Barry Callebaut AG

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Barry Calabelt's full year results presentation for 2024-2025. I'm Sophie Lang, Head of Investor Relations, and today's session will be hosted by our CEO, Peter Feld, and our CFO, Peter Van Ester. Following the presentation, we'll have a Q&A session for analysts and investors. Please do limit yourself to no more than two questions. Before we start, please take note of the disclaimer on slide two. And I'd also like to inform you that the webcast and conference call today is being recorded. With that, I'll hand you over to our CEO, Peter Feltz.

Thank you very much, Sophie. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our fiscal year results presentation for 24-25. Today, we will also be sharing a strategic update covering the actions we have taken and are taking to build a more resilient Barrikalabout, delivery on our next-level objectives, and how we are unlocking future growth and shareholder value. Let me start with a few key messages. As you will hear in more detail from Peter Farnese shortly, in H2, we returned to cash generation and made strong progress on our deleverage agenda. This was supported by actions we've been taking on our BC Next Level journey and to step up resilience to market volatility. As we look to the year ahead, we have three clear focus areas. De-leverage to less than three and a half times net debt to EBITDA and delivering strong cash generation. Preparing for a return to growth with clear focus on customer experience, competitiveness and unlocking new innovative solutions for our customers. And third, relentlessly addressing optimization opportunities for the new environment. With that, I will hand over to Peter Farnesse to talk to the results. Thank you, Peter.

And good morning, everybody. Let me walk you through the full year performance in a bit more detail now. Starting with a short summary. After significant cocoa bean price increase and volatility in half year one, the market has stabilized in half year two and we have been taking decisive actions to reduce working capital, enabling strong cash generation and deleveraging. At the same time, the cocoa market turbulence created a challenging B2B environment and we took some prioritization decisions within cocoa, both of which impacted our volume development at minus 6.8%. When it comes to profitability, recurring EBIT growth of 6.4% in constant currency was supported by pricing through the increasing cost of financing and mix. After major pressure on net profit in half year one, half year two net profit benefited from the further cost pass-through actions we have taken. Let me go into more details. starting with leverage. We delivered major progress in the second half of the year, enabled by our working capital actions, which I will talk more about in the next slide. Back in half year one, we saw a step up to 6.5 times net debt over EBITDA, as higher prices during the peak harvest meant that we needed to finance significantly higher inventory value. For the full year, our intentional actions enabled us to land at 4.5 times leverage, significantly progressing towards our ambition of being below 3.5 times by the end of fiscal 26. Our leverage adjusted for cocoa beans, or RMI, is actually today at 2.7 times. But in fact, if we also adjust it for cocoa inventories as well as beans, so only cocoa, not even excluding chocolate and other stocks, our adjusted leverage is below one time. But actually you can see that on the right hand side of this slide, and it's important to realize that our net debt of 4.3 billion is actually fully backed by high quality inventory at 4.7 billion value. When it comes to reducing our net debt going forward, we have very intentionally established a balanced debt maturity profile with around 700 million Swiss falling due in the next five years on average every year, enabling repayment with our strong liquidity position. So going through those working capital actions in more detail, we have been diversifying our sourcing with increased purchases from origins like Brazil and Ecuador, which do have significantly shorter cash cycles and reduce our forward contracting. This goes hand in hand with our actions to step up our bean blending capabilities so that we can optimize recipes for our customers. Next to that, we've also been optimizing our purchase timing and inventory levels and reducing forward contracting. For example, when it comes to safety stocks where we have been somewhat overcautious in the past. At the same time, we also took action to enhance the flexibility of our financing options with the introduction of a letter of credit facility last August. And this allows us to replace futures margin call cash outflows with a letter of credit, benefiting from both liquidity and agility in volatile times. It delivered 200 million operational cash inflow now, but it's especially an important buffer in case of potential future bean spikes and volatility. The next level focus on improved planning and logistics processes with better end-to-end coordination also had an important impact on our inventories. And finally, of course, the increase of EBITDA is also contributing to our good progress on the leverage through the pricing through of the higher cost of capital, delivery of the next level savings and prioritizing higher return segments within global COCO. So what does that mean for free cash flow? Free cash flow declined by 312 million Swiss for the fiscal year, with a return to a strong cash inflow of 1.8 billion in half year two. When we look there at the moving parts, let's maybe start with the brown box, which is the cocoa bean price impact. This had a negative 1.1 billion cash impact for the year, with 664 million positive inflow in half year two. The bean price did close at a similar level at year end versus the start of the year, which was around 5,300 British pounds, but with much higher prices, of course, and higher volatility during the year. We saw a negative impact from the bean price for the fiscal year still for two reasons. One, liquidity swaps, and two, some phasing. Now, as you might remember, in fiscal 23-24, we had taken significant liquidity swaps to better allocate our cash flows to our business cycle. And this has postponed margin co-payments in the range of several hundreds of million Swiss francs into fiscal 24-25, so this fiscal year. And this has been the main driver of this. Secondly, also, our long cycle of business between the bean contracting and the customer sales And given the much higher prices a few months ago, there's also a bit of a phasing impact when the bean price comes down. So we do expect some further benefit to come if the bean price, of course, stays stable at the lower level. Moving to the green boxes, which is the operational free cash flow, we see here a positive contribution of 1.2 billion for the fiscal year, of which 1.4 billion in the second half of the year. Here we see the major operational benefits from the next level actions on working capital reduction and financing flexibility that I just described in the previous page. Finally, looking at the yellow box, we invested 388 million for the fiscal year behind investment in CapEx and BC Next Level. Looking ahead with all of this, given the harvest timing and a typical H1, H2 cash trajectory profile, half year one of this fiscal year, the coming fiscal year, is expected to see negative free cash flow before we see further strong progress in half year two. Moving to the market disruption now that we have seen over the past year. I will only talk briefly here as Peter will also go into more detail. But we all know, of course, that the bean prices have increased significantly in the first half of the year. In response to that, the strength of our cost plus business model allowed us to successfully pass these higher prices through to our customers, driving 56% pricing for the fiscal year and even higher at 85% on our cocoa business. We saw our peak pricing in quarter two with pricing remaining high though in half year two, but a bit lower sequentially. At the same time, it does take our customers some time to price through to the end consumer. So we have been impacted by a challenging B2B market as they manage that transition and adjust to the higher prices. And in particular, our customers have been reducing pack sizes and reformulating in some cases, certainly also adjusting their stock levels and their forward cover, calling off orders sometimes later. And finally, a few of our very large customers who also produce chocolate in-house have been prioritizing their own capacity as they saw temporarily lower demand. Nevertheless, our customers have also taken significant pricing with Nielsen data showing chocolate prices in the market that are around 30% higher than what they were before the bean price increased. Within the next few months then, we know that it will still be challenging, but we do expect market dynamics to improve because of this, and also given the recent decline that we've seen in the bean price. We therefore expect our customers to take only limited further pricing, and we have seen customers willing again to contract further out in light of these lowering prices. On top of the market dynamics, there's also been a number of BC specific factors for the decisive actions we took in this environment. In global cocoa, we sharpened our return focus to prioritize volumes within cocoa and also towards chocolate, where we see the higher returns in the context of higher bean prices and now the leverage agenda. The impact is expected to continue into half year one of fiscal 26. In North America, the intervention in our Toluca Mexico factory at the start of the fiscal year saw a residual impact as we worked through all of that to get customers back and re-qualified. And finally, our SKU rationalization efforts, which are now complete, impacted volumes for Goumet, especially in Western Europe. At the same time, we did focus our strategic direction on the growth platforms, which have shown resilience. Cacao Coatings, which we used to call a compound business, saw positive growth overall, particularly driven by high single-digit growth in Western Europe and double-digit growth in Latin America, where we have supported our customers with innovation and reformulation. In specialties, we saw particularly strong growth in our inclusions business. And finally, in AMEA, the region was impacted by the China microclimate, but we saw double-digit growth in key geographies like India, Indonesia, and the Middle East, supported by innovations, actions to delay our route to market, and portfolio segmentation. These market dynamics have led to 5.3% decline in chocolate volumes, and for the group, we saw a decline of 6.8%. So the group decreased more than chocolate, as global cocoa declined by 12.8%, with a strong impact from the negative market demand to the higher prices on the one side, but also due to the prioritization reasons that I outlined before. I will therefore focus this slide on global chocolate, first by region and then by segment. Starting by the regions, to the left of the page, Western Europe saw a 6.6% volume drop as the demands there continue to be impacted by higher prices and the knock-on effects of all of that on customer behavior, as well as some effect of SKU rationalization. Central Eastern Europe declined by 4.4%, with a very challenging customer environment, particularly for food manufacturers that are local. North America saw a decrease of 6.7% as new customer wins were offset by the difficult market environment and the impact of the Toluca intervention I talked about. Latin America saw a strong growth of plus 6%, driven by innovative customer solutions, particularly for cacao coatings, again, compound. And finally, AMEA saw slightly negative growth as the demand pressures in China and the developed markets offset the double-digit growth I just discussed for India, Indonesia, and the Middle East. By segment, to the right of the page, Goumet has been more resilient as growth in AMEA, Latin America, and CEE was offset by the challenging environment we saw on that in Western Europe and North America, again here impacted by the SKU reduction and the Toluca intervention. Meanwhile, the food manufacturer segment was impacted by customer behavior shifts in this context of volatility and significantly higher prices as we've seen across the whole market, and as I talked about earlier. Moving to profits, and first recurring EBIT, later I'll talk about net profit. Recurring EBIT was 703 million Swiss, increasing by 6.4% in constant currencies. Looking at it per ton, we saw a 14% increase, showing that the impact from the lower volumes was significant. Now, EBIT benefited from mix, as the higher profit segments like gourmet, specialties and cacao coatings saw better growth than the overall group. Importantly also, the Cost Plus model enabled us to successfully pass on the higher financing costs of this high bean price environment, with a strong improvement in pass-through in half year two, after some gaps we had seen in half year one, as it does require time in a forward-selling business to pass this through. Third, delivery of the BC Next Level cost savings also benefited EBIT. At the same time, we've also seen a number of offsetting costs, some temporary, some structural. In particular, unprecedented market disruption costs, especially in half year one, such as the impact of steep backwardation on rolling costs and high market prices that are raising carry costs of our inventories. These already improved significantly in half year two. Also, we saw an impact of the lower volumes on the fixed cost base and inflation. And finally, we made some structural investments in customer experience and internal capabilities. For example, digital investments, supply chain investments, such as enhancing our bean blending flexibility and capabilities, people investments, and some other cost inflations, partly due to the cocoa environment, like higher insurance costs on the much higher value of the beans that we are transporting around. Closing this section on recurring net profit, net profit was at 250 million Swiss or 267 at constant currency, down 36% in local currencies. However, it's very important to distinguish between half year one performance of minus 69% and half year two performance, which was flat versus last year. Half year one net profit was heavily impacted by the speed and the magnitude of the bean price increase and the corresponding working capital impact and the time it takes to fully pass through this higher cost in a forward selling business. Half year two, however, we did see a strong improvement to being flat versus last year, showing the strength of our actions with around three times as much profit generation versus half year one. Driven by further actions to price through higher cost of financing, our cost of financing increased sharply with 170 million year on year. in sync with the higher working capital needs that we had throughout the year and the additional funding we raised for that. And we took actions to price through those financing costs, which further took effect in half year two. Second, a bit of market stabilization with significant easing of the backwardation in the cocoa market. And this means that the gap between the near term, the more expensive prices, has been narrowing versus the long term, less expensive prices. So that has been helping in half year two. And third, the impact of our end-to-end value chain projects and planning improvements. With that, I will hand over back to Peter, who will talk more about the actions that we take to enhance the resilience of BC and make us an even stronger leader in this industry.

Thank you very much, Peter. So the last two years have been in many ways unprecedented. The market environment has radically changed. The entire industry was disrupted. Today's full year results presentation provides an opportunity for us to reflect about what we've done and about the journey ahead of us. So looking back, how we have been delivering BC Next Level while taking decisive actions in a radically changing environment. And looking ahead, how we are pulling all levers to deleverage and decouple from the bean price while enabling growth and returns. So let's dive in. So BC has seen unprecedented time over the past two years. We are unlocking our full potential with BC Next Level by progressing relentlessly to weather the new normal. We've launched our strategic investment program, BC Next Level, two years ago. We are advancing Barrik Kalebout to become the trusted advisor of our customers. Best value, best service, best sustainability, and food safety and quality. With the goal of creating a better customer experience, a better scaling Barrik Kalebout, and a one-time cost improvement of 250 million. As you know, due to the disruption and bean crisis and also the tariff situation in North America, we announced a delay by 12 months. Now, let me be clear. BC Next Level is delivering. More than 30 initiatives are hardwired, way more than halfway through. But unfortunately, due to these external shocks, the savings uplift will only be visible in the bottom line later. We have achieved a lot since we have started our journey two years ago. We've talked about the BC Next Level transformation during our results presentation, about our new operating model, our footprint optimization, the SKU reduction, to name a few topics shared so far. But BC Next Level is much more than this. It is a strategic investment program with 36 initiatives that bring tangible benefits to Barry Callebaut and importantly, our customers. Now, we won't have time to look at all of the 36 initiatives today. I want to focus on a few to illustrate the benefits that BC Next Level brings to BC and our customers. Before we go there, I want to thank our teams in Barikalabout who have worked tirelessly to get us where we are today. Thank you very much. Starting with food safety, a cornerstone of our business. We have elevated food safety to the next level and installed three fire lines for safety to provide certainty to our customers at all times. One, full product testing before releases, 100% positive release. Two, rigorous supplier compliance. And three, investments into technology and factory design. A great example are the outdoor samplers we have been installing, precise, repetitive, and efficient sampling for best results. All of this is part of our larger food safety agenda. As part of Next Level, we've done many things to improve our supply chain performance. I want to share two examples today. The first one that you see on the page right now, we have introduced real-time track and trace for all our road shipments in Europe and North America. We are testing this as we speak and will soon be ready to have everything at our customer fingertips. Customers will know when their order is ready, when it leaves our factory, when it arrives at their factory, if there's any delays. On time, in full, in spec and quality delivery is a critical part of our customer journey. The benefits are obvious. With a similar intent, we've launched OceanEdge with DHL to give end-to-end visibility on our ocean freight. We've massively improved ocean shipments with efficiency benefits, detailed tracking, centralized document repository. BC Next Level is a key enabler for a more scalable Barri Calabaut. The next example I want to give is our new factory operating system, BCOS, a milestone in Barri Calabaut's history. A global, standardized way of working to be established in all our factories. 29 locations are going live by the end of this year. We see remarkable results in the factory where we have already introduced BCOS so far. The training and the mindset shift enabled a 20% more efficient production on a six-month period across the lines that started first. This is huge and the benefits will be coming in the future. All our new factories like Brentford in Canada and Nimrama in India that we've started up this fiscal year are starting with BCOS from day one with all its benefits. BCoS is a backbone to create a better scaling barricade about for the future. The next example is our global business services that now operates from our four hubs. Woodch in Poland, Hyderabad in India, Monterey in Mexico, and Kuala Lumpur. 24-7 capabilities around the globe. All four hubs are fully up and operational. Woodch and Hyderabad drive global processes. Monterey and Kuala Lumpur support regional operations. GBS brings significant benefits and efficiency benefits for Barry Callebaut. But importantly, it is also the base for better, more consistent service to our customers around the globe. Integrated processes, standardized workflows, end-to-end process ownership. Clear benefits for BC and for our customers. And the last example for today, and we're only covering a fraction of the BC Next Level programs. If you haven't realized by now, our annual report and this presentation look slightly different. We've launched Masters of Taste as our new brand purpose with our global power brand Callabout. It underscores our deep commitment to be number one trusted advisor for our customers. As you know, taste is by far the most important purchase driver in the chocolate industry, confirmed by 84% consumers globally. This brand purpose for us brings all of Barical about employees and our partners together and helps to drive a stronger value perception with our 15,000 customers globally, especially in the gourmet segment. As of earlier and shortly after announcing BC Next Level, the cacao crisis hit the industry. For decades, cacao and chocolate prices have been comparatively stable with relatively low volatility. We all know what happened over the past two years. The first price spike in 24, making chocolate three times more expensive within four months. A second spike in 25. Today, we're still two times higher compared to historic levels. This unprecedented situation on bean price, volatility and supply introduced challenges and required decisive action. We needed to tackle a lot of challenges resulting from the high and volatile bean prices and the more difficult supply situation. Increased working capital requirements to fund the inventories, rapidly increasing our leverage as well. Changes in customer behavior, more short-term bookings, delayed call-off, a lot of conversations with customers not used to such rapid changes in prices. Challenges for the industry to source the beans from the right origins in the right quality. Demand and supply forecasting challenges in uncertain environment with ripple effects throughout the entire value chain. A lot in parallel. And we have been addressing it. We've acted swiftly and decisively, including by deciding to push forward with BSE next level. To address the bean price volatility, we installed cross-functional task forces to effectively respond to temporary price spikes. Clear action plans in readily changing market conditions. I would say it brought all of Barical about closer together as a team. The level of collaboration across cacao, chocolate and the different departments is probably the highest it has ever been. As a joint team, we've secured the right financing for this environment, including a $2 billion of bond insurance in January and February 2025, less cash-consuming solutions for daily market volatility, as explained by Peter earlier. But also lots of actions to secure the bean supply. We quickly diversified and expanded our traditionally more Ivory Coast and Ghana-focused origin mix. We drastically reduced our bean and produce stock inventory through various measures to minimize working capital needs. And we have a clear plan what needs to happen in the future to make Barikalabout even more resilient. Let's look ahead. The focus forward is clear. De-leverage and return to growth. Before we get into it, I want to provide an outlook on the cacao market. Our views differ short-term versus long-term. Short-term, in other words, for the upcoming crop cycle over the next six months, we are cautiously optimistic on supply. It is expected to be broadly similar to this past year. Likely a slight decrease in West African crops to be offset by growth in the other origins. Cacao prices at two-year lows, also positive. But the volatility remains structurally higher than before the crisis, and customers are all still adjusting to the changing environment. So temporary price spikes are not out of the question yet. Long term, structural challenges remain for the industry to solve. Climate change, diseases, farming conditions. We are leading the industry to secure supply and I will share more details in a minute. The main message I want to leave with you. We are preparing Barikalabao to weather higher prices and volatility for longer while working to decouple the business from bean price fluctuations. Let's get into the crop. Prices. We've all observed the recent significant drop in cacao prices. Three topics I want to highlight. One, the cacao terminal market is now below £5,000, a level we believe our customers have largely priced through in retail. That's good. Short term, the market seems to have found a price that works for farmers, processors, our customers and consumers. Too early to tell, but cautiously positive to see. Two, for the first time in two years, the forward curve is flat. You pay the same for cacao delivered in December of this year and December of next year. This is very important. It incentivizes our customers to book rather than wait for lower prices in the future. It also reduces rolling costs associated with hedging significantly. The flat curve is good news. Three, volatility has reduced, but it is likely here to stay, which brings us to the next slide. Volatility, looking at the daily change in cacao prices, let it sink in. Before 24, cacao prices changed around 20 pounds per day on average. In April 24, 400 pounds plus changes on a daily basis. This is unprecedented in terms of speed of change. Volatility has come down, yes, but we continue to observe strong reactions around selected news and overall liquidity in the market is low and expect volatility to remain higher than before the crisis. The good news, our business model have proven to be resilient in this environment and to protect us. Volatility is likely here to stay and we are prepared for it. Our quarterly pricing, which is tied to cacao prices, of course, has peaked in quarter two, 24, 25. Nielsen quarterly pricing, the sellout data, is only now starting to stabilize in line with a typical three to six months B2B to retail delay we see in the industry. We believe customers and consumers are adjusting to the new normal. Consumers' appetite for chocolate remains strong. It is the number one preferred consumer flavor by distance. Customers, we believe, have largely prized through the current terminal market levels and we are proactively collaborating with them on recipe optimizations, new product launches and other efforts. Short term, our customers will still continue to navigate consumer readjustments on a case by case basis. But we believe we are through the worst as an industry. Let me also say chocolate has been far too cheap for far too long. We believe actions are required to ensure long term supply of our beloved cacao. As I said in the beginning, the long term structural challenges are not resolved. A significant part of today's cacao supply is at risk due to climate change and disease. We are tackling this proactively and we are leading the industry to ensure a predictable long-term supply across four areas with ingredient innovation. Mid-July 25, we announced our partnership with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences to explore cacao cell culture technology. And today, we are pleased to announce a long-term commercial partnership with Planet A Food. More on a few slides. Two examples amongst many taken to deliver new chocolate experiences with less or no cacao content. through our sustainability programs supporting the leading consumer goods companies of the world. The scale of these programs is massive and by far the largest in the industry. I want to use the opportunity to reiterate that we are ready for EODR. We are supportive of the legislation. It is important to give the entire industry a level playing field. We are ready at Barrichalabout for our customers, and we believe traceability is the right thing to do. And we're also driving investments into smallholder farming and large-scale high-tech farming. So how are we progressing with our future farming initiative? Our Future Farming Initiative is designed to modernize sustainable cacao farming at scale, a catalyst to the industry to invest in farming. Under the leadership of Steven Ratzlaff, who led over two decades our global cacao business, We're going forward and we are having good news on that side. Many elements are in place to scale the future of farming. The team is making strong progress. We've built a team of industry-leading experts working tirelessly. We have the largest nursery established in Brazil, two farms to test and improve farming methods, and we're driving productivity investments such as our AI-based cacao pot harvesting robot. We've also identified a funnel of properties that fit our criteria for large-scale cocoa farming. Advanced discussions with partners and landowners to put funding and scaling models are in place. So the ingredients to really unlock the future farming opportunity are here today. The team is now working on executing the plan. So talking about our long-term priorities, we remain focused on our four strategic growth priorities and continue to drive improvements in execution. A few thoughts how we are progressing on each of them. One, deeper partnerships. We are the trusted partner of choice for innovation and reformulation. Customers are looking towards us to provide our solutions. Or our new commercial centers of excellence are driving capabilities and impact, while our new customer segmentation allows us to be more tailored in our service offering. Since the cacao crisis, outsourcing was not the top priority on our customers' agenda. Today, we are making progress nicely on some larger opportunities for the future. We remain bullish on outsourcing as a key enabler to strengthen our strategic partnerships and by more deeply interlinking our supply chain to bring benefits of our scale to our customers. Two, as shared, we've launched Callabout Masters of Taste. We also successfully launched our pilot direct-to-consumer webshops in Germany and Austria for gourmet business and launched our digital Callabout Academy. Three, we are continuing to improve the scalability of our specialty offerings through a more focused portfolio, accelerating innovation in cacao coatings and expanding into non-cacao solution and experiences. Four, we continue to see a huge opportunity in getting to fair share in EMEA, with China completely untapped. The team is progressing nicely in key markets, as evidenced in the numbers that Peter has shared with you earlier. We are preparing for a return to growth, to innovate, lead and grow. Our net promoter score that our customers have given us has increased significantly compared to last year. A great step towards the ambition of delivering best customer experience. This increase is driven by a few factors. Our customers especially highlight our product quality, the effective solution advisory, our understanding of their business needs, and the breadth of our portfolio. This is our ambition, being the trusted advisor to our customers. Great to see the progress on customer experience. We have in Barical about chocolate solutions for any customer need, from cacao products to decorations and inclusions. Our ambition is clear, leading in chocolate, growing in cacao coatings, and launching non-cacao. I want to spend a bit more time on two of them, cacao coatings, previously named compounds, and non-cacao solutions, and we'll go a little bit more into these exciting news. are many reasons to accelerate our growth in cacao coatings or as we call them before compounds it is very high on any customer's innovation agenda right now and it makes financially sense Lower capital intensity than chocolate, you need less beans per ton of product. Higher returns than chocolate with attractive profitability. Higher growth than chocolate, driven by current cacao price dynamics and push into reformulations. You see this reflected in our numbers. Cacao coatings is outperforming chocolate in most regions. I want to call out Western Europe in particular, the largest chocolate region in the world, where we see promising growth in cacao coatings. While our global chocolate business overall has declined, cacao coatings have grown substantially in many regions, if I may add. More to come. We are continuing to invest in this exciting category, and this brings me to another exciting news to share. Earlier today, we have announced our commercial long-term partnership with Planet A Food, the German food tech innovator behind ShowViva. This partnership marks a key milestone in diversifying our portfolio, and capturing the exciting opportunities in chocolate alternatives without cacao. It is also exemplary in how we innovate, lead and grow by embracing technology to open further avenues for growth while enhancing our resilience to today's cacao market volatility. Let me be clear, these non-cacao innovations are not meant to replace traditional chocolate, but to complement them, expanding our portfolio to meet growing customer and consumer demands. Together with the team at Planet A Food and its motivating founders, Sarah and Max, we can scale the production of irresistible chocolate-like creations that broaden choice without compromising on taste, quality, and our commitment to the planet. So let me zoom out again. We are well underway with many strategic actions spanning our entire value chain to make Barikalebau less bean price dependent and drive growth. The goal is simple. De-leverage, decouple from bean price, enable growth. This is guiding our actions throughout the organization. We are increasing our financial agility, solutions that breeze with the bean price and consume less cash. We are reorienting the purpose of cacao with a clear focus on ROIC targets for the third-party sales. We're driving a step change in digitization and analytic capabilities. We have improvements in sourcing, as discussed previously, and conscious decisions on our product and geographic portfolio to drive growth. Many new products are requiring less working capital. We've improved our operations already significantly, reducing transport time, improved visibility on stock levels, better end-to-end collaboration across cacao and chocolate, all to capture incremental value across our value chain. Our ambition is clear, the leverage, decouple from the bean price and enable consistent profitable growth. So with that, we're moving to the outlook for the year ahead. While we've seen a stabilization in cacao bean prices, it is clear that we are still operating in a challenging environment. Our customers and the entire industry are still digesting cacao prices 2x above historic levels and the ongoing B2B efforts of that will remain pronounced, particularly in the first half of this fiscal. Our working assumption is for a bean price in and around 5,000 British pounds with continued volatility, albeit at lower levels than last year. While we've taken steps to enhance our resilience to temporary cacao bean price spikes, of course, if this were to happen, it would have an impact on our delivery of 2526. As you know, the largest impact of our cacao bean price is on cash and leverage, with a likely knock-on impact on volumes and profit, as our customers are likely delaying orders and adjusting their purchase behavior, as we saw last year, as well as further prioritization in global cacao. When it comes to guidance, our clear focus is to deleverage below 3.5 times and prepare for a return to growth. H1-2526 is expected to remain challenged as customers and consumers continue to manage higher prices while we aim for improvements in H2. On volume, global chocolate is expected to see mid-single-digit volume decrease. With a focus on ROIC and global cacao, this will result in mid- to high-single-digit volume decrease in global cacao. As a consequence, BC group volume is expected to see mid-single-digit decrease related to bean price developments impacting global cacao return prioritization. In particular, while we don't typically provide guidance by quarter, we wanted to be transparent and proactive, share what we expect as a significant volume decrease in Q1. The key reason relates to North America, where we temporarily paused our production site in St. Hyacinth in Canada due to a technical malfunction with one piece of our roasting equipment. The factory is a significant contributor to the overall North America production. It was closed for around three weeks. The site is back up running. And while we are doing everything possible to deliver our customer orders as soon as possible, this will have an impact on H1 performance for North America. We've agreed with the board to invest in a new facility in the United States, as well as taking significant upgrade investments in existing network. This decision earlier this year comes with a delay following more clarity on the tariff situation. On profit, we expect low- to mid-single-digit growth in EBIT recurring and double-digit growth in profit before tax recurring, both in local currencies. These are on a recurring base and exclude remaining BC Next Level one-time OPEX investments of around $60 million to be spent on digital and on growth initiatives. So to conclude with three clear focus areas for us this fiscal year. First, deleverage to less than three and a half times net debt to EBITDA in delivering strong cash generation. Second, prepare for return to growth with a clear focus on customer experience, competitiveness and unlocking new solutions for our customers. Leading in chocolate, growing in cacao coatings and launching non-cacao solutions. we will be served relentlessly addressing optimization opportunities for this new bean price and quality environment. So with that, we are building an even stronger leader and we are confident that Barry Kallebau can win in the new market reality. Thank you very much for listening. We will now move to the Q&A session and I will hand over to the moderator to start the Q&A. Thank you.

If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw from the queue, please press star two. Our first question is from Johan Effert from UBS. Please go ahead.

Good morning, all, and many thanks for taking my questions. Two as guided. The first, I would be pleased on your volume outlook being down mid-Singal-Ditches in fiscal year 2026. I mean, don't you expect that, as you also highlighted, the 5,000 UK pounds COX impact on the beans is worked through. We are maybe even entering a deflationary environment in chocolate going to 2026, so at least the incremented price may be quite limited. So why do we expect to underperform? The global chocolate market volume grows again in 2026. Is there anything on insourcing happening? Is there anything where you see ongoing SPU rationalizations on customers? Have you lost a customer? This would be the first question. And the second question on the cost savings. Can you please remind us what is the total aggregated net saving run rate we have seen now in fiscal year 25 in the EBITDA? And what are the incremental net saving benefits in fiscal year 26 and then also 27? Thank you.

Yeah, Jörn, good morning first from my side. Thank you very much for your questions. Let me just come back to your first question, which was on volume. Look, I think, as you know, we are a forward booking business. And as we've just shared, we obviously continue to... to look very closely at what customers are doing. We believe, as per our information, that our customers have about priced through 30% of the price point that we see today. However, there are still discussions and we see still discussions happening between our customers and the retailers. or their end customers as they bring the products into the market. So that is one of the elements why we're cautiously positive on it, but we have to recognize that we're coming from a low run rate there. The second thing that we have informed you about is the incidents that we had in the Centre High facility in Canada that obviously had an impact and that we are having behind us, but that obviously will impact the first half year outlook on the business. The second question that you've asked on next level synergies, let me tell you that we've had in the end of the fiscal year 25 about 60% in the numbers and about 70% hardwired for synergies going forward. So progress in line with what we had set out on the agenda there. But as we've explained to you earlier, we have other cost elements that we have to address, and there's a whole array of task forces underway to deal with the new bean price and bean quality environment as we speak.

Thank you. Our next question is from John Cox at Kepler Chevro. Please go ahead.

Yeah, good morning, guys. Thanks very much for the call. Very insightful. A couple of questions for you. One, a point of clarity. I am trying to ask another two on top. This St. Hyatt in Quebec facility closure, that is your biggest facility in North America. Am I right in thinking it's like three, four hundred thousand tons capacity? You said it's just closed for a few weeks and you lost some customers. Can you just elaborate a little bit on that? I'm just trying to pass out. what the impact of this thing will be on the guidance for the year. Second question, just to come back on the cost savings, your EBIT level recurring is the same as it was last year. And I know there's a load of different things going on, but we're not even 10% above we were in terms of a recurring EBIT from when you actually started this program. I'm just trying to get a handle on how much is gone in FX. I'm guessing half of it is gone. So that 187 net EBIT gain we should have expected over three years now to four years is probably half of that amount. And as part of that, what should we see? Because we can see EBIT per ton is improving. Is it just a matter of seeing that volume growth, even when it does improve, we're going to see a big step up in EBIT growth because you were saying that eventually it will be shown in the bottom line, but we're just not seeing it at all. So that's the sort of broader cost savings and final impact. And then just lastly, on the financials line, we had a minus 370 there. You're talking about 700 of debt falling due. which is, you know, maybe 20% of the debt, which you've sort of used as part of this, you know, problems with the balance sheet. Why can't we expect that financials line, the net financials to come down by 20% per year over the next couple of years? It just, you know, it's sort of like, it's a big balloon on that net financials and probably going to contribute to pretty, pretty high EPS cuts on FY26 because It just doesn't seem to be moving down much, even though your efforts on deleveraging are far better than expected in H2. Thank you.

Thank you, John. Good morning also to you. Thanks for the questions. Let me take the first one. So the Shanghai impact, you know, has been a impact that was driven by an equipment that shut down one of our roasting facilities. You're right. It's one of the big factories, especially also for the cacao that goes into North America. So there's a triple effect that we actually see from that. You know, for me, the important aspect is that, you know, we have concluded with the board to invest significantly in the North American network. to bring it to the same performance level that we expect to have in reliability. And, you know, combined with the work on BCOS, you know, we were confident that we actually will make the improvements needed for that facility. This incident has been with us for about three weeks. It's a proactive activity that we have done. And, you know, obviously, there's a trickle-on effect for North American customers. Look, we want volume back from any of those incidences that we had, from the decision we took in Toluca last year, the same situation here. It's extremely painful, but as I said in my introduction, we have a clear obligation to our customers when it comes to quality, performance, reliability, and that's the rigor that we're putting into Barrichalabao's new product supply infrastructure to really go forward. So it's a lot of work that actually is impacted there and that we're doing. I'm thrilled to see that we have approval from the board to build a new facility in the United States, as well as to upgrade significantly the network across North America as we speak.

Yes, and I'll take your next two questions, John. First of all, you're talking about EBIT and the savings. I wasn't really sure you were talking about backward or forward, but let me give the overall picture. EBIT has gone up indeed by 6% over the last year. We talked about the moving parts just now in the presentation. There's a positive about the mix for sure. There's positive about passing on those financing costs throughout the year. There's positive about next level savings rolling in, as Peter was talking about. But there is important offsets as well which are linked to the disruption that we see in the market some of them being temporary because we need to price much faster much more frequently pricing teams in place to do that some of them also a bit more structural which is really about part of the backwardation costs that we're carrying that were very high carry costs that are higher some investment in in capabilities like like digital insurance costs there's a lot of offsetting costs as well that have been uh not making it see as much as uh as as you would have seen that we would have seen in the ebit otherwise um you asked about forex we had uh we had a 45 million forex impact if you then look at uh reported right we had a 45 million impact indeed uh last year uh canceled out with uh with the forex and the strengthening of the fish ranks We do expect another 15 on that next year, especially driven by the Turkish lira and the US dollar. So also next year we'll have smaller, but also, as it looks now, a 15 million impact on the forex. So that's what played on that line. And then your last question was about financing costs and the pass-on. And especially the level, I think you asked. Yeah, we landed the year at 377 million finance costs, which is obviously a big increase versus last year, an increase of about 170 million. Very much linked, obviously, to the bean price that spiked and the fact that we then, of course, had to finance this. about the value of the inventories, as I explained in the presentation. So we did the two bond issuances in early this calendar year, which obviously played a big role. That's the step up that we are seeing. Next year, we will have lower levels. Actually, H2 has been lower than H1 last year already, despite this funding of the... the two instruments in the beginning of the year, because we already were working on some of those levers that we've explained in the presentation. And I think that's the positive news, right? That we are building on the operational sourcing and financial agility to bring back our working capital, which allows us to bring back our financing costs. So for next year, we do expect to be at least 40 million lower than where we've been reporting finance costs this year. We stay in a very volatile period. We have the peak harvest coming up, so we need to be a bit prudent. The good news is that we're making this good progress on working capital. The other good news is that we have maturities of 700 million every single year for the next year, so it allows us to pay back debts that we don't think we need to hold. We are doing that already. We are reducing commercial paper. We paid back some bilaterals. So we're certainly going to push on that lever as much as, again, the bean price environment and the working capital progress is allowing us.

Thank you. Our next question is from Alex Sloan at Barclays. Please go ahead.

Yeah, hi, morning, all. Thanks for taking the questions. Just in terms of the volume outlook, I appreciate you haven't quantified the impact of this incident, but in terms of the phasing of that mid-single-digit decline through the year, would you expect to be in positive growth in the second half? And then secondly, if I can just come back just in terms of there's a lot of moving parts on the next level. But in terms of the 187 million kind of net impact that you were targeting to the bottom line, could you maybe spell out sort of how much of that you actually think was the net impact? you know, will have landed and be visible in fiscal 26 and how much of it will have landed and be visible in fiscal 27 at this point, just in terms of sort of how much more is to come, because I'm a little bit confused on the moving parts there. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Alex, for your question. Good morning also to you. Let me just start on volume with a different focus. I think we need to be very clear that we're driving volume growth in the chocolatey solutions, which is chocolate, is our global chocolate, and we're focusing on that. As we've said in the outlook, we will have a tough quarter one start and we are seeing H1 to be down. We hope to recover that quite a bit in H2. um and and that's i think the key message uh that lands us into the outlook that we have given to you uh on global chocolate mid single digit decrease for the fiscal year when you look at cacao then we have guided you that we're focusing the cacao on the core kpi to be roik And for us, that is very important to understand, specifically when it comes to liquor and to butter sales to third party. That obviously correlates with leverage and our objective to decrease our leverage. And that needs to be the number one priority. So we're focusing global cacao third party on ROIC. which will then result at current bean prices of 5000, as we have assumed, to a decrease of mid to single high digit. As I've explained earlier, when we see the bean price change and, you know, just looking back one year, you will remember that from the first of November 24 to the end of November 24, we literally had seen a doubling in bean price just in 30 days. That obviously has a big implication, and that's why we're giving the guidance in a distinct difference between chocolate, where we will clearly focus on regaining market share and volume, and on the other side, on global cacao, where we'll focus on ROIC in order to manage our deleveraged objectives.

Yes, and Alex, on your question on the next level savings and then the total EBIT, again, and I'll try to be a bit more specific, the individual projects that we're delivering on next level, as Peter also mentioned, they are delivering, and we do get those savings on, let's say, GBS. We moved all these people in shared service centers, so there's certainly labor arbitrage element, which is straight into the pocket. There's factory closures that obviously also help So, it's undoubtable that these savings are landing in the P&L as such. But at the same time, we do have significant costs about disruption. The bean quality has worsened, which means that leads to higher costs in our factories. We need to manage higher volatility over the last year. That led to our impact on our cost, which means that net, you didn't see the effect. If we look forward specifically, we will do two things, right? We will continue to deliver and some of it will now roll of those savings of the individual projects into the fiscal year. At the same time, we will be focused on building down some of those temporary disruption costs that I've been talking about. All of magnitude, I think you can talk about 100 million that would be contributing to the P&L next year. But again, it's a combination of delivering the project as such and managing the cost of disruption down in parallel.

Thank you. Our next question is from Edward Hocken at JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Morning. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I've got two, please. One quick one is embedded within your volumes guidance for the coming fiscal year. Can you tell us what assumption you're making on the end market volumes versus that minus 3.5% that the market declined by in FY25, what you expect for 26%? And my second question, please, is on the free cash flow building blocks. I'm looking at slide eight in the presentation. Can you maybe talk about FY2026, how some of these moving parts should evolve for the operational free cash flow? Should we think of this 1.1, 1.2 billion as a new steady state level? To what degree should the bean price free cash flow turn positive? And just remind us of CapEx plans, what kind of level we should be expecting for FY26. Thank you.

Thank you, Edward, for your question and good morning to you again. On the volume guidance, you know, and specifically when we look at the end consumer market, we continue to be very positive that chocolate will remain the number one ingredient in any food product globally. It's the key driver for Our business, and as I always say to our employees, we have a great luxury to operate in this business that creates a little happy moment for consumers around the world whenever the sun shines or it's raining. And I think for me, that is the paramount important element here. We have two and a half billion consumers entering the market in Asia that now have the opportunity to invest in this category. So great trajectory looking forward. It's a great category. And I'm convinced that we will see stabilization as consumers will also adjust to the higher price points. What we've shared earlier in the presentation is that our customers have, in the latest Nielsen report, seen in FMCG, so in what Nielsen really tracks, not gourmet because that is less covered, actually hardly covered by Nielsen. We see on the FMCG side that 30% of consumer price has gone up, driven by the chocolate industry. We had guided for that a while ago. that that is roughly by category a little bit different because you always have more or less chocolate on the product. But that's sort of what we've seen. So we believe that consumer prices have been taken at this point in time to the current bean price level of about 5,000 pounds or less. So that's the part there. So we keep on being... hopeful that the category and convinced that the category going forward will be a great category to invest in however as our customers are bringing that price further into the market and especially on the gourmet side where we operate around the world with many distributors who then actually serve the end customers the smaller bakeries the patisserie shops That obviously is a longer cycle that our customers have to work through. And that is why we believe there's a disconnect still that needs to happen. As in that specific industry, the prices probably have not yet gone completely through. So this is why we are thinking that the guidance that we've given to you is an appropriate guidance on the chocolate business. Because we think that, you know, we believe on the long term very clearly that there's a fantastic category to invest and operate in. And on the other side, we still believe that there's some digestion that needs to happen as the entire industry moves to a 2x price points on its key ingredient, the cocoa bean.

And on the second question on the cash flow page in the presentation and looking forward, we are looking at, and obviously that is needed, because we're deleveraging towards three and a half times at least, we're looking at a strong positive free cash next year of about one billion in our planning, which is based again on that assumption that we made about 5,000 bean price. Of course, it fluctuates as you... we all know very well by now, fluctuates a lot around that. Thanks to continuing to work on those big pillars that help us to make the big step in half year two, you know, the operational agility, the sourcing agility, the financial agility that helps to bring it down. So specifically to your questions on those components, we will have If you're looking at the page, you know the yellow part, the investment capex and next level capex will have a number next year which is similar as what you've seen in fiscal 24-25 with about 300 million capex and 60 million one-off investments that we plan to do in next level. And then the rest will mainly be operational free cash flow progress, which is the green part on the slide. There's a little bit still rollover of bean price benefits because we're, you know, if the bean prices come down and the fact that we're forward selling, there's a bit of the benefit that we still need to come. But that's really the small part of what's remaining. The big part to get to the one billion will be operational free cash flow further improvements.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Tom Sykes at Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Yeah, morning. Thank you. Just trying to nail down the bridge on getting to EBIT growth. Are you expecting the gross profit to be up on volumes being down mid-single-digit? Then on the volume outlook, are you expecting volumes? What are you expecting to happen to volumes excluding North America, please? And then finally on, just to understand this sort of customer behavior, where do you think inventories are for your largest customers vis-a-vis their kind of run rate of demand? Because I guess part of the The bull case is that there's potentially a restocking as some of those volumes come back, or at least as some demand comes back. But it's difficult to understand where quite the sort of industries or your customers' inventories are relative to the run rate of demand. So if you had any thoughts on that, that'd be great, please.

Do you want to take the EBIT one?

Yeah. Your question on EBIT, I think, was specifically on the gross margin and the moving parts on EBIT for next year. Obviously, the biggest impact on EBIT next year will be the impact of the volume, right? The mid-single-digit negative volume is impacting, obviously, on the gross margin line. While there will be a mixed positive level, because we will have... as this year, right, overproportionately growing in those area specialties, Goumet, that deliver the better margins. There will be a plus on next level savings, which is somewhat above, somewhat below gross margin, and offsetting some of those structural costs, disruption costs that I've talked about, reducing those. So those are the four big moving parts. There is one Other part, which is the pass-on of the financing costs, which also has a play on EBIT. If we have less financing costs to pass on, that might have a mechanical effect on EBIT, which is why we're guiding also on net profit before tax. But really, those are the three, four components that drive the EBIT for next year.

Yeah, Tom, and to your other two questions on volume, let me start there. So obviously, you know, we are impacted in North America quite a bit because of the size of St. Hyacinth, as we discussed before. We do see Europe a bit more stable in that situation compared to North America, very clearly, as our OTIFs for the factories have improved significantly across all of Europe. We are also in significant reformulation activity as I mapped out to go from, you know, certain chocolate solutions into the cacao coating side of things. And actually we're leading with innovation on that, which we're thrilled by our customers actually coming to Barikal about to ask for those innovations to really make a step change. So that's the positive things that we're seeing on Europe. EMEA excluding China. I want to leave China aside for a second. And Latam, we're a bit more positive, clearly striving to deliver positive growth on these environments. And China itself, as we've said many times, chocolate hardly exists. It's a long-term growth opportunity for the industry and for Barik Halabaut, and that's what we're trying to unlock. Probably not having a huge impact in this fiscal year on China, but we believe that there's a great opportunity going forward. in that aspect. On inventory, let me just share that one of our next level activities is also to have a better understanding of our inventory levels at our top customers, especially on the Gourmet side. You can imagine that we have good discussions with our larger accounts, where we will soon talk about the G20, more than the GCAs, as historically we've done, that make up about 65% of the volume of Barical about globally. On that volume, we have good discussions for our customers to understand where they are. They've clearly shortened the inventory cycle significantly as the bean prices spiked last year and going into 25, calendar year 25, and they retained that low level. So now the good thing is we see a bit more positive momentum since three months ago, the bean price actually came down a bit. So we have a bit of a catch up in that and we're excited about it, obviously. And as Peter has shared in his presentation, the forward curve, is obviously very attractive to actually book today, right? So that's the aspect there. On the gourmet side, our new next level capabilities is bringing our top customers in gourmet, the top distributors in gourmet, to actually allow us to see their inventory levels. We're building that database up. The software has been established. We're now in deep discussions with our customers to have far better visibility on that, and that will give us a far better understanding of the flow through of products as we have that long supply chain from the beans all the way to the end consumer.

Thank you. At this time, the Q&A session has now concluded, so I will hand the call back to Peter Feld for closing remarks.

Well, thank you very much for attending our annual results conference today. We're very much looking forward to the individual discussions that we will have with many of you later on. Thank you very much for attending and I'm handing back to the operator.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference. You may now disconnect from the call.