Kerry Group plc

Good morning and welcome to Kerry's full year 2024 results call. I'm joined on the call by our CEO Edmund Scanlon and our CFO Marguerite Larkin. Edmund and Marguerite will take you through today's presentation and following this we will then open the lines up for your questions. Before we begin please take note of our disclaimer regarding forward-looking statements. I will now hand over to Edmund.

Thanks William and good morning everyone and thank you for joining our call.

Beginning with the overview of 2024, which represented a milestone year for Kerry with our transition to a pure play B2B taste and nutrition company, better position for growth and long-term value creation. We're pleased to report a strong financial performance right across our metrics. Volume growth of 3.4% in taste and nutrition for the year and 4.1% in Q4 both well ahead of our end markets. And this growth was led by increased nutritional renovation activity with many customers, continued strong performance in the Americas, and very good growth in our food service business. We delivered strong EBITDA margin expansion of 120 basis points at group level and 110 basis points in taste and nutrition, leading to constant currency EPS growth of 9.7% for the year. We made good progress on returns and also generated strong cash flow of 766 million. We also delivered significant returns to shareholders in 2024 while continuing to reinvest in our business. On reinvestment, we further developed our capacity across all three regions while stepping up our expenditure on science, technology, and innovation, which continues to be a key enabler of growth. Capital returns in the year were over $750 million as we continued our share repurchase activity and grew our dividend at a double-digit rate. We maintain a proactive, flexible approach as regards capital allocation with a clear priority of delivering the best return for our shareholders. Moving to our sustainability commitments, we made good progress, including increasing our nutritional reach to 1.4 billion consumers and reducing our scope one and two emissions by 50% versus the base year. From a strategic perspective, it was an important year of development. Firstly, we further enhanced and developed our biotechnology solutions portfolio, including the acquisition of the lactase enzymes business of Nova Nisus, along with continued investment behind our selected biotechnology hub. And we gave a deep dive in our biotechnology solutions capability as part of our strategic update at our investor day back in October. And as I mentioned, the sale of the Kerry Dairy Ireland represented the culminating step in Kerry's transformation to becoming a dedicated taste nutrition company within the value-add specialty ingredients market. So a very pleasing year as regards business performance and strategic development.