Coca-Cola Europacific Partners plc

Hello and thank you for standing by and welcome to today's Coca-Cola Europe Pacific partners half year 2025 results conference call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's remarks there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session you will need to press star 1 and 1 on your telephone. I must advise you that this conference call is being recorded today. I would now like to hand the conference over to Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Strategy, Sarah Willett. Please go ahead, Sarah.

Thank you all for joining us today. I'm here with Damien Gamble, our CEO and our CFO at Walker. Before I hand over to Damien, a reminder of our cautionary statements. This call contains forward-looking management comments and other statements reflecting our outlook. These comments should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary language contained in today's release as well as the detailed cautionary statements found in reports filed with the UK, US, Dutch and Spanish authorities. Copy of this information is available on our website at www.cococolaep.com. Prepared remarks will be made by Damien. We will then turn the call over to your questions. Unless otherwise stated, metrics presented today will be on a comparable Netflix neutral basis throughout. This will also be presented on an adjusted comparable basis, thus reflecting the results of CCP and our Australia Pacific and Southeast Asia business unit, APS, as if the Coca-Cola Philippines transaction had occurred at the beginning of last year, rather than in February when the acquisition completed. Following the call, a full transcript will be made available as soon as possible on our website. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Damian.

Thank you, Sarah, and many thanks to everyone for joining us today. I'm really pleased that we continue to execute on our growth strategy. And I'd like to start today by thanking all of my great colleagues for their energy, hard work, and continued dedication to our customers and to our business. As always, this is supported by our strong, aligned relationships with the Coca-Cola Company, Monster, and our other brand partners. In short, our value creation is clearly evidenced by our impressive TSR of around 235% since 2016. We continue to deliver solid top and bottom line growth Our cash returns are accelerating, having now completed around €460 million of share buybacks this year, alongside paying a dividend in line with our annualised payout policy of around 50%, both within our disciplined capital allocation framework. Beyond today's results, we will also circle back to a few of the areas we covered in detail at our recent investor event in Manila to provide an update on progress made since then with a little bit more detail on what is coming around the corner. At that investor event, we talked in detail about our resilient categories, so a brief reminder of one of the key slides we shared. Simply put, we are in the right categories, including ARTD and hot coffee, that are structurally growing, are profitable, and diverse. We've got relevant share in our core NA-ARTD category, which grew by more than 5% in the last 12 months. We have a matchable scale and localness in our supply chain and in our frontline sales force, and we're investing more than ever before in our key capabilities, while accelerating productivity through technology and digital. We are well positioned from both a portfolio and a geographical perspective, with a material presence now across our 31 markets. In short, the fundamentals of our business remain strong, and we operate in a resilient and innovative consumer categories which are healthy and growing. I'd now like to turn to our performance. We're pleased to have delivered a solid first half. We continue to grow share ahead of the market and create value for our customers. Given our year-to-date performance, strong commercial plans for the balance of the year, full year 25 pricing in place, continued focus on productivity, and a good start to the second half, we are pleased to be reaffirming our full-year profit and cash guidance. We have updated by providing a range on full-year revenue growth of 3% to 4% rather than approximately 4%. This is driven by a slower than expected trajectory in Indonesia, which in Q2 alone impacted group volumes by around 1%. But of course, we will update as the year progresses. Our first half interim dividend and ongoing share buybacks demonstrate the strength of our business and their ability to deliver continued shareholder value. So we are winning today, but we're also focused on creating tomorrow. Strong cash generation is supporting record investment and future growth with multi-year plans in place. And we are really starting to lock more value from tech and AI where we have been investing for many years. So we're confident with the right strategy, all done sustainably to deliver on our mid-term growth objectives. I'd now like to turn to some key performance highlights. Our solid top-line performance reflects underlying volume growth, best-in-class execution, and solid gains in revenue per unit case. This was driven by sustainable revenue and margin growth management, including our continued focus on price and promotional strategies. In Europe, Easter timing and better weather supported return to volume growth in Q2 crucially with a better performance in our away-from-home business. Total first half volumes were, however, impacted by a weaker consumer backdrop in Indonesia, though we continue to remain excited about the long-term opportunity and continue to focus on our transformation journey. We will touch on that a bit more later. Our other APS markets performed really well, including the Philippines, despite cycling strong comparables of nearly 20% last year. We grew our overall value share by 10 basis points year to date in a category which grew in volume and value both in Europe and APS. The market remains as competitive as ever. As we said before, we continue to take a multi-year view on our promotional and pricing strategies. We remain focused on driving profitable revenue growth and creating value for the category whilst recognizing that remaining affordable and relevant is important for our consumers. Our strong top-line performance, together with the delivery of our efficiency programs, drove solid operating profit growth of 7.2%, with operating margin expansion both in Europe and in APS. We generated solid, comparable free cash flow after investing in capacity, more coolers, technology, and digital. And we delivered cash returns to shareholders of over €800 million. Ed will go into more detail on our financials shortly. As ever, our business performance reflects our great people, great brands, great execution, all done sustainably. A few brief highlights on our first half, starting with people. We continue to build the capabilities of our teams. For example, our partnership with the London Business School has upskilled over 500 of our top leaders and has now been extended to another 3,500 colleagues. We continue to be recognized internally and externally. In 2025, the Top Employers Institute recognized CCEP across all of our major markets. And we're really excited to welcome around 60 new colleagues into our new integrated shared service center in Manila, which Ed will also touch on a bit later. On to our brands. We're extremely privileged to make, move, and sell the world's most loved brands, in which we continue to invest, and drive appeal to even more consumers. Category highlights are included in today's release. The return of the global iconic share of Coke campaign was well executed and well received by customers and consumers. And the launch of This Is My Taste campaign for Diet Coke is gaining traction by providing a fresh look and identity. Overall, it is fantastic that in Europe, for example, Coca-Cola trademark remains the biggest FMCG brand. Monster had a phenomenal first half, with volumes up nearly 15%, fueled by great innovation. This is especially the case with Ultra and Zero variants, where volumes were up over 20%, alongside ongoing distribution gains. We grew retail value share and energy by around 140 basis points during the period. In flavors, as we highlighted at our investor event, we are increasingly focusing on winning with flavor extensions and zeros across Fanta, including Raspberry and Apple, and of course, in Sprite. Excluding Indonesia, these brands are a bigger part of the mix. Fanta's zero volumes grew by around 7%, and Sprite's zero by around 13%. The transition from Neste to Fuse Niberia is ahead of plan, and we continue to expand in the exciting ARTD category, with total volumes up around 9%. supported by new flavor variants for Absolute and Sprite, alongside the launch of Bacardi and Coke. And finally, the sports category continues to perform well, supported by the new Red Peach Aquarius variant in Spain, as well as larger pack sizes, including one liter Parallade alongside our cans. So as you can see, we delivered innovation across the board through packaging, flavor extensions, special collaborations, and more. A bit later, I will share with you some of the brand plans in place for this year and beyond. We have said this before, but at CCP, we're fanatical about delivering best-in-class execution and activation, whether that's in-store, online, or in-outlet, all done locally to drive distribution and visibility every day. We continue to create leading value for our category, adding nearly 450 million euros of value to our retail customers. And here I'm anchoring back to what we shared with you at our investor event and our four more strategy. We love creating engaging displays, especially around key holiday events, with the cornerstone and half one being a share code campaign I referred to earlier. This is all driven by the largest sales force in FMCG, over 12,000 total, powered by technology. And when our customers are buying more often, what we want is more volume. And when you get more volume, we leverage our revenue management capability to drive more value sustainably. These examples show how we're bringing this to life. We've launched an 850 ml PET for smaller households in Germany, one of our biggest markets. In markets like GB, Spain, and others, extra free and extra filled is a great way to manage affordability given ongoing cost of living challenges. We continue to focus on premiumization, whether it be with more multi-packed mini cans in France, multi-packed mini PET in Australia, or more returnable glass. We're increasing our share of cold drink space by investing in more coolers across Coke Trademark and Monster. We have new customer wins, including Kinopolis in Spain and Costco wholesale in Australia. all helping our brands reach more households. And we continue to accelerate our digital capabilities to reach more people, like working even more with the Coca-Cola company on social media campaigns and by adding even better functionality to our B2B portal, myccep.com. Having delivered a record $2.3 billion in revenue in Europe last year, we've grown again by almost 10% in half one. And now on to our sustainability highlights before handing over to Ed. We continue to be recognized externally, including retaining our inclusion on CDP's A-list for climate, now for the ninth year. Ongoing progress in the area of packaging collection remains a core focus, including new recycling partnerships in our Pacific region. And we continue to invest sustainably in sustainability-focused technology through our venture arms across ingredients, manufacturing, and packaging to support our decarbonization journey. For example, we've invested in a climate tech company that convert waste water into a source of renewable electricity. We're currently trialing this technology at one of our sites in GB. Just one example of how we're making CCEP a more sustainable and a better business. I'd now like to hand over to Ed to talk about the financials in more detail. Ed?