Cloetta AB (publ)

Good morning, and thank you for joining us on the Q2 conference call for Cloesta. My name is Natalie Redmo, and I'm head of investor relations. I'm here today with Henri de Sauvage, CEO of Cloesta, and Frans Rudén, CFO. Henri is going to take you through our second quarter results, and we will then move on to a Q&A session. And I will now hand over to Henri.

Thank you, Natalie. So pleased to have you here and be able to talk a bit through the Q2. results the key messages are that we've seen a strong rebound in both of our segments and also a healthy profitability coming back in the business now that society starts to open up and of course as well as a result of the many actions we have been working on over the last 12 months sales of the branded package products are back at pre-pandemic levels and this is really good to see because for candy

We had a very strong hoarding effect last year. I remember that people were buying a lot of grocery products in the first and second month after the lockdown and the pandemic started. So that's good that we are able to compensate for that. Well, Big Mix has shown enormous rebounds that we kept the candy sales and the pack business in growth. But also the pack tools in gum, that were double-digit down during COVID, are recovering. However, not yet to the 2019 levels. Big Mix sales up with 80%. Of course, it's driven by the opening of channels and the comparison of last year. But it's also very good to see the sales impact of all the things we've done, like the premium 10-weeking concept, which is selling at a higher price. And we're also making good progress to work sustainable profitability with all the actions we have been taking, and I'll come back to that a bit more. Significantly, the building started in our local 14% event is to get growth in this profitable branded business. And we do are strengthening our most important top 25 brands. In this quarter, we made a further step up in our marketing stance. Not only was it low compared to 2020 when we cut a lot of advertising given the uncertainty of COVID, but also versus the absolute level of 2019. We'll show you a bit more about that as well. In our continued factory journey, we took another milestone by going live with the new integrated maintenance system in our first factory. which will be rolled out to all the clients, may benefit our systematic approach to preventative maintenance, which will increase our efficiency of the lines and creating extra capacity, as well as getting a better insight into maintenance and costs. The webinar has underwritten the science-based target initiative to understand the climate of Paris.