is a carbon footprint around 1/3 less in the major milk-producing countries. We just want to be a leader in sustainability. We're all striving for a better future than the one we have today, and that's particularly the case when you look to the environment and being the leader in dairy innovation and science. Co-op has a long and proud heritage of dairy innovation, pioneer in many world firsts and increasingly new solutions, which aim to solve problems customers face in their operations and help people live healthier and longer lives. We believe we have an opportunity to differentiate New Zealand milk further on the world stage, and we aim to getting more value from our Co-op's milk. This requires us to focus on our capital and our people on the heart of New Zealand milk. And for these reasons, the Co-op has reviewed the ownership of 2 other milk pools in Australia and Chile. As a result of this review, we started the divestment process for integrated investments in Chile, both Soprole and Prolesur, and reviewing ownership options for Fonterra Australia, including a potential IPO with the Co-op retaining a significant stake. We see both these moves as critical to enabling greater focus on our New Zealand milk and importantly, allowing us to free up capital, much of which intend to be returned to shareholders and unitholders. This will also open up choices for investor and new areas of high-value growth, such as investment to support the growth of our Foodservice and Active Living portfolios. We're in the unique position of being the lowest carbon producing dairy nation on the planet. And when you combine this with our past based model, animal welfare standards and scale efficiency, we have something that can't be replicated, but we can't slow down now. Customers want to know where their food comes from, the environmental impact that it leaves, and a farmer's livelihood relies on a stable climate and healthy ecosystem. This is why we have an aspiration for Co-op to be net 0 carbon by 2050. The next decade, we'll invest around $1 billion in reducing carbon emissions and improving water efficiencies and treatment at our manufacturing sites. Also know that to maintain our relative carbon footprint of [indiscernible] northern hemisphere system, we must solve the myth and challenge. Our investment and sustainability initiatives across the supply chain will support our investment in our brands to showcase our New Zealand's sustainable nutrition story. This will put us in a great position to further grow our Foodservice and consumer channels throughout our markets in Asia Pacific region and gain more value through our ingredients channel by helping customers meet their sustainability goals. Co-op has a long and proud history of dairy innovation, pioneer in many world first and increasingly new solutions, which aim to solve problems our customers face in their operations and help people live healthier and longer lives. The next phase of the nutrition journey has just been discovered. Food has evolved over many years from simple energy source stores, what customers seek of today, taste, convenience and pleasure. We're now seeing that some types of food and in particular dairy can help some answer many of life's current challenges, such as cognition, immunity and industries. This is why we look to understand more of this health and wellness trend and where we can build a competitive advantage. To enable this, we are aiming to increase our current total annual R&D investment over 50% by 2030 to around $160 million per annum, with around $60 million a year specifically targeted at Active Living. Co-op's focus on value creation also opens up choices for investing in new high-value growth opportunities for the future. We have an ambition to play more boldly in nutrition space, which underpins $500 billion slice of the global health and wellness category by unlocking the potential of advanced specialty ingredients and going further. We've set up a dedicated team to explore what the future of Nutrition Science solution looks like for the Co-op, and over the next year, we'll narrow down and prioritize the areas we can build a competitive advantage. There are 4 ways value targets we're aiming to achieve by 2030. An average Farmgate milk price for the decade of $6.50 to $7.50 per kilogram of milk solids, a 40% to 50% increase in operating profit from F '21 with the reduced interest having less debt. This should translate into approximately 75% increase in net earnings, giving us the ability to steadily increase dividends to around $0.40 per share by F '30. A group return on capital of 9% to 10%, which is up from 6.6% in F '21. Through planned divestments and improved earnings, about $1 billion returned to shareholders by F '24 and around $2 billion of additional capital generated for a mix of investment and further growth and return to shareholders. This is in addition to approximately $2 billion invested in sustainability and moving our milk to higher-value products. Our strategy and the ability to achieve these targets depend on a sustainable supply of milk and in turn a capital structure that enables us. I'll now hand over to Marc to take us through this in a little more detail.

Thanks, Miles. So by 2030, we're aiming for EBIT to increase by about 40% to 50%, our net earnings to grow by around $0.20 to $0.30 to $0.55 to $0.65 per share. Moving milk into the highest returning products will be key to unlocking our earnings potential. We plan to increase milk solids in our Foodservice channel by 50% by FY '30, and we'll seek to achieve this by growing our global Foodservice presence across Greater China, Southeast Asia and the U.S. Over the next 4 years, we're aiming to improve our margin to consumer using our Aotearoa New Zealand Providence and sustainability credentials to differentiate our brands, and that will be supportive of our ability to realize e-commerce opportunities. We believe our ongoing focus on product innovation in the active living portfolio, which includes pediatrics, sports and Active Living and medical nutritional continue to improve margins. Given the constrained milk environment, we'll be operating in and the growth we're targeting for our consumer and Foodservice and Active Living channels, we intend to reduce the amount of milk solids we direct to our core ingredients business from 74% of our portfolio in 2021 to 64% in 2030. Our targeted EBIT improvement of about 40% to 50% by 2030 is after taking into account the proposed sale of our investment in Soprole and potential ownership changes to our Australian business over the next couple of years. In FY '21, Soprole contributed around $0.03 to our net earnings per share in Australia, also $0.03. On an earnings per share basis, we expect to see the benefit of reducing interest expense to lower rates and debt levels. And we'll need to significantly increase our capital investment over the next decade behind the strategy. Our Co-op, of course, has invested significantly over the last couple of decades, and it's obviously, important that we maintain our existing manufacturing sites and business infrastructure in good working condition. So to that end, we'll continue to make the necessary efficiency improvements and invest approximately $550 million per year, what we call essential capital, and as signaled over the next decade, we intend to significantly increase our investment in sustainability-related activities throughout our supply chain. Capital investment is also going to be needed to support growth in Consumer and Foodservice channels and to accelerate the growth of our Active Living business, which is why we're also increasing our R&D budget. Of course, we're going to continue to be financially disciplined and that this we've seen in the last couple of years is going to continue to strengthen our balance sheet and going forward as well. So we continue -- we intend to maintain a strong balance sheet and not exceed the long-term targets, which are a debt-to-EBITDA of 2.5x to 3x and a gearing ratio of 30% to 40%. That's going to give us the ability to deal with the volatilities that inevitably are going to arise, that are just inherent part of the business and also to take advantage of opportunities. The expected increased level of debt at FY '24 is enabled by the growing earnings profile. So an improved performance will give us the ability to increase our dividend to shareholders. And as a result, we assume a payout ratio at the midpoint of our dividend policy of 40% to 60% of reported net profit after tax, but excluding abnormal gains until 2024. And then for the few -- couple of years after that, FY '24 to '27, we assume that the payout ratio would increase to the top end of that 60% and then increase to 70% from FY '20 onwards. In addition to dividends, increasing in line with improved earnings, we plan to return around $1 billion of capital to our shareholders and unitholders by FY '24, dependent on the proposed divestment of Soprole and ownership changes in the Australian business. Assuming we continue to achieve our financial targets and maintain a positive outlook for our Co-op, we'd have the capacity to make further capital returns to our shareholders, and that's assumed to occur from FY '25 onwards. So just back to you, Miles, to summarize.

Thanks, Marc. Our focus on New Zealand milk sustainability, innovation and science will see us shift every aspect of our business to create more value. And doing so, we'll continue to improve our financial performance and as a result, strengthen our ability to repeatedly generate cash and create value for our shareholders, unitholders and New Zealand as a whole. We have an incredible raw material made from the past of New Zealand farms, business supported by a talented and committed team, who want to do right by you and an exciting opportunity to create value. It's up to us as Co-op to work together make the necessary changes and ensure we're creating goodness for generations. Third topic for discussion today is an update on our capital structure review, and Marc is going to take us through this briefly before we open up for questions.

Thanks, Miles. So yes, as a Board Management team, we are united in our view that capital structure needs to change in order to enable our strategy. So we've heard the fundamentals of New Zealand dairy are strong. We've made some strategic choices that will sustainably grow value. But to deliver that value, we have to have sustainable milk supply. So operating environment has changed significantly. Current structure was put in place back in 2012 when New Zealand's milk supply was growing rapidly. While we've maintained milk supply up until now, that's really because of New Zealand's overall milk supply growing. So now we're starting to see more land going out of dairy than coming in. Environmental regulations are beginning to take effect. And with the outlook for dairy so attractive, we can't rule out that there'll be more capacity entering the market as well. So protecting our Co-op does protect value for all farmers. If we don't take action now through changing our capital structure, we're likely to see impacts on value for farmers and unitholders. So firstly, how will that impact show up through low -- when we have lower milk volumes going through our fixed assets, that means a less efficient Co-op, and that impacts milk price. Fonterra sets the benchmark for milk price in New Zealand, which benefits all farmers. Farmers tell us that a key reason that they leave the Co-op is to free up capital. Providing flexibility is absolutely essential if we hope to maintain a strong Co-op into the future. We're targeting maintaining a flat milk supply to enable our long-term strategy, and capital structure is important to maintaining that. So the next one just shows the key features. What we're proposing is what we call flexible shareholding as a structure. So this is progression on the preferred option we put forward at the start of the consultation process back in May, but with some key changes based on the farmer feedback and further expert advice. The key features of the structure are new minimum shareholder requirement will be set at 33% of milk-supply compared to the current compulsory requirement of 1:1. This intended to strike a balance between providing a meaningful level of flexibility for those who needed, while ensuring that all farmers have some capital backed supply. New maximum shareholder requirement would be set at 4x milk supply compared to the current 2x. This is intended to strike a balance between supporting liquidity in the farmer-only market by ensuring more capacity for farmers to buy shares from those who want to sell, while avoiding a significant concentration of ownership. The fund would be capped to protect farmer ownership and control. If greater flexibility is provided without making any other changes to the current structure, the thresholds relating to the size of the fund would be exceeded relatively quickly. So the farmer's shoulder market would continue to operate as a farmer-only market, but shares would no longer be able to be exchanged into units. This means that the share price may trade at a discount to the unit price referred to as a restricted market discount, and more types of farmers are going to be allowed to buy shares and our proposal, including sharemilkers, contract milkers and farm lessors. This recognizes their connection to Fonterra provides a pathway for future farmer owners and increases the number of potential participants in the farmer-only market by around 4,000. Exit provisions would be extended. Entry provisions would be eased. Existing shareholders would have up to 15 seasons initially, reducing annually to 10 seasons, which would also support liquidity and give these farmers greater choice about how long they retain an investment in the Co-op. Meanwhile, any new entrants would have up to 6 seasons to achieve 33% minimum shareholding requirement, and that compares to a standard 3 seasons for entry and exit under the current structure. Voting rates remain the same. So we are confident and united in the belief that the proposal delivers on the principles that we set out to achieve, which to recap where a flexible shareholding structure provides sustainable milk supply, providing farmers with capital flexibility and protects farmer ownership to control by moving to a farmer-only market for shares and capping the fund, and it maintains financial sustainability by improving our ability to compete for milk to enable our strategy and protects against uncertain and recurring risk to our balance sheet of share buybacks. These 3 areas together protect value for farmers and ensure the Co-op pertains the milk supply needed to deliver its long-term strategy. So what's next? Well, from here, we're looking for feedback on the revised proposal. We have a lot of opportunities for farmers to continue to engage in the conversation. There will be online farmer-to-farmer discussion groups throughout October. And once we get a feel for our farmers views, we'll make a decision around whether we proceed to a vote, which we would aim for in the December AGM. So a lot of information from us.

Thank you.