Kri-Kri Milk Industry S.A. (KRI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello again, and welcome to this analyst briefing. I'm Konstantinos Sarmadakis, Kri-Kri CFO. In this session, we will discuss our financial performance during 2021, comment on the developments of economic environment and explain the factors that affect our outlook for 2022. But we will start with a short presentation. [Operator Instructions] Let's start with some key highlights of 2021. In the Yogurt Export segment, the top line growth continues with double-digit pace. For the Ice Cream segment, 2021 was a year for a full recovery. In the Yogurt Greece segment, almost across all 2021, we were experiencing hard competition pressure. Now this pressure has eased, and this leaves a space for sales development. Finally, we have to mention input cost inflation. Prices of raw materials suddenly climbed very quickly, trimming our margins, especially in Q4 2021. Moving on. We start with a review of Yogurt Export segment. Top line grew by almost 10%. Sales in Italy were up [ 28% ], and we had a slight decrease in U.K. sales. Now Yogurt Exports represent more than half of our total yogurt sales. And these 2 countries, Italy and U.K. account for nearly 80% of our yogurt exports. The Brexit had little direct impact, however, it gave rise to logistics costs, and this explains much of the higher distribution costs in 2021. On the next page, we can see the performance of Ice Cream. 2021 was a year of strong recovery both in sales and margin. Sales reached EUR [ 30 million ] with an EBIT margin of 17.3%. Exports also had a good performance, especially in Italian market, we sell [indiscernible] and yogurt that has a great appeal. And you can see that sales in Italy were up by [indiscernible]. Moving on Yogurt Greece segment. Our sales had a slight decline, and EBIT fell to EUR 5.52 million against EUR 6.65 million last year. In the market, we were experiencing hard competitive pressure. This graph here shows the average selling price per supplier. [ 100 ] is the average market price. You can see that the leader lowered the price back on November 2020 by more than 7%. This whole -- held the whole market back and made more difficult for us to roll input price increases on -- especially on Q4 2021. Now you can see that the pressure has eased, and this leaves us space for sales growth. Another important point is that we are the leading supplier in private label. And as inflation -- inflation reduces consumers' net income, this -- there is more consumers to value for money products. And thus, private label win market share. Despite the hard competition, we had very good performance in the marketplace. You can see that our value market share grew by 0.2 percentage points in 2021, although we lost volume market share. You can see that the leader having a very hard competitive pricing, achieved only to increase their volume market share by 1.5 percentage points and the value market share by only 0.2 percentage points. And all our competitors were -- all other competitors were on negative ground. This very good performance continues also in the current year, 2022. You can see that we are increasing our market share by 0.8 percentage points. All our other competitors are in negative ground, and you can see that the private label, private label wins market share in volume terms of 2.2 percentage points. We have seen that the price increases that we rolled in our products didn't have any adverse effect on our market shares. However, we are -- we have some concern about the overall market dynamics and weak total consumption of this inflationary environment. Let's now move and comment a few things about input costs. In 2021, we had a steep rise of the price of natural gas, and this led the rise of -- for the price of fertilizers. As a result, the animal feed cost had risen sharply, and this led to higher price of raw milk, which is the most common of our material -- raw material. You can see that the grow on -- the growth of -- the rise of the raw milk price started in Q4 2021. And this continues with the average data of February, the raw milk price is around 15.7% higher than last year. So we have this sudden high input cost inflation. We have to roll this input cost increase in prices, in product prices. We had the first round of price increases affecting by January 2022. And now we are -- as this environment continues, we are now preparing for a second round of price increases effective by May 2022. These price increases offset a large part of the losses resulted from higher input costs, but you can see that there is a time lag of price increases, and this trims our margin. On 2022, we expect a stress in our margins. The extent of which will depend on the time the input prices. However. deescalate, we are very optimistic about the long-run level of our margins because we expect much of this higher selling price level to be maintained after input prices come down. Let's move on some comments about our cash flows in 2021. You can see that our cash from operations reached EUR 23.5 million, against EUR 17.1 million on 2020. We had cash -- negative cash flow from investments, around EUR 10.6 million. And cash flow from finance, negative. This includes also the dividend payment, loans repayment and the cash collateral we have put forward. However, the free cash flow, you can see that it is high -- on a high positive level of around EUR [ 13 ] million. A few things that worth commenting on operating cash flows is -- you may see that the stock level declined -- reduced. And this comes from the consumption of the surplus stock of raw materials that we have filed back on Q4 2020 in order to as a caution against the forthcoming price increases on 2021. And also, we have achieved to have lower receivable days, and this comes most from the Greek supermarkets that we [ retained ]. About CapEx. CapEx on 2021 reached around EUR 10 million and EUR 6 million of this consist of the construction of biogas station. In 2022, we expect CapEx at the level of EUR 4 million to EUR 5 million. This table here shows an overall look of our P&L. You can see sales are at EUR 134.6 million, and EBITDA EUR 21 million, EBIT at EUR 16.7 million and profit before tax at EUR 16.5 million. On the right-hand side of the page, you can see that the hit on our results came from the Q4. You can see that we had net losses of EUR 2.5 million against marginal losses on last year 2020. The proposed dividend for this year for 2021 that will be paid on 2022 is stable at EUR 0.20 per share. This gives a payout ratio of 50% and a dividend yield around 2.5%. Also, some important things about ESG. You can see that we have finished this biogas plant for sewage treatment. This is a project with a great environmental footprint that treats all our sewage and produce biogas and then electricity. Also, we plan to install photovoltaic systems in our factory. And this will help reduce our energy consumption. This year, we have published along with our financial reports a few metrics of ESG that we follow. And we plan to have an ESG committee, and this ESG committee to assess the materiality of all ESG issues, and then form an ESG policy and oversee all of these actions. Finally, for this year, we expect total sales to achieve a high single-digit growth and we expect a decline in our profit margins. The magnitude of this decline will depend, as I said before, on the degree and the time of deescalation of the prices of our inputs. However, we see that this year is a year of parenthesis. And as I said before, we are very optimistic about the long-term level of our margins. Finally, the current shareholder structure, [indiscernible] controls 72.6%, legal entities are at 20.8% and individual private investors at 6.6%. Here, the presentation is finished. If you have any questions, please use [indiscernible] tool and I'll try to answer this. Thanks, again.

Okay. Thank you all for posting the questions. I'll try to answer some of them. First of all, a question about could you give more granularity in decline of operating margin expected in 2022? It is difficult to say and give you more clear picture about this because our view, our horizon is very difficult to say, and we're experiencing very hard inflationary pressure. We try to -- with these price increases, a part of this to -- a large part of this to pass it to prices, but we don't have a picture how much this will affect our margins. Can you repeat how much CapEx you expect in 2022? In 2022, we estimate a CapEx level of EUR 4 million to EUR 5 million. This may seem low, but it refers to replacement CapEx and some machinery. And all major projects have been finished, and we are okay with our capacity -- production capacity for the next couple of years at least. Another question. Can you please give us [indiscernible] of this EUR 5 million of CapEx investment? Okay, I answered this. Regarding margin pressure, have you included in your budget has moved out during the year? Or do you expect these inflationary pressures to remain for the full year? I believe that there will be a decline in -- and this pressure will come down on the second half of this year. But until now, we don't have any evidence to support this. So it's just an assumption. And all our budget this year is -- it depends on many assumptions and many factors that keep up adjusting. Regarding the photovoltaic system installation, what would be the megawatt of that? On 2022, we will install 1 megawatt station, and we planned to install 3 megawatts, but the network does not have the capacity to support this. So this year, we will start with this 1 megawatt, and we'll try to figure out a solution to install another 2, perhaps next year. Have you applied secure PPAs? No, we don't have PPAs for electricity purchases because up to now, I think that there is no legal framework to do this in Greece. Other questions, could you give a bit more color on the [ results ] as to why in the Greek yogurt market declining, purely inflation-based? A major factor that the yogurt is declining is that 2020 was a very good year. And because of the COVID restrictions, consumers were all spending their income on supermarkets and so the base is high for the yogurt. And also, this is their strategy for competitive pricing post market back. So it also affected directly the value of the market and also have the other suppliers to lower the prices as a price or as extra promotional activities. On Export Yogurts, can we expect more growth than 9.8% you did in 2021? Yes, we believe that this will be a very good year for exports. We see growth at around 15% year-on-year. How big is of an impact do you believe that the biogas plant will have on your energy cost? The electricity of the biogas, we will be selling the electricity to network. So we will not have an effect of our consumption. But this -- for this year, we expect to have EBITDA of around EUR 800,000. On margins, there had been 0.7 points impact from staff costs. Could you please clarify what the reason for that? We had some -- we had some increases on wages, but the major effect has to do with accounting and the accounting of some bonuses that were given us stock awards. And -- so this affected 2021. Why is the drop of gross margin for Export Yogurt show high compared to all other segments [indiscernible] gains in gross margin? For ice cream, I said that we had a price improvement also. And also, the season of ice cream had ended before the steep increases in costs. The difference between Export Yogurt and Greece Yogurt is coming from product mix. So there are some products that use, I would say, more expensive raw materials against others. What are the assumptions for the high single digit growth guidance? Do you take into account a better dynamic for domestic yogurt sales or does the high single-digit guidance include full performance from other domestic yogurt market as well? For the domestic yogurt market, as I said, we are having a market that declines in value. So we have to take this into account. And so we expect our market shares to grow, but in a declining market, it is very difficult to grow in sales. However, I have shown that the private label wins market share, and as we are very strong, the leader supplier of private labels in Greece, we believe that we will have a positive impact from this. Have you made any restocking in the end of the year beginning 2021? What can we expect in terms of working capital management for this year? No, we didn't have this because the price levels of raw materials were not in favor. For working capital management for this year, as I said, we have reduced [indiscernible] days. And for stock, we might expect things as normal. Why are some of Greek products not distributing the whole of Greece, for example, fresh milk? This is a strategic choice; fresh milk is profitable only if it is distributed in a local area. If you try to distribute it all over Greece, then the cost is very high, and also you have returns and other costs of operation. So we keep it only in local market, Serres area. And this way is profitable. And also, we leverage with the very strong brand name we have in local area. Another question, final, on the Greek yogurt market, I was talking about early 2022 decline. Maybe why is it declining? The yogurt market, in general, was hit from lower consumption and this comes from consumers' income, as I said. I think this is the major reason for this. So I think there's not another question. Thank you all for joining us in this session and wish you to have great holidays. If any one of you has other questions, I am at your disposal, you may send an e-mail. Thanks again. Goodbye.