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

Welcome to Midsona Q4 Report 2025 presentation. [Operator Instructions] Now I will hand the conference over to the speakers, President and CEO, Henrik Hjalmarsson; and CFO, Max Bokander. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to this presentation of Midsona's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 results. My name is Henrik Hjalmarsson, I am the President and CEO. And with me, I have Max Bokander, Group CFO. We'll spend the coming 25 minutes or so going through an overview of the fourth quarter as well as a summary of 2025 with a deep dive into some of the financials, after which time, there will be plenty of time for questions. So with that, and just a brief overview of Midsona, for those of you who might be new to us. So we are a leading European healthy and organic food business, marketing and selling mainly plant-based vegetarian and in many cases, natural and organic products across 4 -- sorry, apologies, 3 divisions: Nordics; as well as Division North, mainly consisting of Germany then; and Division South, France and Spain, where Nordics is clearly the biggest with 64% of revenue; North Europe, 25%; and South Europe, 11%. We're headquartered in Malmö, Sweden, and we've been listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange for more than 25 years. First then, a summary of the fourth quarter. And let's start with the top left-hand box on the right-hand side, where we can see that net sales in the quarter grew modestly at 0.7% organically, however, slightly down in actual terms, driven by currency. This organic growth was driven very pleasingly with -- by our growth in our own consumer brands, which grew healthily at plus 5.9%. We saw that organic growth in our own consumer brands across all 3 divisions. And we achieved a total growth despite then a lingering negative impact on volumes from the fire in the Spanish operations that we saw earlier in the year. The profitability grew with an increase by 1.3 percentage points in EBIT margin to 5%, corresponding to an EBIT growth of SEK 11 million to SEK 47 million. The gross margin in the quarter was slightly down, mainly driven by the timing of promotion costs and the customer rebates. But with a material, particularly overhead efficiency improvement, we then grew the total profitability of the business. We saw improved cash flows in the quarter, growing by SEK 43 million to SEK 141 million, leading to a net debt to adjusted EBITDA of 1.1, down from 1.6 at the same time last year. If we summarize all of 2025, again, starting on the top left-hand box on the right-hand side, we saw modest organic sales decline in the full year. Positively, again, the -- our own consumer brands contributed positively with an organic growth of 1.4% in the year, a trend that we saw accelerated in the third and fourth quarter. However, negative impact with a bit weaker quarters earlier in the year as well as the impact of 2 discontinued licensed brands and the fire in Spain then led to a slight negative organic growth for the full year. Profitability grew slightly by 0.3 percentage points to an EBIT margin of 3.7%, corresponding to an EBIT growth of SEK 5 million to SEK 133 million for the full year. Gross margin, again, slightly down for the full year, mainly driven by a negative sales mix as well as a partially negative production efficiency, particularly early in the year, but then compensated by improved overhead efficiency supporting then the EBIT margin growth. Again, cash flows for the full year remained strong, SEK 87 million up to SEK 229 million, which means then that we leave the year with a healthy balance sheet with a 1.1x leverage as well as improved underlying business performance with the EBIT growth of SEK 5 million. And the Board then proposes a dividend, 10% above the dividend of last year at SEK 0.22 per share. If we look a bit at the highlights for the fourth quarter by division, starting with the Nordics. In the Nordics, we saw an organic sales growth of 0.7%, which was clearly driven by our own consumer brands, which grew organically at 6.2% in the quarter. We saw a continued strong sales development of our own organic brands, which I'll come back to in a little bit. But also pleasingly in the fourth quarter, after a more challenging third quarter for the Health Food brands, we now saw them back in growth after the change of our business model from direct to central distribution. We saw a somewhat weaker gross margin in the quarter, driven by mix and promotional costs, however, mitigated then by strengthened cost efficiency to strengthen the EBIT margin. If we look at Division North, ever so slight organic growth of 0.1%, but also in the case of Division North fueled then by the growth of our own consumer brands, which grew by 3.3%. However, our own business-to-business brands had a quite a material organic decline, but that's also a part of a plan to move to a more focused value-added HoReCa proposition with a stronger profitability profile, and that transition is ongoing. The gross margin weakened in Division North, where we saw then the biggest aspect of the timing of promotion cost, the customer rebate, which was despite an improved cost control, not fully offset. Looking at Division South, we saw an organic sales decline of 3.1%, which was largely driven by the lower contract manufacturing volumes in Spain following the fire, as we have announced before. However, pleasingly, again, also for Division South, our own consumer brands grew by 6.4% organically with a particularly strong growth in the French grocery trade. We saw a materially improved gross margin, which was driven by improved efficiency as well as sales mix, and I'll come back to that a little bit later. Looking then again -- or sorry, instead through the lens of the portfolio, starting with our organic products, where we saw an organic growth in the organic portfolio of 3.2%, which then pleasingly, again, driven by our own organic brands, which grew by 7.8% in the quarter, really showing that the marketing and innovation initiatives that we have taken in the organic portfolio is paying off in terms of stronger engagement with our customers and bigger uptake with our consumers. We saw a somewhat weaker growth on the contract manufacturing side, partially then impacted by the fire in Spain, and also, as I mentioned before, on our business-to-business brands in Germany. If we look at the Health Foods segment, we're back in organic growth after a weaker third quarter. The new business model for one of our brands going from direct to central distribution in the Nordics is now fully implemented and contributing positively in the quarter. However, we have a negative impact on Health Foods through lower contract manufacturing sales as we work on optimizing our contract manufacturing proposition to improve profits. And then lastly, looking at the Consumer Health products. We saw an organic sales decline of 6.8%. Some lingering negative impact from the discontinued distribution of a licensed brand, we saw a bigger impact from -- we've had over the year 2 discontinued licensed brands, and we saw a bigger impact in the third quarter. This has continually worn off in the fourth quarter. I think we expect that to be fully phased out during the first quarter. We also saw a weak start to the flu season, which impacts a quite broad part of the assortment we have, which are remedial products aimed at remedying flu or flu-like symptoms. I thought I'd take the opportunity to share a couple of points around the development of products and brands for growth and how we work with that. Starting here on the left-hand side with Friggs, which is obviously one of the most important and largest brands in the group. Here, we have a very strong position, mainly in the Nordics, as a strong driver of the healthy snacking segment, where corn cakes is a very important part. A big part of that is to create continuous excitement in the category and also among our products, and doing that by revitalizing the offering to new and local taste preferences. And in conjunction with the fourth quarter, we launched a new range with paprika flavoring, which was really an exciting one and which came off to a strong start at the -- towards the end of the year. The second example here in the middle is from our certified organic beauty range under the Urtekram beauty brand, where we are on a very exciting considerable growth journey internationally, leveraging strong positions on digital and e-commerce. Here we launched a new range called the Nordic Berry range, which leverages our strong Nordic heritage and the natural origin, and this was received very well by our partners around in Europe. And the third one then, an example of how we've worked continuously with strengthening our organic assortment across the Nordics, where one of the things we've done is to focus our efforts. And as you can see, has had a good impact with a material improvement in the revenue per item in the fourth quarter. This not only enhances the impact on shelf and in-store, but also obviously, with a slightly narrower but more focused assortment with higher revenue per item drives the improved supply chain efficiency. So pleasing to see. A few words on our gross margin development, starting with the Nordics where we saw a slight decline of the gross margin in the fourth quarter. So -- and that's despite the fact that we saw a healthy product mix and margin management continued as well as production efficiency that contributed positively. However, that was not sufficient to fully offset a somewhat more negative category mix and somewhat increased promotional cost. In Division North, we saw a somewhat larger negative impact. This is despite the fact that sales mix continued to impact as did actually channel mix impacted positively with growth of our own consumer brands. However, the time -- in a year-over-year comparison, the timing of promotion cost and customer rebates impacts the margin development in the quarter negatively compared to the fourth quarter of 2024. Part of this negative development, pleasingly was offset by improvements in production efficiency, but not sufficient to grow the margin. In the South, we saw the opposite development with a material strengthening of the gross margin with a positive sales mix impact and with strong growth in our own brands, but also materially improved production efficiency, particularly in France, but also in the remaining operations in Spain. I take the opportunity to just share a few words in terms of an update on the restructuring program that we launched in conjunction with the third quarter report during the fourth quarter, which is then has the ambition of contributing to our margin target and continuing our profitability enhancement targeting a SEK 20 million run rate in annual savings. So I'm pleased to say that the program is on track and in line with ambitions. The union consultations were finalized in the fourth quarter. And the majority of the implementation work was also finalized during the end of the fourth quarter, spilling slightly into the start of the first quarter this year. We still expect run rate savings of approximately SEK 20 million, and we still expect to be fully implemented by the end of the first quarter this year. However, we have been able to execute this with slightly lower costs than we originally assumed. And we think that the total onetime cost to achieve the program will remain less than SEK 10 million. And lastly, before handing over to Max, a few words on our short-term priorities, obviously, making sure that we get full implementation and impact from the restructuring program continues to be a short-term priority for us to make sure we achieve that impact in full run rate by the end of the quarter. We have a good opportunity to leverage the growth momentum on our own consumer brands and to continue the focused product and marketing initiatives investing to fuel continued growth. And following the fire in the beginning of the third quarter in our Spanish operations and a good work with stabilizing the business by the local team, we are now in the process of setting the long-term business model and production structure for a profitable business recovery. And with that, I will hand over to Max, who will take you through the details of the financials.

Thank you, Henrik. I will start with the financial summary for the quarter. The net sales declined by 2.9%, but this is fully explained by the negative impact from the currency. And excluding this effect, there was a small organic growth of 0.7%. The gross margin was negatively impacted by timing of customer discounts, but underlying the gross margin was stable. EBIT, however, improved with SEK 11 million, driven by improved efficiency throughout the full organization. The net financing costs continued to improve versus last year and this quarter with SEK 4 million, driven by the more favorable conditions in our new financing agreement. The net result landed on SEK 33 million and was negatively impacted by SEK 6 million of restructuring costs. The cash flow from operating activities improved with SEK 43 million, and the quarter ended with a leverage on 1.1x, which is an all-time low for Midsona. Moving over to sales development for the quarter. As already mentioned, the net sales declined by 2.9% or in absolute, SEK 28 million, but the FX translation explains SEK 34 million. And the organic sales development was positive with SEK 6 million, and this despite the smaller operations in Spain following the fire. Extra positive as we see it, our strategic and our own brands grew very strong during the quarter with 5.9%. The business-to-business branded business in Germany is still under transition to focus on profit over volumes and continued to decline as a result. However, with positive effects on margin. Our private label business continued to show good growth for North Europe, but the lower sales in Spain following the fire led to an organic decline for the group as a total. The license business declined with 16.2%, mainly driven by one distribution agreement that was discontinued from January 2025. Now explaining the quarterly EBIT development compared to last year. The organic sales were, in this case, labeled as volume resulted in SEK 2 million higher contribution, but this was offset by a slightly lower gross margin, driven by the timing of customer discounts. Improved efficiency throughout the full organization resulted in SEK 30 million lower sales and admin expenses. And the FX translation effect and revaluation effect on operating assets and liabilities had a negative SEK 1 million effect. And as a summary, the EBIT landed on SEK 47 million with a 5% margin. We have higher ambitions than this. But as a small note and if we compare with our historical performance, we need to go back to quarter 1 2021 to find a quarter with a higher absolute EBIT. Moving over to the cash flow. As you can see from the graph to the left, the cash flow was positively released -- impacted by release of working capital, mainly driven by inventory that landed on a 10% lower level than same time last year. This despite us improving service level throughout the year. And as a summary, the cash flow landed on SEK 141 million. Finally, moving over to our cash and debt situation. We ended the quarter with SEK 781 million in available cash, which represents 22% of our last 12-month sales. And as already mentioned, the net debt in relation to EBITDA landed on 1.1x, well within our financial target, and as already mentioned, an all-time low for Midsona. With this, I hand back to you, Henrik.

Thank you very much, Max. So with that, we open up for questions. So I hand back to the operator, please.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Alice Beer from ABG Sundal Collier.

Just starting out, could you help us break down the EBIT growth in terms of these improved efficiencies? You talked about the restructuring program and the sales mix and centralized distribution and B2B sales, what are the main drivers? And are there any temporary improvements that should not be extrapolated?

So I think the key drivers that you see, you pretty much summarized it actually. So there is some positive effect -- some early positive effect partially from parts of restructuring program. However, that will materially increase going into this year. There is, however, a fairly strong positive impact in the Nordics from the shift from direct to central distribution, which has allowed us to improve the cost efficiency on the sales side quite materially. And then I think also, you see the result of a continued focused effort on improving the general efficiency throughout the organization that we worked a lot on across the third and fourth quarter. There are no material onetime effects in the -- in that sort of ongoing cost structure. But obviously, saying that there are always some swings up and down in seasonality impact of the underlying cost.

Okay. Great. And then for the full year, you've mentioned high raw material prices that have not yet been passed on. And as we know, Sweden will lower its VAT on food in April, and supermarkets will have a lot of pressure to decrease prices. Are you worried about cost inflation in conjunction with the supermarkets hesitate to accept higher prices?

Not -- I will answer that in 3 ways. So one, obviously -- in general, we work towards a consolidated customer landscape, which is obviously where we invest a lot of time and energy in building strong demand among consumers. But -- and in that sense, price is always a topic that we spend a lot of time and energy on. I don't have a general concern, larger than normally on that front, I would say, with the exception of some specific raw materials, obviously, with the heterogeneous portfolio of our style, there are always pockets of products and raw materials that see temporary surges due to -- can be local, for example, local weather or climate phenomena. So there are some specific pockets but not a -- in general, a bigger concern than normal.

Okay. Great. And then you mentioned further clarifying your priorities and actions. Can we expect updated targets in the near term?