Nomad Foods Limited (NOMD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[indiscernible] and welcome. Today, we have with us Stefan Descheemaeker, CEO; and Ruben Baldew, CFO of Nomad Foods, one of Europe's leading frozen food companies. The company has a portfolio of iconic brands and has maintained market-leading position across its core categories by continuing to invest in innovation and brand building. With that, I'll hand it over to the company.

Thank you. And let me start with a short video. I think it's going to test my... So today, Ruben and I, we're going to go through a lot of operational details, strategic, obviously, Minutiae. But at the end of the day, if there are 3 things that you need to remember of the presentation today, these are the 3. The first one is the category. While Europe frozen food is growth advantaged. It's convenient. It's about, obviously, the quality of the food, it's sustainable, it's affordable. So a lot of great things behind the category as such. And it has outpaced food over the last decade, and we definitely believe it's going to do so for the next 10 years. The second is the portfolio advantage. Very simple. We are the leaders in Europe by far, we have the strongest market share. We have fantastic brands. We elaborate on that one later. And again, built on things like nutrition, health and sustainability and affordability, obviously. And last but not least is, well, we are -- we have a strategy that is working and that we're going to make it work in the future. So it's very simple. This year, we're going to celebrate our 10th anniversary since we IPO-ed. And it's going to be our 10th consecutive year of top line and bottom line growth as simple as that. Shorter term, well, we have gained market share after years, obviously, of inflation. We've grown market share consecutively for the last 6 months, and we're growing volume for the last at least 3 quarters, including Q4. As we said, we like focus, we like market share. And so where some people decide to move away from focus, we decided it was the right thing to do. So as a result, what you can see is we are by far the leaders. If you include ice cream, we're #2. And if we just frozen food, which is a great category, as you can see, we are the leaders. We are a young company 10 years. At the same time, a lot of tradition behind it in terms of frozen food. And what we've -- again, what we've said is and what we've done is we've decided very clearly that we want to focus on this category as it has a lot to offer, where other people decided to diversify away from the core. Our core is our focus. And we like it. We think everything in our strategy is around focus. Must-win battles, it's a definition you're going to come a bit later. It is exactly the same by country, by category. And you can see that in terms of what we have, I mean, we have by far, I mean, the biggest market share. Our top 25 categories in all our countries in Europe command a market share which is close to 50%, which is remarkable. And it has to do obviously with the quality of our brand. In terms of awareness, in terms of brand equity, you can see the numbers. It's saying -- it's telling, it speaks for itself. And again, big difference with the U.S. in frozen food. It's very much protein, so fish, seafood and poultry and vegetable. So 2/3 of our business is around these 3 big themes. And we believe -- and we see that these 3 themes obviously have a lot of tailwinds. What we see, for example, is, well, you're checking with Google and you see that obviously, the interest behind protein is increasing in Europe. We have the right product. We have the right brands, and we have the right innovation behind it. Second thing is this you can see this 93%. What are these 93%, very simple. There is a definition in the U.K., which is about if it's reasonably low in terms of salt, fat and sugar, in other words, HFSS, it's acronym. Obviously, if you're below that threshold, you're good. So 93% of our food is non-HFSS, which is great in terms of health, but it's even better, as you can see on the right-hand side, in terms of business. What we can see from Kantar lately in 2023, high inflation, obviously, is that the good food, non-HFSS is responding much better than HFSS as such or good or bad food. Forget about the number 16, it's obviously was inflation time. But what's important is the delta between these 2, and that's where we are. Again, things that you probably know from the frozen food industry in the U.S. with differences. Convenience is a no-brainer. Value, value is very important. So it's mass. Very important for us is we have to deliver something that is affordable for consumers. And sustainability, again, in Europe is still very important and we will remain that way. Then when you translate this into what the real numbers are, well, it's simple. I think overall, over the last -- as we said, over the last decade, we've seen that frozen food, which is a food line, has been doing better than food overall. Still a bit -- this year a bit both lines have merged. Still, we believe it has what it does and increasingly so, because of increasingly so, we believe that in the future, whatever it is, whether this in the U.S. or in Europe, there will be an increasing difference between good food and bad food, and we belong to good food. One more thing is we believe that there is still a lot to do, a lot -- a very high long runway ahead of us. When we compare with the U.S., which is on the left-hand side in terms of consumption per consumer, basically on a full year basis, well, you see the difference. And when you think, for example, big countries like Spain, Germany or France, it's about half of what it is in the U.S. So we believe, again, I mean, by doing the right things, there is still a lot of increase ahead of us. On top of that, and that's our job, obviously, and that's what we're doing. We know that this category is responds well to investments. The impulse level is higher than many categories, and that's what we have seen. I mean, back to reinvestment behind the category, we've seen a big difference over the last 2 years, and we'll come back on that later. In focused investment in our jargon, must-win battles is a big thing for us. It's -- must-win battles are the key categories per country where we have the largest market share and as a result, also the largest, obviously, gross margin. So this is the big thing for us. That's where we're investing most of money. But lately also, we're investing behind what we call growth platforms, which we believe these are the categories where we believe in the coming 3, 4, 5 years, these are the categories, the must-win battles to be in other countries. Again, investment behind the category. Despite the crisis, we have kept investing behind the category. 2023, plus 14%. This year, it's going to be high single digit. Next year, it's going to be well above sales. So it's a major investment, a major commitment behind the category, behind our brands, and we believe it's the right thing to do. Same thing in terms of innovation, where we started from a low baseline, definitely '22, '23, where basically with the retailers, every -- the only thing that mattered was price. We're starting to see, obviously, an uptick in '24 and even beyond in '25. What we also like, by the way, is innovation for us is also, for example, a lift and launch from one country to another, which dumps with a lower level of risk because we know that this is a category that is doing well in one country, and we believe that it's going to do well in another country. We'll come back on that later with a few examples. One more thing is renovation on top of innovation. So what we've seen in '23 is -- and obviously, our biggest competitor, as you can imagine, is private label. We've seen these guys doing a good job, quite frankly. And so we've decided to test systematically, rigorously what we call the perceived, let's say, superiority difference. And what we've seen in '23 is we didn't like it that much. Only 8 of our 25 key must-win battles were coming with superiority in terms of perception, obviously, at the consumer level, the rest being equal with one exception. So we decided that we come to with a 3-year program, where basically at the end of this program, we should become -- we should go to 80% of all the 25 must-win Battles. And we've seen that obviously, we need to do this if we want to keep the margin or the premium we have versus private label. And we see it's working, by the way. Next year is going to be crucial. We're going to move from 12% to something like close to 18%. So it's a big difference. And in terms of innovation and renovation, the numbers are really going to jump big time from 8% to something like 17% for the year to come. So it's a big difference for us, and it's absolutely fundamental as a branded company. Now if we move into some examples, and I'll start with the seafood, which is a big thing for -- as you may remember, from our portfolio. Well, we're coming with a lot of new innovation, again, premiumization, nutrition driven. One example is the Tentazioni di Gusto in Italy. It's really something like, let's say, a restaurant quality food, and it's perceived as well by the consumers. Same thing in Germany on the right-hand side with premiumization. So all these things again go in the direction of more premium, more margin, obviously, and more difference vis-a-vis private label. One other example is poultry. Poultry at this stage is only 8% of our business. I can tell you it's moving very, very fast. It's a great protein. It was a growth platform that 5 years ago in the U.K. In the meantime, it has doubled in the U.K. only. And we have a lot of great example. This one is Chicken Shop, which is basically replicating experience from [ QSR ]. And from there, what we have come to -- what we're doing is we're proposing to the other countries like Italy, for example, which is underrepresented in frozen chicken to go that way. And we started last year, first half, and the results are remarkable. We have increased our market share by 600 basis points in only the last 12 weeks. So it's great. We're educating the market, by the way, on how to do this, which is exactly what is expected from a brand leader like us. Same thing in Germany, a bit different, though, the market is very big, but it's very much in the hands of private label. So we're coming with something which is definitely in terms of brand superiority and quality superiority is much higher. And again, same kind of results 6 months later, we're doing very well with this. And we believe that it has what it takes to become the new fish of the coming years. One odd example is this, leverage fish to grow potatoes. So we have -- obviously, we are dominant in fish, something like 35% of our portfolio is fish, which is great. But at the same time, obvious things like coming with fish and chips in the U.K. is something we just developed this year. So -- and it's really -- I mean, it's flying, not only by selling more chips, which is new for us in the U.K., not in other countries, but also obviously by bundling both together. Same thing, same example in France, where over the last 5 years, our business has tripled. So a lot of things can be done by leveraging one versus the other. We have a lot of other examples, for example, in Croatia and Serbia, which is our Ledo, which has been our acquisition something like 4 years ago. We're moving again from, let's say, low-quality fish to high-quality fish, more margin, same thing in vegetables. So a lot of examples of things we're doing that obviously are growing our sales, but also as importantly, is growing our margin. So with that, I think you have probably a good idea of all the operational things we're doing, the strategy. And I will obviously invite Ruben now to explain how it translates into results.

Thank you, Stefan. And clearly, the strategy is working. What you can see here on this table is this market share evolution. You clearly see the diversion of trend between '24 and '23. In '22, '23, we had to price ahead of competition. That caused us to lose market share. It did protect our margin. And now with some easing of the inflation, we actually see that, that strong margin is allowing us to invest in our brands, in our products and into growth platforms. And you then clearly see in '24 the version of trend with the gap and the decrease becoming smaller. And over the last 5 months, and we actually just had the latest periods coming in, actually, the last 6 months, we've seen consecutive market share gain in the last period being around 60 bps of market share gain. That market share gain is volume driven. So here, you also see per quarter our volume decline in last year where we had to take the pricing as early as that. But in quarter 2, '24, we started to turn that with 1.6% volume growth. Third quarter '24 went down to 0.7%. But within that, we actually had a headwind of an ERP implementation, which was around 2.5%. So underlying, we were looking at more like 3% plus volume growth. And also in quarter 4, we will grow volume, which then will be the third consecutive quarter. And as Stefan said, I really want to make emphasis on the fact that the category of frozen food in Europe is a strong category. Stefan showed has almost been growing 3% in the last 10 years. But also if you look at the right, you look at year-to-date, 1.8%, outpacing many categories in Europe in food. If you actually look over the last 2 years per quarter, you see it has also been outpacing growth in the market. We do see in the last couple of months that the growth is slightly coming down, and that's because inflation is easing, which actually allows us to invest a bit more because it helps us in the gross margin. But overall, a very strong category. And this building market share momentum and a strong category also helps us to reconfirm our guidance today, which we have issued earlier. Clearly, we're still closing the books, so full details and full reconfirmation will come later in the quarter, but we're very happy how we closed quarter 4. And also today, we have issued our guidance for 2025. Given the strong category, as we alluded to, given our building momentum and market share, we have a guidance of 1% to 3% in organic revenue, and we will continue to build margin accretion. We will continue to drive margin mix. We will continue to drive revenue growth management. We will continue to drive savings in our supply chain. And those benefits, we will reinvest in additional investments in our brands and in our products. So we will increase A&P. But even after that, there will be a margin accretion leading to 2% to 4% EBITDA. That EBITDA growth translates to 4% to 6% EPS growth, EUR 1.81 to EUR 1.85 at current exchange rate, that is in $1.85 to $1.90. It's good to note, by the way, that on the more transactional dollar element, so what we're buying in dollars, we're hedged for '25. And with that, also, we'll have a cash flow conversion of 90%. It's not only looking forward, what we're promising, it's also looking backward of what we have been delivering. As Stefan said, '25 will be the 10th anniversary of this company as a listed company. And in those 10 years, we've delivered an average growth in the revenues of 6%, EBITDA of 7% and EPS of 10%. And it's not only the amount of that growth, the level of that growth, it's also the consistency. If you look at revenues and EBITDA, it has been year after year after year. That delivery of the P&L has gone hand-in-hand with the strong cash flow delivery. So here, you see our adjusted free cash flow between EUR 27 million and '24. In '21 and '22, it was slightly lower because we had from a kind of supply perspective, slightly elevated trade working capital levels. But the years behind -- outside those years, you see actually that our cash flow delivery has been between EUR 250 million and EUR 350 million cash flow. If you look at our growth targets looking forward, that would imply EUR 850 million of cash flow over the next 3 years, which is at the current exchange rate, 1/3 of our market. Now how have we and will we then deploy this cash? What is our capital deployment? In the past, if you look 2015, 2018 until 2021, we have been doing M&A. And as Stefan said, we're doing strong M&A. I think there's a strong discipline in this company about being disciplined of doing the right M&A. But more recently, we've actually turned that focus of M&A into returning cash to shareholders via buyback and dividend. Now our appetite for M&A might evolve depending on our own valuation, depending on the valuation of companies out there. But let's be clear that maximizing shareholder return will remain an absolute priority. And with that, I would like to close. I hope you agree with us that we have an exciting building momentum over the recent 6 to 12 months. And building on that momentum, we think we can continue our exciting journey. Many thanks.