Fonterra Shareholders Fund (FSF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thanks for joining us today, and welcome to our 2024 Annual results briefing. I'm Miles Hurrell, CEO, and I am joined here today by Andrew Murray, our CFO. I'm going to kick things off with an overview of our performance before asking Andrew to take us through some of the detail behind the numbers. Before we get into it, I want to start by thanking our people right around the world for their contribution to our results, especially as the trade environment continues to have the backdrop of market volatility and geopolitical uncertainty. We've had a strong year and maintained the positive momentum we saw in 2023. In summary, net earnings of $0.70 per share is at the top end of our guidance range. Dividends for the year totaled $0.55 per share, up on last year and include a special dividend of $0.15. Gearing is down to 24%, and our return on capital was a solid 11.3%, well above our target range for FY '24 of 8% to 9%. The final Farmgate milk price for the '24 season was $7.83 per kilogram of milk solids. And when combined with a $0.55 dividend results in a total payout for a fully shared up farmer of $8.38. And while this is still early in the season, it was pleasing today that we could also increase our Farmgate milk price for the current season, which now has a midpoint of $9 per kilogram of milk solids. Your Co-op is in good shape and has a strong balance sheet. This is enabling us to make milk price payments to farmers sooner, but also gives us the ability and confidence to announce a number of investment initiatives for the future, which I'll discuss over the next few slides. Positive momentum can be seen with quite a step change in the financial metrics over the last 2 years. You will recall that last year, we had favorable price relativities, which contributed to the higher ingredient margins and record results. With price relativities reducing this year, the composition of earnings has changed. We had lower ingredient margin that were partially offset by improved volumes and margins in our Foodservice and consumer businesses, and Andrew will provide more detail on this shortly. Our balance sheet has continued to strengthen with year-end debt and gearing reducing significantly over the last 5 years. Year-end inventory has been stable for the last 2 years and in F '24 was down 25,000 metric tonne or 4% equivalent to around $200 million in working capital. The total dividend of $0.55 per share is made up of two components. Firstly, $0.40 under our current dividend policy, which is at the top end of our payout ratio of 40% to 60% of net earnings, plus a special dividend of $0.15 per share, where a combination of our higher earnings over the last 2 years and a strong balance sheet has enabled us to pay this. In addition to the numbers for the last financial year, we are pleased with the progress we're making on our strategy and initiatives for the future. We announced earlier in the year our decision to explore divestment options for our global consumer business and Fonterra Oceania and Fonterra Sri Lanka. These businesses are performing well and the divestment process is progressing as expected. Alongside this, we have revised our strategy to have a sharper focus on the Co-op strengths and where we can best create long-term value, and we'll be sharing details of this next week. Over the last couple of months, we have announced plans for 3 future investments. These are aligned with our revised strategy and includes $75 million for high-value protein capacity at our Southern plant as we focus on premium ingredients, $150 million to build a new UHT plant at Edenale to meet the increasing demand for cream in our Foodservice business in Asia and $150 million to build a new cool store at our Whareroa site in Taranaki, supporting long-term resilience of our supply chain. Focus on innovation continues to be a key part of that strategy and enabling us to get more value out of our farmers milk. This year, we introduced our Horizon Awards, where we had 240 high-quality entries, and it was a real highlight to spotlight and celebrate innovation right across the value chain. We're also making good progress in sustainability. A key milestone during the year was our announcement of our target to reduce on-farm emissions by 30% by 2030. The next few slides provide some context around the industry and trading environment. Overall, the fundamentals of New Zealand dairy remain positive. This chart shows that we are seeing limited global milk growth. And while demand has fluctuated over the past 12 months, there are signs of it stabilizing. Noting that the data is for the period ending July, a couple of observations about what we are currently seeing. Firstly, supply in the U.S. and Europe is tightening due to both warmer weather and lower cattle numbers. Also, stronger demands in these regions means there is less milk available for export. On the demand side, we are seeing a continuation of the strong demand coming out of Southeast Asia, Latin America and Africa. And pleasingly, we are starting to see positive signs out of China with stronger participation in the most recent GDT events. And finally, here in New Zealand, milk production early in the season is up across the country, although recent cold weather is likely to slow this somewhat. I noted earlier that price relativities reduced in F '24 from the previous record high levels. And you can see this with the narrow spread between the reference prices in light blue and the non-reference prices in dark blue. The reference product prices are the primary driver of the farm gate milk price, and this shows the decline in the early part of the F '24 season before improving in the second half. After a big drop early in the season, the non-reference product prices were reasonably stable for the remainder of the season. These market dynamics provide context to the movements in the Farmgate milk price and earnings. Looking at the chart on the left, the lower '24 season Farmgate milk price reflected the lower U.S. dollar prices for reference products, which were partially offset by currency movements. The increase in costs reflects the impact of inflation on most cost categories with the largest increases being in energy, staff, packaging and vehicles. The chart on the right shows the monthly milk price and the different profiles over the last 2 seasons. The softer demand out of China impacted the price of milk early in the F '24 season before increasing strongly from November onward across the portfolio of products. The lower monthly milk price at the end of last year and during the first part of '24 season contributed to strong performance seen in our Foodservice and consumer channels. Andrew will now comment further on what's driving our financial performance.

Thank you, Miles. Before I get into the specifics of each channel, I will take a moment to cover some of the key drivers of the overall performance. The earnings per share of $0.70 for our continuing operations reflects lower operating earnings than last year, partially offset by lower financing costs and less tax. The $195 million decrease in operating earnings includes the benefit of $192 million less impairments than the previous year. So adjusting for this, operating earnings were down $387 million. Overall revenue was down, mainly due to lower product prices in the ingredients channel, but volumes were also down 1%. Despite the lower overall sales volumes, it was pleasing to see our sales mix shift further towards the high-margin Foodservice and consumer channels. The key driver of the lower operating earnings was the lower price relativities that Miles referred to, resulting in lower margins in the Ingredients channel, partially offset by the improved volumes and margins in the Foodservice and consumer channels, which I will provide more detail on in the next slide. Operating expenses are reported as favorable, but last year included the higher amount for impairments in consumer. After removing the impact of impairments, operating expenses have increased $87 million, including an additional $59 million that we have invested in our IT and digital transformation as well as the cost of selling increased volumes through the higher-margin channels. We have continued to make cost savings across many areas of the business, and these have largely offset the impact of other inflationary pressures. Financing costs were $54 million less than last year and reflect lower average total borrowings and lower cost of funds. Tax was also down on last year, reflecting lower earnings and the higher dividend. Lastly, on this chart, discontinued operations made a loss of $40 million, reflecting the sale of DPA Brazil in October last year. DPA Brazil was profitable over the period, but this was more than offset by the release of $68 million from the foreign currency translation reserve as part of the sale. This slide shows the change in the composition of earnings between the channels and the key drivers within each channel. This is a continuation of the picture we saw at our half year results with shifts in both volumes and margins between the three channels. In addition to the impact of price relativities, the ingredients channel performance was also adversely impacted by the disconnect between the Farmgate milk price paid in Australia and global commodity prices, which impacted the performance of ingredients exported from Australia. The improvement in our Foodservice channel was driven by the better in-market pricing, particularly in our Southeast Asia markets as well as the lower cost of milk. UHT cream sales volume growth also contributed to the strong Foodservice performance. Consumer sales volume growth was driven by increased demand in Sri Lanka as well as here in New Zealand, where we grew our market share across many categories. Consumer margins also increased as we moved to a more favorable product mix and improved pricing across most regions as well as the lower cost of milk. Consumer channel operating expenses decreased this year due to lower impairments compared to the prior year. After adjusting for impairments, consumer EBIT increased $111 million year-on-year. This matrix view of our reporting segments shows the diversification of our earnings across channels and markets. Last year, our results were heavily weighted to Ingredients with the favorable price relativities and also included the impact of the impairments in the consumer channel. This year, the earnings profile is more balanced with approximately 57% of operating earnings coming from ingredients, 30% from Foodservice and 13% from consumer. Looking at the segments across the top of the table, core operations mainly covers the collection and manufacturing of our milk, which is then transferred to the in-market businesses of Global Markets and Greater China to sell to customers. The decrease in earnings for core operations reflects lower margins for the Ingredients channel due to the lower price relativities. Global Markets improved its performance with operating earnings up $363 million or $171 million after adjusting for impairments. Earnings increased across all 3 channels, but the main driver was consumer due to its higher volumes, better margins and lower operating expenses, again, noting that FY '23 included the significantly higher impairments. Foodservice and Global Markets also improved, nearly doubling operating earnings through increased volumes and margins across the majority of markets. Greater China's operating earnings increased by $133 million, driven by a $100 million increase in Foodservice. This continues to be a very strong market for us, especially for our cream products. A key part of our strategy is to move more milk into higher-margin products. During FY '24, we successfully increased the volumes sold in the Foodservice and consumer channels and within the ingredients channel, moved milk from lower-margin products such as whole milk powder and allocated it to higher-margin cream and protein products. Turning to operations. A significant amount of our assets and resources relate to processing our farmers' milk, and we are focused on continuously improving our performance. Three of the four metrics showed improvement this year and continuation of the long-term favorable trend. The cost of quality metric is one of the key measures of the effectiveness of our manufacturing activity, and this was unfavorable mainly due to two events. Whilst these were not food safety issues, they did increase costs by $29 million. Last year, we introduced two metrics to measure our operating efficiency on both a dollar basis and per kilogram of milk solids. The first metric is cash operating expenses. So this excludes noncash costs such as depreciation and impairments. Relative to the previous year, IT and digital transformation costs increased and accounted for the majority of the change with cost savings across many other areas of the business, which largely offset the impact of inflation. However, increased volume going into the Foodservice and consumer channels does drive higher operating expenses, noting that these products also generate higher margins. Overall, there was a small net increase versus last year. The second metric relates to manufacturing performance and the cash costs for collecting and processing New Zealand milk solids. The target is to reduce these costs per kilogram of milk solids by 2% each year. In FY '24, the cash cost per kilogram of milk solids reduced by 1.5%, and this was driven by lower cost of materials, combined with operating performance improvements, partially offsetting inflationary impacts and higher labor costs. Our balance sheet is in good shape, and this gives us options and flexibility for the future. Compared to a year ago, our year-end net debt is $600 million lower, down from $3.2 billion to $2.6 billion. The reduction reflects the strong underlying performance of the business, lower working capital and continued financial discipline regarding capital investment. Lastly for me, our return on capital was 11.3%. This is significantly above our 5-year average and above the FY '24 target range of 8% to 9%. The change relative to last year reflects the lower operating earnings, but this is partially offset by lower capital employed due to improved working capital and the previous divestment of Soprole and the associated return of capital. The return on capital by channel largely follows the changes in the earnings profile already mentioned. I'll now hand back to Miles to update you on our outlook for the current financial year.

Thank you, Andrew. Looking ahead to the current season and financial year. Today, we have announced a lift in the '25 season Farmgate milk price with a midpoint of $9 per kilogram of milk solids. This lift follows recent strengthening in GDT prices and constrained milk supply in key producing regions. Given that it is early in the season, we are continuing to maintain the wide range. We've also announced today our forecast net earnings for FY '25 of $0.40 to $0.60 per share. This range reflects an expectation that our underlying performance will be similar to last year with strong margins across all three channels and that there will be a high investment in digital transformation and a higher tax expense. After several years of strong earnings, we exhausted our tax losses in FY '24, meaning we'll now be a taxpayer in New Zealand and generating imputation credits. To enable all shareholders to receive the imputation credits, we are changing how we treat the tax deductibility of dividends, which means more tax will be paid by the Co-op. While this tax change does not impact the operating performance of Fonterra, the higher tax expense will affect our after-tax profit. The imputation credits generated will be available to offset tax payable at the shareholder level. The benefit of imputation credits will also be passed through to the shareholders' fund and thereby unitholders. Overall, we're really pleased with the results and looking forward to the current year. Thanks for your interest and time today.