Kerry Group plc

Good morning and thank you for standing by.

Thank you, operator. Good morning and welcome to Kerry's full year 2025 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 open up the lines 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. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. Beginning with the overview of 2025 on slide four and starting with performance. We're pleased to report that we delivered another year of strong end market volume outperformance, margin expansion, and earnings per share growth. While overall market volumes remained relatively subdued through the year, we continue to demonstrate our ability to consistently outperform our end markets with volume growth of 3%, highlighting the strength and relevance of our business. This growth was driven by a strong performance in the Americas throughout the year, led by food service innovation and increased nutritional renovation across a broad range of customers. Given our positioning as a leader in sustainable nutrition, with customers looking to address nutrition, taste, cost, or sustainability aspects. We also delivered strong margin expansion of 80 basis points, with EBITDA margins just under 18%. and we're well on track to achieve our margin targets, which we will give you more color on later. Moving to earnings, we delivered constant currency EPS growth of 7.5% in 2025, which is stated after the dilution from the Dairy Ireland disposal in the prior year. This was on top of the 9.7% growth we delivered in 2024, and we're looking to achieve another year of high single digit EPS growth in 2026. Earnings compounding has always been an important part of Kerry's story, and we reaffirmed this with our high single digit plus EPS growth target out to 2028, when we refreshed our margin and EPS targets last year. From a strategic perspective, we continue to evolve our business through targeted capital investments and portfolio development activity, enhancing our technology capabilities, supporting new innovations, and delivering even more value for our customers. Just to touch on some of the key developments in the year. Firstly, on technology capabilities. These included the opening of our new state-of-the-art biotechnology center in Leipzig in Germany, and a number of other technology developments, which I'll outline later when we look at each of the regions. On innovations, key innovations in the year included our next generation of fermentation-derived TaySense sweet and salt reduction technology ranges, the launch of our new Plenibiotic postbiotic for digestive and skin health, a breakthrough enzyme system which delivers significantly more effective natural sweetness, new fermentation-based solutions under our Kerry Experience portfolio, and new natural cocoa replacement systems which replicate authentic cocoa taste using less than half the cocoa raw materials. And on footprint and customer access, we extended our apnea manufacturing presence into Egypt and within East Africa while expanding our capacity in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. And we strengthened our customer innovation network through new centers in Frankfurt, Indonesia, and Dubai. So to summarize, 2025 was another year of strong market outperformance combined with continued strategic development. Moving next to the business performance overview, we achieved group revenue of 6.8 billion and EBITDA of 1.2 billion. Volume growth was 3% for the full year and 2.8% in Q4, well ahead of food and beverage end markets. driven by good innovation activity and continued product renovation activity with our customers. Pricing was pretty flat in the year, with input costs turning deflationary in Q4. EBITDA margins were up 80 basis points, driven by accelerated efficiencies, portfolio developments, operating leverage, and mix. Across our technologies, we had good growth across savory taste, taste, scent, salt, and sugar reduction technologies, botanicals, natural extracts, proactive health ingredients, taste solutions for high protein applications, enzymes, and biofermented ingredients. From a channel perspective, food service achieved volume growth of 4.6%, supported by strong innovation activity, including new menu items and seasonal launches. Growth in the retail channel was supported by a step up in retailer brand innovation, and renovation activity to enhance the nutritional profile across a range of customers. And finally, growth in emerging markets of 5.3% was led by a strong performance in Southeast Asia and LATAM.