Coca-Cola HBC AG

Thank you for standing by, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Coca-Cola's HBC's conference call for 2024 full year results. We have with us Zoran Bogdanovic, Chief Executive Officer, Anastasios Stamolis, Chief Financial Officer, and Jemima Benstead, Head of Investor Relations. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone keypad at any time and wait until your name is announced. I must also advise that this conference has been recorded today, Thursday, February 13th, 2025. I will now pass the floor to one of our speakers. Jemima, please go ahead. Thank you.

Good morning and thank you all for joining the call. In a moment, Zoran will share his highlights of 2024. Anastasis will then take you through our financial performance in more detail and discuss the outlook for 2025 before handing back to Zoran, who will discuss our growth opportunities for the business. We will then open up the floor to questions. We have about an hour for the call today, which should give plenty of time for a good discussion. Please keep to one question and one follow-up, waiting for us to answer the first question before moving to your follow-up. Finally, I must remind you that this conference call contains various forward-looking statements. These should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary statements in our results press release this morning and at the end of our slide deck. And with that, I will turn the call over to Zoran.

Thank you, Jemima. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining the call. 2024 was yet another strong year for Coca-Cola HBC. I feel very proud. of all we've achieved and privileged to be able to share the progress made by our 33,000 colleagues. We delivered an excellent financial and operational performance while managing tough macroeconomic challenges. In all cases, we've consistently adapted to the environment, leveraging our portfolio and capabilities, particularly revenue growth management, route to market, and data insights and analytics. I really want to commend our people's focus behind execution excellence because the speed and agility with which they are executing our strategy in every single outlet is fantastic. They are raising the bar every year. Taken together, this enabled us to deliver ahead of our plans in 2024. We continue to invest in our teams, our capabilities, our 24-7 portfolio, and our operations. to ensure we are ready to unlock the huge future growth potential we see. Let me call out some highlights. Firstly, our top-line growth was strong and high quality, underpinned by continued volume momentum. Secondly, we are delivering real value to our customers. We were once again the number one contributor to retail customers' absolute revenue growth within FMCG in Europe. and we are continuing to gain value share with an additional 150 basis points gained in NIRTD in 2024 and continued share gains in SparkLink. And thirdly, this progress was all possible because we are focusing on the most promising opportunities in our market, led by our strategic priority categories. As well as delivering results today, we are investing for future growth. Firstly, strengthening our portfolio. We continue to prioritize sparkling energy and coffee, which offer the most sizable growth potential across our 24-7 portfolio. We are also ensuring we have the right locally relevant portfolio in stills, and we are taking hold of the opportunities in our 24-7 portfolio through investments in premium spirits, which enhance our mixability credentials and drive incremental transactions. Secondly, we are investing in our BISPO capabilities, with a particular focus on embedding our data, insights, and analytics capability into other capabilities and key business processes. And thirdly, we continue to invest in sustainability, focusing in our most material areas, packaging, climate, and water. Focused execution of our strategy has continued to drive strong financial performance. Revenue grew by 13.8% on an organic basis, with volume up 2.8%, and volume expansion in all three segments. Comparable EBIT was 1.2 billion euros, the highest ever for our company, and up 12.2% year-on-year on an organic basis. Our comparable EBIT margin reached 11.1%, a strong improvement from the 10.6% of 2023. Comparable EPS grew by 9.5% year-on-year. Return on invested capital is an important metric for us at CCH as a measure that we are driving strong returns from the investments we are making. I'm really proud to say that we have driven 190 basis point improvement in 2024, reaching 18.3%. Before I hand over to Anastasis to take you through our financial performance in more detail, let me touch briefly on the drivers of our strong top-line growth from both the category and market perspective. Starting with categories, sparkling and energy combined represent nearly 80% of our total revenue. Coffee is earlier in its journey, but is a sizable and important market with a huge potential. and I'm pleased to report that in 2024, these three priority categories continue to perform well. Moving on to our markets, we benefit from a diverse country portfolio with strong growth potential. In 2024, our execution excellence in a range of macroeconomic and consumer conditions allowed us to drive good financial progress across all three segments. I'm particularly pleased to see ongoing top-line expansion in the established segments despite the more sensitive consumer environment that we called out earlier in the year. Meanwhile, the developing segment achieved a strong rebound in profitability. And while the emerging segment faced specific macroeconomic challenges in two large markets, we navigated them well, taking pricing, adopting promotions, and adjusting packaging. Combined, these steps helped lead to robust financial performance in this segment, too. Let me now hand over to Anastasis, who will talk more about our 2024 financial performance before I return to share more on our medium-term growth drivers and opportunities. Thank you, Zoran, and good morning, everyone.