Danone S.A.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Dunkin' First Half 2024 Results Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press dial 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to hand you over to Mathilde Rodier, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Thank you.

Good morning, everyone. Mathilde Rodier speaking, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you for being with us this morning for Danone's 2024 H1 Resource Call. I'm here with our CEO, Antoine de Saint-Afrique, and our CFO, Jürgen Esser, who will go through some prepared remarks before taking your questions. And before we start, I draw your attention to the disclaimer on slide 32 of the presentation related to forward-looking statements and the definition of financial indicators that we'll refer to during the presentation. And with that, let me hand it over to Antoine.

Thank you, Mathilde, and good morning, everyone. A warm welcome to our Half Year 24 conference call. Juergen and I are pleased to be with you today to share what is, yet again, a strong, consistent, and broad-based set of quality results. And for this, I would like to start this call by thanking all the donors. They make it happen, day in, day out. It has only been one month since we held our capital market event in Amsterdam, and I'm very pleased that so many of you were able to join us at that event. Our progress in the first half of 24 has been very much in line with our new strategy and with what we shared in Amsterdam. As we said then, we have been on a journey of radical transformation over the past two years, driving a major cultural shift shaping a performance-oriented organization, rebuilding distinctive capabilities, refocusing our strategy, and sharpening our execution. It has been reflecting on the results of the last two years as we delivered consistently on strategy, and our 24 H1 results show further progress in the right direction. So let me dive into the results starting with slide three. As you may have seen from the press release this morning, we close a strong first half of the year with like-for-like revenue up 4% and broad-based growth across geographies and categories. As we have said before, volume mix is key for the resilience of a value creation model. And this semester, we have stepped up this contribution to plus 2.1%, showing progress for the fourth consecutive quarter. Price contributed plus 1.9% to net sales growth in H1, normalizing as anticipated with inflation slowing down. Higher quality growth combined with consistent productivity and a focus on efficiency is allowing us to leverage our assets better and deliver an improved margin from operation up plus 257 bps. And as we did since the beginning of Renew Danone, we reinvested in our brands, in product superiority, in our capabilities, driving our competitiveness while allowing our recurring operating margin to improve by 45 bps to 12.69%. The results of this fall through, along with our continued strict management of CapEx and control over working capital has allowed us to deliver 1.2 billion euros in cash in H1, an improvement of 11% over the same period in 23. Moving now to our slide four. Our H1 performance demonstrates the results from focusing our efforts on consistently deploying our Renew model. We share that the CME we are winning through fueling our growth engine, but also driving our core and taking ownership of our category growth. And here, let me confirm what I told you in Amsterdam. There is growth in our categories. As a matter of fact, they keep growing faster than the average of food and beverage. Our renewed focus on an investment in science, delivering strong product superiority and differentiating technology, expressed in a consumer-relevant way, keeps paying off. In high-protein, we keep deploying a growth model with discipline through YoPro and Oikos. Most recently, in Europe, we launched YoPro in Germany. While expanding our footprint, we keep a high pace in the markets where we are already present, leveraging our science around protein and nutrition to roll out more advanced variants which further strengthen the claims we can make around performance and recovery. In medical nutrition, we have delivered very strong growth in both adults and pediatrics across the globe. We are playing at scale and driving our global science and formulas to further expand our reach, such as in the post-discharge space in China, where adult oral is growing very fast. And Coffee Creations, our sizeable, profitable and fast-growing platform in Noram, continues to win and to grow share. For those who attended the CME, you will have heard us speak of the continued success of our international delight and stock brands. The launch of our latest innovation, Cold Foam, is showing promising early results with consumers. allowing them to take the coffeehouse experience home and recreate their favorite drinks. If you haven't tried it, please try it. It's worth it. And as discussed in the CME, we keep broadening the way we reach out to consumers by further expanding our channel reach in Away From Home. We are consolidating our position in coffee shops and are developing where needed specific formats for the Away From Home channel. I hope you have seen what we did in Wimbledon. And here in Paris, we are full on with the Olympics and Paralympics games with very visible yogurt kiosks in strategic venue and an active and visible involvement in 13 million meals served to those competing in and attending the event. So we have an overall good momentum. But we still have plenty of things on which we can do better. It is back to the constructive dissatisfaction mindset I mentioned in Amsterdam. Moving now to slide five. As I'm sure you would expect me to say, we have a mindset where we think the job is never finished. We have as category leaders the responsibility to continuously show the growth of our categories. making sure they remain relevant to consumers and exciting to customers, with a mix of our continuous focus on the core and relevant innovation. What was done in the U.S. on yogurt with the FDA accredited claims for yogurt category related to diabetes is a great example of nourishing category relevance. And as category leaders, we obviously benefit from it. As I have previously said, there is no long-term value creation model without systematically building future-looking capabilities. This year, we have announced two major partnerships, one with Microsoft on AI and another with Michelin on precision fermentation. These partnerships, each in their own way, are about projecting our company forward, making it future-ready. The same goes for Danskills, a pioneering company-wide upskilling and reskilling program, which we announced earlier this year. And as always, there are a number of things that do not yet work the way we'd like them to work. There, we go deep, we go systematic, and we make sure that we improve step by step. In the US, we are making progress with turning around our plant-based beverage business. We took some pricing actions earlier in the year and are starting to see some green shoots of regaining competitiveness. As already shared with you, we now focus on driving differentiation and usage through occasions rather than ingredients, which we believe will shift the needle as it does for Alpro in Europe. So some progress, but obviously still lots of work to be done. Similarly, and while we are making consistent and encouraging progress, and have made significant transformations in places such as Morocco and Brazil, there is still work to be done in fully transforming the business model of dairy in emerging markets. So, I'm overall happy with the strong, consistent and broad-based performance. but certainly not complacent as we see further opportunities to progress. And with this, I'm happy to hand over to Jürgen to provide more details on the financial results. Jürgen, over to you.