Cloetta AB (publ)

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on the Q1 conference call for Cloetta. My name is Nathalie Hedmo, and I'm head of investor relations. With me here today are CEO, Henri de Sauvage, and Fiancee Rudine, CFO. Henri and Frans will take you through our first quarter results, and we will then move on to a Q&A session. And I will now hand over to you, Henri.

Good. Thank you, Nathalie, and welcome, everybody.

A few key messages on what we did see in the business in Q1. So it's very pleasing to see that the branded business came back to growth, while we still have quite some out-of-home channels with a lot less shoppers. The mix was still negatively impacted by COVID, although March was a good month, which we'll show you later. That, of course, has to do both with the comparator and also that Easter was in March. Difficult to calculate exactly the effects of the two. Also very pleasing to see is the progress we're making on the roadmap to profitability for pick and mix, a lot of pricing and premiumization was done in the last couple of months and that also starts to show in particular on the growth margin in that underlying business. Then I'm also very pleased to say that Although we're still managing the pandemic, there's a lot of progress on the strategic agenda. Today we'll talk a little bit more about e-commerce and sustainability, which are gaining traction. A few quarters ago, we talked about our innovation 2.0 setup, so fewer innovations, but bigger ones. This quarter, we're actually launching quite some disruptive innovations, which will disclose a little bit more about them going forward. I can tell you a little bit about the success. Still very good focus on the VIP Plus, the savings program, delivering also on the indirects, moving towards a global shared service center in the Netherlands and in Slovakia. Also very good progress over there. We'll talk a little bit about the refinancing of the group, which we have done, and we also approved an investment into new packaging technology for carts and boxes.