Midsona AB (publ) (MSONB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Thank you for attending this call. As a top line summary, I can conclude that we took step forward also in the fourth quarter. We showed good absolute EBIT and margin improvement. Our leverage continues to decrease. And as a result, the Board is proposing a dividend to the shareholders. We want to make you aware that this presentation contains certain forward-looking statements and that such statements can be subject to risk and uncertainty. And for a view on the risks and opportunities, we refer to the annual report. So let's start by looking at the full year. And we're very happy about the progress that we have made. EBIT before one-off items amounted to SEK 128 million compared to SEK 60 million last year before one-off items. Taking one-off items into account, so looking at absolute EBIT, it improved from SEK 29 million in 2023 to SEK 128 million in '24. We have significantly reduced our complexity and thereby, we have step changed the gross profit margins. It's clear that our efforts to simplify the business have paid dividends and the gross margin increased to 28.7% compared to 25.9% the year before, also before items affecting comparability. And this was despite continued relatively high raw material prices. We do see slight negative organic growth, but adjusting for the described complexity reduction, we are growing the base business. Also, we continue to progress on sustainability. And among other things, we did achieve a prestigious CDP A rating. Very importantly, we have reduced our leverage significantly. The most important net debt-EBITDA covenant has come from 4.4x in 2022 to 2.7x in 2023, to 1.6x ending 2024. So what we have basically done is that we have improved profit and reduced debt. And as a direct result of our improved financial standing, the Board is proposing a dividend of SEK 0.20 per share. If we go more into the details of the fourth quarter, the story pretty much mirrors the story for the full year. We are improving EBIT to SEK 36 million compared to SEK 22 million the year before, this is before one-off items. Absolute EBIT improved from SEK 19 million to SEK 36 million. And the fact that we do see negative organic sales growth is due to the conscious decisions that we have taken. We have continued to step out of structurally unprofitable business, Christmas sales of nuts and dried fruits in the Nordics and low-margin food service contracts in division North. And as a result, our gross profit improved by a stellar 3.5 percentage points to 28.9%. This is, of course, a little bit of a mixed picture, but let's start with organic. Sales for organic products have been depressed as the market has been down the last few years. Now we are growing a solid 5% in quarter 4, and this is both growth of [ Southern ] brands and private label. And considering that market conditions are still somewhat challenging, we are therefore very satisfied with the 5% growth that we have achieved. It shows that our plans to drive our brands are working. And generally speaking, we do see some stabilization and even growth in some markets, but other markets and channels are still quite depressed. It is our expectation that the market situation gradually will improve as lower inflation and interest rate gradually will restore consumer confidence and spending. And our market intelligence clearly shows that consumers still want to consume healthy and sustainable food and especially organic food. So we are confident about the outlook for organic in the future. We do see a big growth -- drop in organic growth for the health food category. And this is solely due to the fact that we have stopped a lot of unprofitable contracts related to Christmas sales of dried fruits and nuts. And this has been a very conscious decision that we have taken, and it's a decision that has really improved our margins. The consumer health category shows slight growth, and it's a few of our brands that drive that growth and the new distribution contract in Finland. Let's look at our 3 divisions. In the Nordics, we do see declining sales, and this is due to the effect that I talked about earlier that we have stepped out of unprofitable Christmas contracts. This is not the reason why EBIT is down. The reason why EBIT is down is due to the fact that we have made some major marketing investments to prepare for a couple of bigger launches that you will see in the first 2 quarters of 2025. We are very happy about the development in division North. Our relentless focus on complexity reduction and selling the right mix is really paying out. We have been improving our offering, and we have been rewarded by both from the customers and consumers. And right now, we do see pent-up demand, but we're also, to some extent, held back by our production output in our German factories. And the main challenge has been to find qualified personnel to run the lines. We are addressing this, and we do expect a gradual improvement during the first 2 quarters of this year. The South Europe division is still a challenge. We do see good growth in the division, but EBIT is still negative. And that, of course, we cannot accept. So we will continue our efforts in further improving operations in Spain and to better compete in a pretty tough market in France. As said, the main improvement driver has been our increased gross margin. In the fourth quarter, it went up from 25.4% to 28.9%. What is especially good is that we see good improvement in all the 3 divisions and some pretty spectacular improvements in division North and South. I would say that most of the drivers are the same. And the main factor is our relentless focus to reduce complexity in our portfolio. We have been substituting low-margin private label contracts with better margin ones, and we have discontinued low-margin food service and licensing agreements and also as described previously stepped out of structurally unprofitable Christmas sales in the Nordic. Complexity reduction will continue, but at a much slower pace in 2025 as the majority of the job now is done. We are also focused on selling more of our high-margin brands. We have managed pricing efficiently. We are step-by-step improving production efficiency, and we are seeing more stable raw material prices. If we look at 2024, I would like to make a few more reflections on the year. In spring, we launched a new group strategy, and this is largely about increasing profitability and strengthening our market position for the future to build a stronger organic platform, to develop our strong health food brands, and to achieve greater efficiency and harmonization across our system. And we are confident that we are well positioned for growth in the future. We also updated our financial targets. And we are progressing, but the majority of the work still lies ahead of us to reach the target. We have a target to achieve an 8% EBIT by the year 2027. We took a good step forward in 2024 and achieved a 3.4% margin compared to 1.6% in 2023. We have the ambition to achieve organic sales growth of 3% to 5% per year, here we achieved a minus 0.7%. And this, of course, we need to improve. Still, in '24, we have reduced complexity. We have done so consciously. This has been needed to improve our margins. And looking forward into '25, one of our key focus areas will be to get back to organic growth. And we have significantly reduced debt. We are down to 1.6x compared to 2.7x previous year. We have set a new organizational structure. This is important, and it has and will be a big facilitator in our change process. We have now also hired a Purchasing Director, Josefin Kronstrand, and she will start mid-March. Then earlier today, we have also announced that I will be leaving the company. It has been a long and fantastic journey since I started 17 years ago. There is no way denying that the last years have been quite challenging. And I'm proud about the progress that we have made, especially in 2024. I would say that we now have a much better platform in place compared to a couple of years ago, and we are now accelerating from this platform. I will remain as CEO until my successor has taken office. We don't know how long that will take right now, but I'm very committed to the business, and the projects that we set for 2025. What we want to do and what we are targeting at is to deliver a stellar 2025 in the Midsona team. Our focus will be to get back to organic growth with a special focus on our brands. This, as the majority of our complexity reduction now are behind us. To be able to drive organic growth, we need to increase output in our Ascheberg, Castellcir and Mariager plants, where we still suffer from some bottlenecks. We will continue to improve our operational efficiency by better coordinating our efforts across both divisions and countries. We do see a huge potential in sourcing. And as of mid-March, we will have a new central sourcing director in place. Cash flow will continue to be key as this is a way to further reduce debt and then in due time, look at opportunities to deploy it. Lastly, sustainability will continue to be high on the agenda We will stay true to our mission of providing healthy food for both people and planet. By this, I would like to hand over to you, Max. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Peter. As a financial summary for the quarter, the net sales declined with 4.1%, mainly explained by the exit of low-margin sales. And as a result, the gross margin continued to improve and in this quarter with 3.5 percentage points. The EBIT increased with SEK 40 million, driven by this improved gross margin and the net result improved with SEK 60 million, driven by lower financing costs. Worth noting for the full year, the tax cost landed on SEK 28 million, corresponding to a tax rate of 37%. And the high tax rate is explained by an unbalanced profit within the group and the fact that new losses carried forward were not capitalized. The current tax rate or the current tax cost, however, landed on SEK 18 million for the year. Going back to the quarter, the cash flow from operating activities landed on SEK 98 million, which was SEK 59 million weaker than last year when we had a very favorable working capital effects which was not fully repeated this year. The net debt and EBITDA ratio continued to improve and landed on 1.6x. Looking at net sales, it declined with 4.1%, while organic growth landed on minus 3.4%. Peter walked through before the sales by product category. Here, you see the sales by brand type and for our own consumer brands. The organic decline was 6.2%, explained by the exit of low-margin Christmas sales for our brand Earth Control within health food category. For our own business-to-business sales, in North Europe, the transformation to focus on profit over volume continues and the sales declined with 12.8%. Private label, however, grew with 3.7% during the quarter, and South Europe and North Europe continued to show strong growth numbers in this segment. Nordic, however, still showed negative growth while continuing exiting certain low-margin contracts. The license business also grew strongly, I would say, with 7.3%, driven by an increased growth for an existing distribution agreement on the Finnish market. Now explaining the EBIT development. The organic sales decline or, in this case, labeled as volume resulted in SEK 11 million lower contribution. This was, however, more than compensated by the earlier explained improved gross margin, resulting in SEK 20 million higher contribution. The sales and admin expenses were overall flat, but we had lower cost for admin, offset by higher investment in selling activities. Last year, other items was positively impacted by governmental grants for high energy costs. This was not repeated this year, and that's why you see the minus SEK 7 million. As a summary, the EBIT landed on SEK 36 million for the quarter, which was an increase of 64% compared to last year. Moving over to cash flow. As already mentioned, the operating cash flow landed on SEK 98 million and was positively impacted also this year by seasonal effects in decreasing working capital; however, not on the same level as last year. Finally, our cash and debt situation. We ended the quarter on to SEK 628 million in available cash, which represents 17% of the last 12-month sales. And finally, net debt relation to EBITDA continued to improve and landed on 1.6x, which is 0.9x better than our financial target. With this, I would like to hand over to the operator and open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Nikola Kalanoski from ABG Sundal Collier.

Firstly, could you perhaps give us an idea of some of the tailwinds and headwinds you're seeing into 2025 versus what we have already seen in 2024?

Yes, I will answer that question. I would say that generally speaking, we have seen a stabilization in most of our markets. And our assessment is that as inflation has come down, interest rates are coming down, consumers are becoming more bullish, that will play to our advantage. So our assumption is that the consumer will be willing to spend more on especially organic products that are a little bit more expensive. So we have overall a positive outlook towards 2025, still with some risks, but what we see right now, we are on the positive side.

Yes. Understood. And I always ask this question. So I'm sorry for sounding like a broken record, but how much more work can you do with the SKU rationalization efforts going forward because we're certainly seeing a significant improvement. But I'm just wondering how much work is left to do?

I think this is something that will continue forever. But as I said, as part of the presentation, we see that the bulk of that work is behind us now. We did take some quite drastic decisions in quarter 4, significantly reducing low-margin contracts for dried fruits and nuts. We have been stepping out of a lot of low-margin food service business in the German market. This will continue. But step by step, we will move over to driving organic growth for our brands. I would say that the portfolio today is much, much more focused. We are not done yet. I think that there are still some things to be done, but probably less dramatic effects compared to the ones that you've seen in 2024.

That's very clear. And then a question on cash flow. It appears very strong in Q4, and this is typically a quarter in which you do get solid cash flows. Going forward, is it reasonable to assume that the part of this strong cash flow will be reinvested to grow your best brands and potentially take market share? Or do you have more of a harvesting mindset towards this cash flow?

We will work very cautiously to deploy the cash in the best possible way. And I don't want to talk too much about our future plans. But of course, there are a number of -- or not in detail at least, I should say, there are a number of key building blocks. One is that, as you stated, one of our key focuses now is to really, really drive our brands harder by making them more relevant -- and that we will invest in. We will also need to increase output in some of our factories. It's important to say that we don't see that major CapEx is needed to make that happen. Rather, we have been suffering from personnel shortages. We have found some creative ways of actually dealing with that now. So I think that, that situation looks better in the future. Then, as you have noted, we have or the Board has proposed a dividend to the shareholders. So I think that there are many ways of deploying this cash that we will generate.

Yes, I appreciate that. And another thing is you mentioned that you're seeing some pent-up demand in region North Europe, unless I'm mistaken, but that you have some bottlenecks. Would you say that you can solve some of these bottlenecks that are hindering growth? Or do they take a long time to resolve? Or are they maybe even out of your control?

No. We are on our way of solving those bottleneck issues. And what is mainly about is that we are -- our main factory in Germany is in a region with extremely low unemployment and quite fierce competition when it comes to skilled personnel. So we have found out some other ways to recruit people into the factory, and we are currently training those persons now to be able to run the lines. So step-by-step during the first and second quarter, we assume or we are confident even that we'll be able to increase output. We are increasing the number of shifts and production hours in the plant. It will take some time before you see full effect in terms of sales out to stores. But step by step, we'll solve that. And as said, I mean, we do have good demand, both on the brand side and on the private label side in the German market. So this is one of our key activities. And as you have noted, we have made quite a turnaround in Germany or division North in 2024. We consider this being the first step, and we still see that there is a lot of development potential in the division North.

That's great. Wonderful. I appreciate the additional color. And I guess my final point is not a question, but rather, Peter, I'm sad to see you leave Midsona. But I just want to say that I'm very impressed with the turnaround that you've steered since I started covering Midsona in Q3 2022. You've left the company in a good shape, and I'm sure that your successor will have the benefit of joining a stable and seaworthy ship. So with that, Peter, I wish you all the best.

Well, thank you so much for that. I do really appreciate it. It has been a very inspiring journey. And I should say it's not over yet. So the Board has now started the recruitment process. To be quite honest, we don't know how long that process will take, and I will stay until we have a successor in place. And I'm very excited about our prospects for 2025. And I, together with my team will do the utmost to show good improvement also in 2025.

[Operator Instructions] There are no more questions at this time, so I hand the conference back to speakers for any closing comments.

Yes, and this is Peter speaking. Then I would like to thank everyone for their attendance. We are happy about the progress that we're making. We will continue to work hard to make an even better 2025. So see you soon again. Thank you, and bye-bye.