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7/19/2024
Good day and welcome to today's Coca-Cola FEMSA second quarter 2024 conference call. Throughout today's presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you wish to register for a question at any time, you may press star one on your telephone keypad. And now I'd like to hand the call over to your host, Jorge Collazo. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this webcast and conference call to review our second quarter 2024 results. Joining me this morning are Ian Craig, our Chief Executive Officer, and Gerardo Cruz, our Chief Financial Officer. As usual, after prepared remarks, we will open the call for a question and answer session. Before we proceed, please allow me to remind all participants that this conference call may include forward-looking statements and should be considered good faith estimates made by the company. These forward-looking statements reflect management's expectations and are based upon currently available data. Actual results are subject to future events and uncertainties that can materially impact the company's performance. For more details, please refer to the disclaimer in the earnings release that went out this morning. With that, let me turn the call over to our CEO. Please go ahead Ian.
Thank you, Jorge. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter results. Let me begin by saying that I am encouraged by the progress we're making across the priorities we set for the year. For the second quarter, we continued building on the growth momentum of our core business, increasing our consolidated volumes by 7.5% year on year, while driving double-digit top and bottom line growth. We're also progressing on becoming our customers' preferred commercial platform with Juntos Plus. During the quarter, we finished rolling out the new version 4.0 of our app in our two largest markets, Mexico and Brazil, while beginning its rollout in Guatemala, Panama, and Colombia. Now more than half of our total customer base are digital buyers. Importantly, we're taking significant steps in deploying Coca-Cola FEMSA's principles, the foundation of the culture that we envision for our long-term growth and success. Although a positive quarter, our resilience and ability to respond to challenges was put to the test as we faced unprecedented flooding in the state of Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. I want to take a moment to express our heartfelt support to all of the people affected by these events and to recognize the leadership and swift actions taken by our team to ensure the well-being of our Brazilian collaborators as well as their families, and to provide effective community support. Our team mobilized quickly to ensure business continuity and minimize disruption. I will expand on these actions later today when I touch on Brazil. During our call today, I will summarize our quarterly results and provide an update of key developments across our territories. Then Jerry will walk you through our division's performance, closing with an update on the progress we are making to add capacity across our operations, aligned with our strategic pillar to remove infrastructure bottlenecks and digitize the enterprise. Moving on to review our consolidated results for the second quarter. Our volumes continue their positive momentum, increasing 7.5% year on year. This increase was driven mainly by the strong performance achieved in Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, and our Central America South territories, which offset volume declines in Argentina and Uruguay. Our strategies to grow our core business continue driving results. Sparking beverage volumes grew 6.8%, driven mainly by brand Coca-Cola's 7.8% growth. Steel beverages grew 13.2%, and bottled water grew 13.4%. Total revenues for the quarter grew 13.1%, reaching 69.5 billion pesos, driven mainly by volume growth, offsetting an unfavorable currency translation, mainly related to the depreciation of the Brazilian real and the Argentine peso, as compared to the Mexican peso. On a currency-neutral basis, our total revenues increased 17.9%. Gross profit increased 17.2% to 32 billion pesos, leading to a margin expansion of 160 basis points to 46%. This increase was driven mainly by the operating leverage resulting from our solid top-line performance, coupled with favorable packaging costs and hedging strategies. These effects were partially offset by higher sweetener costs and the significant depreciation of the Argentine peso as compared with the previous year. Our operating income increased 13.8% to 9.7 billion pesos, with operating margin reaching 14%. As was the case during the first quarter, our operating leverage and cost and expense efficiencies enabled us to protect margins, offsetting extraordinary expenses related to the flooding in the south of Brazil, as well as increases in freight, labor, and maintenance. Notably, this quarter also includes approximately 400 million pesos related to a non-cash operating foreign exchange loss driven by the quarterly depreciation of the Mexican pesos. By normalizing the extraordinary effects related to the flooding in Brazil, our operating margin would have expanded 30 basis points to 14.2%. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter increased 21.7% to reach 13.9 billion pesos, and EBITDA margin expanded 148 basis points to 20%. The difference between adjusted EBITDA and operating income is mainly explained by the increase in non-cash expenses related to the 400 million pesos operating foreign exchange loss that I previously described. Finally, our majority net income increased 13.8% to reach 5.6 billion pesos. This increase was driven mainly by operating income growth, coupled with a decrease in our comprehensive financing results. This decrease in comprehensive financial results was driven mainly by a foreign exchange gain that resulted from the depreciation of the Mexican peso during the quarter, as applied to our dollar cash position. Now, let me expand on our operations highlights for the second quarter. In Mexico, the implementation of our long-term sustainable growth model coupled with favorable weather and a resilient consumer environment, supported our 7.9% volume growth for the quarter, reaching 600 million unit cases for the first time in our franchise's history. Additionally, thanks to the efforts of our supply chain team to add capacity and generate productivity, in May we broke the record of historic monthly production that we had previously established in March, producing 198 million unit cases. Efforts to satisfy unserved demand in the southeast region of the country prompted us to relocate a production line to the city of Villahermosa, which began production last June, bolstering our capacity in this important and growing region of the country. However, as was the case during the first quarter, that demand we saw continued to exceed our installed capacity, generating stockouts and limiting our share recovery efforts. Finally, an update on Juntos Plus in Mexico. As I previously mentioned, we finished the rollout of version 4.0 with more than 335,000 active buyers in the new version of the app, effectively digitizing more than 50% of our customer base in the country. We remain confident in Mexico's momentum and in our team's ability to resolve capacity constraints and continue delivering solid results as we enter the second half of the year. Moving on to Central America. Volumes in our Central America South territories, which include Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama, increased 6.2%. In Costa Rica, our commercial initiatives continue driving volume growth. For instance, to complement our single serve offerings, we introduced a 250 ml presentation of Sprite, fresh, and fused tea. In addition, our multi-serve packs grew 8% year on year as we focused on the execution of refillable and one-way presentations to capture the important meals occasion. Moreover, in Costa Rica and Panama, we launched alcoholic ready-to-drink cocktails in two flavors, Schweppes Gin & Tonic and Schweppes Vodka Citrus, to capture growth in this emerging beverage category. Finally, in Nicaragua, we delivered a solid second quarter. Brand Coca-Cola continues outperforming with double-digit growth, supported by strong performance in both single-serve and multi-serve presentations. Notably, with brands Monster and Fury, our energy portfolio volumes grew more than 50% year over year, capturing value share. We're convinced that there are many growth opportunities in Central America to continue capturing growth, profitability, and accelerate our digital transformation. Moving on to South America. As I mentioned during my introductory comments, the South of Brazil experience the worst flooding in the region's history, affecting approximately 2.4 million people. In this challenging environment, our team rapidly activated crisis protocols, focused on ensuring our collaborators and their families' safety as the utmost priority. Among other actions to support our team in the region, we donated food and water, advanced salary payments, and made vaccines available. In the words of Don Eugenio Garzazada, one of FEMSA's most prominent leaders in the 20th century, what a person is and may possess is an opportunity to help others, an opportunity to serve. And with this in mind, FEMSA and Coca-Cola FEMSA's relief fund donated approximately $1 million to help cover all our affected collaborators. Resources that are being used to support home rebuilding, replace furniture, and basic house appliances that were lost to the torrential rains. In addition, community relief efforts were coordinated with support from our partners at the Coca-Cola Company and the rest of the Coca-Cola system in Brazil, whom also donated resources and water to the most affected communities in the region. Regarding business continuity, as we announced in early May, we suspended operations in our plant in Porto Alegre. We have now completed site cleaning and removed more than 5,000 tons of debris and finished product and are working hand in hand with our equipment manufacturing partners towards a gradual reopening as of the fourth quarter of the year. In the meantime, our supply chain team rapidly adapted our sales and distribution network to serve our customers in the region. setting up two distribution centers around Porto Alegre that allowed us to reach more than 90% of our customer base. To source finished product, we are currently shipping from other Coca-Cola FEMSA territories in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, as well as from other bottlers from the Coca-Cola system, allowing us to mitigate the temporary capacity gap while we reopen our Porto Alegre facility. Despite the challenges faced in Rio Grande do Sul, volume in Brazil increased a solid 12.1%. Favorable weather in most of our territory, coupled with our initiatives to grow the core business, enabled us to achieve record volumes. We are also encouraged by the results of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, which continues to grow 50% year on year. In addition, Powerade and Monster grew 64% and 32% respectively. As we mentioned during the first quarter, we are strengthening our competitive position, gaining share not only with brand Coca-Cola, but also in flavors, energy, teas, sports drinks, and juices. In Colombia, consumer confidence has continued to deteriorate. This macroeconomic backdrop, coupled with unfavorable weather during the quarter, resulted in sequential deceleration in volume growth. In this complex environment, our team remains focused on our Grow the Core initiatives, adjusting our product offerings to capture key price points. These initiatives, coupled with service and availability improvements, continued enabling us to outperform the industry, resulting in share gains. Aligned with our initiatives to increase capacity, in late June, we opened a new distribution center in Funza in the outskirts of Bogota, increasing capacity by 90,000 pallet positions, bolstering our service to more than 30,000 clients in the region. Moving further south to Argentina, as was the case during the first quarter, we continue seeing the effects of a 31% contraction in disposable income, leading our volumes to decline 9.9%. However, prospects of a more controlled inflation and a gradual recovery of disposable income are being reflected in consumer sentiment. Our team continues executing the playbook needed to emerge stronger from these macro adjustments, strengthen our affordable platform to maintain household penetration and consumer preference while driving costs and expects efficiencies, as well as implementing productivity initiatives. Finally, Volumes in Uruguay declined 12.1% year on year. This decline is explained mainly by a tough comparison base. A severe drought in 2023 drove extraordinary growth for personal water, coupled with unfavorable conditions during most of the quarter this year. As we enter the second half of the year, we remain confident in our strategy, as well as the investments being deployed to improve service levels. We expect the consumer environment to remain resilient in the majority of our markets. We continue to see a long runway for Coca-Cola FEMSA's value creation as we progress in the implementation of our sustainable long-term growth model. With that, I will hand the call over to Jerry.
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