Barry Callebaut AG

Hello and welcome everyone to the Barry Callebaut Group 9 Month Key Sales Figures Fiscal Year 2025-26. My name is Becky and I will be your operator today. All lines will be muted throughout the presentation portion of the call, with a chance for Q&A at the end. If you wish to ask a question in this time, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypads. I will now hand over to your host, Sophie Lang, Head of Investor Relations, to begin. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Barry Callebaut's nine-month key sales figure at Brompton School for 2025-2026. I'm Sophie Lang, Head of Investor Relations, and today's meeting will be hosted by our CEO in Financing Marketing and our CSO, Peter Vanneste. As usual, at the end of our presentation, we'll have a short Q&A session for analysts and investors. Before we start, please take note of the disclaimer on slide 2. I'd also like to remind you that the webcast and conference call are being recorded. And with that, I will hand you over to our CEO, Andrew Marcus.

Thanks, Sophie, and good morning, everyone. And thank you, of course, for joining us for our 9-month training update. I will start with some key messages, followed by an update on our focus for growth action plan and strategic priorities. And then Peter will take you through our self-performance in more detail, and I would like to come back at the end of the presentation. Let me start with a brief overview of the key messages. While peak sales volumes decreased for the nine months, the group has returned to positive volume growth in the third quarter for the first time in more than two years. This was supported by elevated demand in our global cocoa business following the sharp correction in cocoa product prices earlier in the year, alongside no base of comparison. Our global chocolate business and early progress in restoring service levels in North America. And while we are encouraged by our return to growth, the chocolate market remains challenging overall, as Peter will elaborate on later in the presentation. And our improvement at Barrie Callebaut will be gradual. We still have a lot of work ahead of us. And that is why we have launched our Focus for Growth Action Plan last month, to strengthen our fundamentals, and I will come back to this in a moment. Taking all of this into account, we now expect full-year volumes to decrease by around minus 1% while maintaining our profitability and our leverage guidance. And before going into the details of the 9-months performance, let me start with a reminder of our Focus for Growth action plan, and first reiterating our ambition. At Barraclava, we are already the global leader in cocoa and chocolate, with a uniquely integrated business model and leading capabilities in R&D and sustainability. and our mission is to build a strong foundation through two clear, deliberate shifts. First, we are evolving towards a more solutions-oriented business, scaling targeted specialties in attractive, faster-growing segments where we can differentiate and create more value for our customers. Second, we are focused on protecting and strengthening our whole volume base while shifting more decisively towards premium segments and accelerating the growth and all of our important gourmet business. Delivering this ambition will be underpinned by a strong customer-centric culture, the right talent and increased empowerment of our regional teams. Now let's turn to the action plan itself. We are accelerating five key enablers that are critical to restore our fundamentals and stepping up execution across the business. The enablers span the entire value chain and are all anchored in a clear customer-centric approach and supported by digital capabilities. and in parallel we are prioritizing five selected growth priorities where we see the greatest potential for value creation. Global cows, regional food manufacturers, gourmet, specialties and cocoa powder. And this disciplined approach ensures that we allocate our resources where they have the highest impact, ultimately driving attractive financial performance and results for our shareholders. But we have significant work ahead of us to fully restore our fundamentals. I'm happy that we are starting to see early signs of progress in a number of key areas. In footprint and quality, we are implementing selective network enhancements. And importantly, we have recorded zero critical quality incidents or product recalls year-to-date. In planning, we are strengthening our sales and operations planning processes with new demand planning tools and with new planning forums that focus on gourmet and specialties. Our early steps are starting to translate into improvements In our core customer processes, simplification efforts are on the way, reflected in a meaningful improvement in customer response times of close to 20% year-to-date. And while these are encouragingly early trends, I want to be very clear, this is really just the beginning. Restoring our fundamentals will require sustained execution, and continued discipline for the months and years to come. Now turning to our five growth priorities, where we are taking action to drive commercial progress. First, on global accounts. We have formed a dedicated team reporting directly to you, and the objective is to unlock the full potential of our largest global customers, with clear growth plans for each account as we move into our new fiscal year. Second, for our regional food manufacturers. We now have a much clearer view of the growth opportunities by region. And this was helping us to prioritize our commercial focus and ensure that planned investments are directly linked to the markets where we see the highest potential. Third, in gourmet, we continue to double down and invest. We are preparing for the launch of new innovation. by a strong commercial campaign, but also securing safety stocks for key STUs, a key core STU list actually, to support future growth. And then fourth in specialties, we are addressing capacity in selected focus sites and working to integrate these offerings more deeply into our core business and commercial processes. And finally, in cocoa powder, we are taking action to unlock premium powder capacity and accelerate sales efforts in higher value segments. So across all these five priorities, while still early steps, we are moving from strategy into execution. And the common denominator across the five is focus. Focused market segments and regional food manufacturers. Focused core set of SPUs reducing complexity in gourmet. Focused in specialties with focus of around four to five core specialties by region. And focusing cocoa powder on premiumization. Since the launch of Focus4Growth last month, we've also taken two concrete steps to move closer to our customer and strengthen execution in our regions. First, we are refining our global chocolate regional setup with the Middle East and North Africa and South East and West Africa clusters transitioning to the CEE or Central and Eastern European region. Historically, these clusters were part of ALEA. and commercial go-to-market approach. And this will allow us to be more responsive to local market dynamics and better serve our customers in these clusters. And as a result, from the 1st of September 2026, our area region will be renamed AZ Civic or APAC and the current CE region will become Cilia. Second, we are evolving selected functional capabilities and teams to be closer to regional business execution. To select the teams within functions such as customer supply and development, finance and HR that are closely linked to regional execution will start to report directly into the regions, while obviously continuing to be anchored in strong global functional expertise and alignment where that really matters. This is about empowering our regions to act faster and with greater accountability. We're also shifting towards a more horizontal way of working and bringing teams together across regions and functions to drive impact. Now, let me hand over to Peter to talk more about the NIDILS performance.