Electrolux Professional AB (publ)

professional Q4 presentation. My name is Jakob Brubai. I'm head of investor relations. We have Alberto Zanatta, CEO, and Fabio Sarpellon, the CFO. We now leave the floor to Alberto. Please go ahead, Alberto.

Good morning. Thank you, Jakob, and good morning to everybody. Q4, I would summarize the quarter saying that the Along the quarter, we had a strong cash flow generation despite the turbulent times that we've been facing during the last part of the quarter. Sales declined by 13.2% with an EBIT margin stable compared to last year. Considering the situation, we have also to say that the board proposed to pay no dividend. And we have also the other highlight that I want to write in the quarter is the fact that we continue in our strategic initiatives. Strategic initiatives in particular, the factor in Rayong, the 28th of February, we will complete, the factory will be completed, and there will be the final handover to give us the possibility to start moving into the factory, and the digital investments, investments in product, but also in digitalizing our company. But let's start from the market. As I said, a turbulent time. And also here we see two different dynamics. First, clearly, the most affected segments are the hospitality ones or restaurant, hotel, bars, and this is reflected on the performance of the food and beverage segment. The second is the geography and the meaning that the second wave and in particular Europe, so in particular the south part of Europe. And also this one will be reflected on the performance considering the presence and the market share that we have in the south European market in particular for what the beverage is concerned. At the same time, we experienced a recovery of the business U.S., with the laundry growing and food basically flat, food and beverage basically flat. And in particular, in some part of Asia, China, and Oceania, so Australia and New Zealand. In Asia, in particular, the Southeast Asia, if the countries that are still suffering, considering the dependency of the business, of the hospitality business, on the tourism, and considering that those countries are still in a lockdown mode. So, as I said, since everything passed by the second wave, customers reacted differently compared to the first one because they were more prepared. so restaurants, hotels, are already ready to face this kind of challenge, but safe decline, in particular during the second part of the quarter. This kind of trend is still going on also in January. The sales again are mainly impacting the food and beverage business. Food and beverage business decline close to 21% and between food and beverage, beverage is suffering much more than food. Beverage is suffering much more than food for two reasons. The first one is the type of business and the meaning of that while many restaurants adapted that to delivery, to take away. This is more difficult for the bar, the pubs, the cafe. And secondly, the geography, because our large part of our beverage business is developing countries that are heavily affected. Italy, just to mention, France, where there are the two companies that we recently acquired, but also the business of our US operation in Mexico that is heavily affected by the lockdowns. In the food and beverage scenario, the positive element is the US, that after quite negative development during the summer and early fall, recovered and declined between brackets only 5%. So, this steep decline of the volume impacted negatively the habitat. That was around 1%. The other element is that Our costs are lower, but the savings are less than before because many activities that have been put on hold during the second quarter, in particular, so the really negative period of the pandemic, we restarted. And in particular, I'm talking about the product development. that is preparing us for a lot of very interesting and hopefully successful launches during the quarter we are in right now. As it has been all along the year, the dynamics of laundry are different. Laundry was basically flat compared to last year, Q4. Growing in Europe particularly the northern part of Europe, and growing also in the U.S. So a couple of words about U.S. because during Q2 and Q3 we have been always commenting the decline of the sales to U.S. and explaining them because they were building the stock. They've been building the stock in Q1. and then depleting or using the products that were stocked in the U.S. by our distributor to generate the sales, the low sales that there were during the Q2 and Q3. When the stock was over, they restarted the ordering and we restarted building the stock with good results as you can see. This year we will face the opposite because this was last year, the quarter when we have been building the stock that was used in Q2 and Q3. Another element about the laundry business that's very positive is the EBITDA that with fresh results thanks to the cost efficiency activities. thanks to all we did with the new product brought to market, the EVTA improved. This is quite significant and quite remarkable. Let's move now, Fabio, to the financials.

Thank you, Alberto. Good morning to everybody. As anticipated by Alberto, Habitat margin in the quarter was 7.3%, close to the ones we delivered in Q4 2019, but down 40 million SEK in value. We have reported a pretty different dynamic between two segments. Laundry was up 30 million. SEC in the quarter and we delivered strong profitability, really close to 17%. While in food and beverage, at the time value declined 17 million SEC compared to same quarter of 2019. No material change we had in the group common cost. When it comes to the dynamic of the profitability, we had two main factors that reduced the EBITDA value, sales and production volume, and negative currency impact. On the other side, we continued to report a positive contribution from price, direct material cost reduction, and the impact of the cost measure. that in the quarter compensates roughly 80% of the impact of the low volumes. When reading through the P&L, we see a decline of roughly a couple of points in the gross margin, and this is mainly related to the lower volumes and the negative impact of the currency transaction. As I mentioned earlier, price, direct material, and production efficiency, in particular in laundry, have positively contributed to sustain the margin. Selling administrative expenses decline, both in value and also in weight on sales. Let me at this point take the opportunity also to give you an update on the cost reduction initiative that generated also in this quarter a pretty remarkable contribution to the profitability, around roughly 90 million SEC. This initiative can be clustered in three main buckets. Around 30 mSEC are what we call the structural ones, coming from the two restructuring plans, the ones that we launched in September 2019 and now are fully executed, and the ones we launched in September last year that are under execution. The sectoral plan that we anticipated during the last call is expected to generate around 110 million SEC already from the second quarter of this year, plus an additional 20 million from the second quarter of 2022. Second bucket is coming from government subsidies, mainly related to two countries, Italy and France, and the remaining 40 million the third bucket is coming from the reduction of the discretionary spending. To be considered that in this third bucket last year we had one time cost, one time cost related to separation that represented more or less 30 million CEC. These cost measures are not over. We are continuing with this core measure also in this first part of 2021. Benefits are expected to come, but on lower scales than the previous quarter. And this is because, as Alberto mentioned a while ago, we are increasing the investment in our strategic initiative. The digital product and solution but also we will have in quarter one and somehow in quarter two some specific one-time cost related to the consolidation of our operation in Thailand that Alberto will develop in a while. Happy to report that in Q4 we have further strengthened our balance sheet. At the end of December, operating working capital was down 23% in same currency compared to December 2019 and down 28% compared to the level we had in September, where we started also to revert the trend of average operating working capital sales. Receivable is significantly down. but also inventory has been progressively reduced in Q3 and then in Q4. And I believe that this is a pretty good achievement because we have reduced significantly the operating working capital whilst at the same time increasing the service and the delivery to our customer, in particular our replacement sales. We close the year with even a stronger finance position. That, as you see from the reporting, has been reduced to half a billion SEC, half of the level we had in December 2019. And after December, we have liquid fund for 810 million SEC and revolving credit facility available for additional 210 million. Our net debt on EBITDA ratio is below 1 at 0.8. So, significant improvement to what we reported in quarter three and quarter four. So, pretty strong finance position. This strong finance position has been achieved Thanks to very strong cash flow in quarter four, we reported 460 million cash flow generation and overall for the full year 2020, 570 million. Operating working capital reduction represented the major contribution in the cash flow generation. CAPEX in the quarter was close to 70 million, with the majority of it, 50 million, is related to the construction of the new operation in Thailand. That confirms our focus on delivery, on the strategic priority, whilst maintaining great focus on cash flow generation and sustaining profitability in the short term. Now, Alberto, back to you. Thank you, Fabio.

So, as Fabio mentioned, again, the strong cash flow generation, but at the same time, continuous investments in new products and improving the productivity and efficiency of this company. Let me start from the product that we brought to market in Q4. we are going also to bring during the first part of 2021. And here you see that I'm not talking about physical product as such, but as I believe it is the future for many products in this industry and probably also in others, we are investing a lot on the digitalization of our equipment. because the additional service and the additional solution will be offered through an enhancement of the digital capabilities. I think I already announced that one of the uniqueness of Electrolux is the ability to provide one connected solution for whatever you have in your kitchen or your laundry operations. Considering that we are the only company bringing to market laundry, food, and beverage product, we are also giving the possibility to the customer to have one connected solution to manage, control, and get additional services from the product. During the quarter, we launched what we call One Connected. That is the platform that is aggregating not only product features, but also services that the customer can get and we already started to have the first installation. We are really proud for that, even if it is just the beginning of a path. Another important thing that is a cornerstone or something that is really the base of our DNA is the sustainability. During the quarter, we publish our strategy and the targets that are reflecting, again, our legacy. but also what we do every day. When we said that our mission is to provide the customer solutions that are making their life easier, more profitable, and truly sustainable every day, it's because we are investing in products that are sustainable and sustainable. with innovative low-running cost solution. And we do this producing them in factories that we operate in order to reuse or use cycle energies and clearly at the base of everything we are looking for our people but also for whoever is working for us to make sure that we have practical practices. These were already part of our way of working, but we have been detailing this one in our sustainability strategy and setting the targets for the years to come. As I mentioned earlier, Despite the challenging time, despite the decline of the business, thanks also to the solid financial position, we have been able to continue to invest, invest to prepare this company for the recovery. We still believe that the short term is obviously the pandemic creates challenges. A lot of our customers, in particular in Europe these days, are in a lockdown mode. But we also believe that when the largest part of the population worldwide will be vaccinated against the coronavirus, we are confident that the business in restaurant, hotel and bar will come back. We see this talking to the customers that are preparing for the summer. We saw this last year when After the first wave, the summer came and people went back to this area. And it is important to be prepared for this restart. And we are doing this, as I said, investing on product. I mentioned earlier that Q1 will be a quarter with new products, solutions, and features brought to market, but also investing in our infrastructure. The big one is the filtering rayon. We are basically at the end of the building process, as I said. We already entered the factory, at least some area of the factory, and by the 28th of February, the end-over of the factory from the construction company to us will be completed. It will take another three, four months, but we are expecting to have the official opening June the 1st with a new facility fully operating with all the laundry product and the beverage product that we have been moving and concentrating in this new facility from the other two that will be obviously at the same time closed. The other important investment is again related to the digitalization of this factory. What we are doing on the product side, this is more on the improvement of our ability to run the company. The plan is a multiyear plan to convert all the IT systems, the different IT systems that we have in the factory. They are different because they are coming from acquisitions or from historical or solutions that were back in the history of this organization to a new one, a modern one, JD Edwards. So a well-known and worldwide user system that for sure will improve our performances, will give us a possibility to be more efficient and more cost-effective. We already implemented the system in the first plan, January 1st. Implementation and rollout went very well. I have to give credit to the people because we had to do it with, normally when you have a rollout you have a lot of people on site to support the local management during this critical phase. This was done locally but also remotely. This means that we have been learning a lot during this month how to do things without being physically present. I think it's an important learning of this difficult situation. And we have been doing this business also that we can run the rollout or we can run the implementation of this new system pretty quickly also in the other sites around the world. So having said so, let's have a summary of what we saw happening in Q4. The first one is that the recovery that we experienced in Q3 in some way halted during the last months of Q4. It was mainly Europe and partially United States, but Europe is the most affected area and you know that a lot of our business is in Europe. We have to say that this market condition is, we experience it towards the end of the quarter and we are still experiencing in January the same trend. In the quarter, food and beverage business were more affected than the laundry one. It happened also in Q2 and Q3. The laundry business is more resilient, also because the segments served the specific one, like apartment house laundry, coin shops, served basically only with laundry products that are less affected than the ones where we have common laundry and food businesses there. We continue to reduce our running cost, so we continue to have cost savings positively contributing to the everyday, but the short-term savings are decreasing. So we have more benefit from the structural savings, the one that Fabio described, and that will be an even increasing impact in Q2 this year. But the short terms are reducing the impact because we restarted investing, as I said, and preparing for the recovery. We continue to invest, invest for the future, product, the Thailand factory, and the IT infrastructure. And then, despite all the things happening around us, we also came out to publish our sustainability strategy and target. With this said, Jacob, I would come back to you and open for questions.

Thank you. If you wish to ask an audio question, you may do so by pressing 01 on your telephone keypad. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may do so by pressing 02 to cancel. Once again, please press 01 on your telephone keypad if you wish to ask an audio question. Our first question comes from Lucille Carrier from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Good morning, gentlemen, and thanks for taking my question. I actually have three questions, and I will go one at a time. The first one was more around kind of current trading and what you are currently seeing in the market, because on one hand, you have spoken about some costs, especially in the food and beverage division, related to kind of restarting the activity. So it seems that you are kind of picking up on that front. But I was curious to know how that compares with what you are seeing in terms of market demand and whether you are seeing maybe some of your distributors, whether this is in food and beverage or laundry, starting to kind of trying to increase a little bit the inventory level. So that's question number one around the overall demand environment.

Okay. So one by one, we take it one by one. So current trading, as I said, the The height of the recovery that we experienced in November, December, is still there in January. So the conditions around us, the fact that the majority of the European market, they are in a lockdown mode, is still there. We are experiencing a recovery of the business in Asia, China, but not only China, Australia, also Oceania, Australia, New Zealand. Most of Japan, Singapore are showing a different trend. This is still affecting more The food and beverage business and the laundry one, I think we mentioned it. But we have also to say that we see, for instance, we see some customers visiting our facilities to look at the product, to test the product. There are operations also in the South European markets that are planning for the reopening late April, May. So I believe that Q1 will still be challenging because the situation will not be significantly different. The impact of the vaccine, the positive impact obviously of the vaccine will not be significant in Q1. But if I look at what is going to happen thanks to the vaccine, but also looking at the last year when With the summer, we had the heart of the first wave and the recovery of the reopening of many businesses. For this reason, if and when people will regain confidence, I'm confident that they will go back to the to the habits that are bringing back again customers to our customers, because the problem is this one, obviously. So what we see is that it's not only us investing on product to prepare for a possible recovery, but also our customers, the end customer, hotels and restaurants are doing so.

Okay, thank you. My second question was around the cost structure, and I was hoping you could give us a little bit more details on your exposure to raw materials. I appreciate that you might be mostly buying components made out of metals and plastic, but even those are probably going to face some form of inflation, so I was hoping you could give us some indication on your components' exposure how you think about the inflation we are seeing currently in logistical costs, considering that you have a fairly kind of fragmented manufacturing base around the world. And lastly, as well, you've mentioned a few times during the call that you were impacted by FX headwind on your profitability in the fourth quarter. So I was hoping you could maybe give us some guidance on the FX impact that you expect for 2021.

Okay, let's split the question. I think the first part, and probably Fabio can comment more about the FX impact. If we talk about the material, first of all, Majority of our material cost or raw material is the steel and we have been hedging our purchasing basically for the whole 2021. So we see movements absolutely, but in this moment we feel confident that we are covered for the largest part of the year. And then what is going to happen in five, six months from now is in some way difficult to predict. But we are covered for the largest part of 2021. And then you were also talking about the logistic cost and the fragmented distribution. In some way, sorry, not distribution, but the manufacturing footprint. In some way, you have to consider that the factory, in particular the ones that we have in China, for instance, or also some of the small in Europe, are mainly serving the countries where they are located. In some way, our global manufacturing plants are the one in Italy, the one in Sweden, and the one that we are building in Thailand. For instance, I'm mentioning the site that we have in China is not 100%, 90% dedicated to the Chinese market, to the local market. That is important because they are also the investment we did when we acquired, again I'm using the Chinese example, The investment we did was to develop the local market and to do this, that was a strategic and important move. Now Fabio, if you want to comment a little bit about currency.

Yes, as I mentioned earlier, the quarter results has been impacted by currency negatively. We have two components. The currency translation, our group is reporting SEC, and year over year we have seen a strengthening of the SEC against the other group currencies, mainly, I would say, U.S. dollar and euro. The second, within the currency, the second piece is currency transaction. And in particular, when comparing the two quarters, We have also here seen a strengthening of tech versus US dollar that generated the main impact in the P&L. Having said so, what about the future? What about this year? I believe very difficult to predict the currency development. We are monitoring of course, the development and also looking into the possibility where it is possible and commercial reasonable to see what we can do in terms of pricing.

Thank you. And lastly, I just wanted to ask around the IT migration program that you've described at the end of the presentation. how we should think about that in terms of cost. And obviously, is there a risk maybe of disruption to production and procurement as you are executing on those migrations? Because we know that it tends to be sometimes a bit of a challenging process to kind of do that type of migration. So I just wanted to have an idea on cost and how you assess the risk.

Okay. So for what the cost is, We do this because we believe we will benefit from this one, from implementing this system. Eliminating, because we will just continue at the same time, more than one system in the different operations. Some of them, in particular, when we talk about the acquired company, they were relatively obsolete systems or systems that were not giving us the possibility fully benefit from what a system can give. For what concerns the disruption, I think I mentioned that I was really proud of what happened in the first factory. We started with a factory in France, so not one of the largest, but one probably of the most complex because of the characteristics of the products that are produced in that factory. and the migration went very smoothly without any disruption for customers. A lot of the products produced in that factory are made on order, so we didn't even have the, let me say, the safety belt to have the stock in the between or to create a stock in the between. So very happy about that and very proud of the team that conducted the migration. It is obviously a dedicated team. We know what it means. It is something that we already experience, and so we learn also from the mistakes that we did in the past to make sure that they're not repeated.

Okay, thank you very much.

You're welcome.

The next question comes from Gustav Hegeseth from SEB. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, guys. A few questions from me. You know, I think we're all trying to understand sort of the lag between when the vaccine is rolled out and people start going to restaurants and when we should start to see a material order pick up for your food and beverage business. So I guess there are a few geographies now like Australia where you see bookings at restaurants being well above last year's. And I know you're not particularly big in Australia, but to give us a sense, perhaps, what is the market reaction there in terms of equipment? Is that a short lag, a few weeks, or do entrepreneurs and restaurant owners sort of have a wait-and-see approach, rather? That would be very helpful.

As you rightly said, Australia and New Zealand are obviously not super large market but we have a relatively good presence and I tell you that already since September we experienced growing sales in both countries so this means that people as soon as they get confidence that they can socialize again in a safe way they go back immediately to let me say, back to the normal life they had before. We were, again, it is just, please take it as it is, because I'm also not able to travel so much, so also I'm not able to meet so many customers as I was using the past. But we started to have customers using what we call center of excellence here in Italy where I'm located. that is the big showroom with a kitchen where customers are coming. And we started to have customers coming to test the product, spending more than one day here with our chef. And we didn't see this in the past. And they do this because they are preparing for the spring, summer, where they believe that the customer will come back. At the end, this is the trigger. for them and for the dealer and then ultimately for us. And then food and beverage teams for large hotels that are already planning the opening 28th of April and last year they worked between the 15th of June and 15th of September. That's it. all working periods for these large facilities. This year they are already planning the 28th of April and they are already having at least pre-booking. So I believe people believe that they could restart and I personally think that as soon as you will get this confidence, the recovery will be fast. As soon as we have this confidence. and it is not the case yet.

Okay, just to follow up on that, again, Australia, I mean, there might be some effects, temporary effects from pent-up demand in the first few months, but as you mentioned, Australia has been open, I think, since September or so, but you're still seeing a healthy growth in Australia. going into this year, so it hasn't faded. And secondly, do you think that it's not you taking market share, it's a market dynamic phenomenon, really?

Okay. So, first answer is yes, sir. We see still the business going pretty well in that part of the world. I would include China, by the way, where we have a much larger presence, a much more significant market share. to talk about if we take market share or if we keep it difficult to say in particular in those markets. So I would say that in this case I'm not able to answer to you. I'm saying that we are growing more than our current sales are higher than the ones that we had a year ago or they were also during the last part of last year.

Okay, great. A few more if I may. There's some of your peers have talked about initial signs of price pressure, perhaps mainly related to U.S. and with the combi open segment, but do you see any indications that there are price pressure in the market? And are you lowering prices at all?

No. No. The answer to the second part of the question in the meaning that I think Fabio was highlighting that we still have a positive contribution from price, so still the contribution from price is positive. In this moment, where still, let me say, the market is full of uncertainty, we are experiencing some pressure on price, in particular in Europe, I would say, more than any other countries. Then again, it's related to the speed of the recovery, clearly, because as soon as the market is quick or if the market is quickly recovering, then also the pressure will be released. But in this moment, in particular on the food and beverage and beverage, because it's the most suffering part of the business, we are experiencing some price pressure, yes.

Okay. And if I may follow up on the question on raw material inflation, obviously you don't have a big exposure to steel directly, but by coming back to your components and sourcing, What type of contracts do you have? Do you have a contract where you incorporate increased costs, or are they negotiated yearly, so any additional price inflation for that components provider will not be passed on until later? Or could you give us some sort of insight on how that price dynamic works, given what we see now with price for several raw materials going up quite significantly every year?

Okay, I can take that question. As Alberto anticipated, we are covering directly or indirectly the raw material that are included into also our components. And we have, I would say, a pretty good coverage, at least over the first half of 2021. It's clear that recent dynamic, but I would say call it really recent, are putting additional pressure on it, but I would wait before coming to conclusion. So overall message, first part of the year, I don't see any material impact for the profitability of the group. On the other side, we are anyway activating cost reduction initiative, negotiation activity to mitigate this impact and bring additional savings regardless of the development of the raw material itself.

All right, that's very clear. And lastly for me, I'm trying to sort of make out the EBIT bridge year over year, and there are a lot of sort of larger items here, the temporary cost avoidance for 2020, including government support, you have the cost savings program, you have spin-off related costs. Could we just, I know you tried to explain, but perhaps make it one more try to sort of sum it up. What's the year-to-year impact as you see it now from all these initiatives and temporary costs and savings for 2021 versus 2020 that we have? Thanks.

Okay, let me summarize what we have seen in quarter four and somehow all along 2020. The first component in the quarter, but also I would say in the fourth year, is the first market was related by the structural cost reduction coming from the two restructuring one completed and one in execution. And in the quarter, the restructuring has generated roughly 30 million SAC savings year over year. The second piece in the quarter and the full year was government subsidies, 20 million. The remaining bucket, the third one, was the management of discretionary spending that contributed with 40 million SEC in the quarter. And as we reported in the previous call, positive contributed all along the year. Going forward, I believe that first, the execution of the restructuring plan is proceeding according to plan. So what we anticipated in terms of saving from future fit to are confirmed. I mean, that is our second restructuring plan. As I mentioned, we expect that this plan will contribute with 110 million yearly savings, all from the second quarter of this year, plus an additional 20 million from the second quarter of 2022. We will see government support, at least we expect to have government support as long as the market will not pick up. And for what concerns the, let me call the discretionary spending, we have continued with a short-term cost containment measure as we did all along 2020. But as we anticipated earlier, the contribution will be still positive but reduce in size because at the same time we increase in investment for the future. On the, let me say, the strategic initiative that Alberto mentioned, the digitalization of the products and the company and time specifically for quarter one with some tail in quarter two, we will have one-off cost related to the consolidation, the move of the factory in Thailand. Just to give you a flavor, this one-time cost for Thai consolidation can range in area between 15 to 20 million for quarter one, 2021.

thank you uh that's that's helpful our next question comes from frederick mudra group from purchase securities please go ahead good morning everyone and thank you operator um first off from the us uh i think you mentioned five percent sales decline in the us uh at least to me seems very strong even also the weak dollar versus the uh swedish krona Could you give us any insight if there is any larger project or so impacting that figure?

No, not specific large project or specific chain rollout. It was our present, I would say majority of this or the product category going better or performing better than the other in the U.S. were the ones sold... through the network, through the dealers for replacement business, for day-to-day business. So it was, I would say, general market sales development.

Okay, so that would be the trend that the U.S. is currently creating at that. Secondly, you mentioned that beverage is suffering more than food. Could you just remind us how that could affect your mix going forward?

Sorry, back one second to the previous question. This was about the food and beverage obviously only because the development in laundry was even stronger and this is related to the fact again that we had the recovery of the sales after having depleted the stock that we built in Q1 2020. So just to make sure that I completed the first answer. Sorry, your second question was about the mix between food and beverage, right?

Yes.

Yes. So beverage is suffering significantly more than food. I think I mentioned about two reasons. The first one is that in the country where there is a lockdown, you have many restaurants adapted to the new reality doing the delivery or take away. That is obviously harder for a bar, for a coffee shop, partially also for a pub. Yeah, there are some, but you don't do delivery of drinks or even less of coffee. So this was, the business as such was impacted heavily. The second element, and this is in general, so it is for us and for everybody, I would say. Then specifically for us, considering that we have been building the beverage business through the acquisitions, And again, we are in the process of globalizing the product offer of these companies through the Alaphalax network. But it's still a process where we are clearly, it's a way of beginning. Majority of the business, of our beverage business, is still around the home markets, of the old home markets of the acquired companies. So, example, The operations that we have in the U.S., a big portion, half of the business was in Mexico, with the larger chains operating in that part. And Mexico is really down. It's not just us. Whoever is operating in Mexico, including our customers, are heavily affected by the pandemic. The coffee espresso company that we have in France, more than half of the business is in France. And if you talk to the roasters that are operating in France, they are declining business even more than us in terms of equipment. It's really the market that is not receiving. And the same applies to the company that we acquired in Italy that has more than half of the business, again, in Italy. and I don't have to say the situation of the country considering the lockdown. So they are very specific situation, well identified, that is also giving us the confidence that it is not a generic problem of inefficiency or low productivity, but is strictly related to the specific situation, some specific geographies, And then back again to what I said at the beginning, that short term, the pandemic creates clearly challenges, in particular to beverage. But when the vaccine or the recovery will be over, also we know that this operation will be addressed.

Sure, I appreciate the market dynamics. I think I was mainly thinking about the margin mix that the stronger declining beverage would have on your profitability.

Yes, and again, also in this one, I'm sorry, I misunderstood that one, but in relation to the margin, the margin is, I would say, 100% influenced by the drop of the volume. And again, it's mainly the beverage aside.

Okay, thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Johan von Klepper-Chevreau. Please go ahead.

Hi, Johan here. Thank you for taking my questions. I appreciate you had a decent cash flow, but Bill decides no dividend for 2020, and in extreme circumstances like this, that's obviously not unexpected. You do have a solid balance sheet, and part of your growth story is also related to acquisitions. And I think, for example, we have seen Middleby announcing two acquisitions recently. Are you missing out there, or haven't you got the targets you want from your M&A pipeline?

No, we saw the acquisition of Middlebury and at least the ones in China, that is the one in the food and beverage business, we didn't... It was there, it was not something public evidently. I think I mentioned earlier that... We restarted our activities during the fall, so we restarted looking around, reconnecting with the connections that we had in the past, still following our strategic priorities, so acquisition that can help us to deliver against the pillar of our strategy. It is still a market that is full of uncertainty and as a consequence also the dialogue with the companies are not so easy I would say. There are some companies that are coming up available for sales but typically they are not the company that could add value both for what the financial performance are concerned and the strategic match is concerned. Still looking. I think you know that the M&A process is something where it's difficult to predict when you are able to bring a result.

Yeah, okay. Then just coming back on the Thailand plant, I understand you will have some extra costs now short term, but I suppose this will yield benefits further down the road. Can you sort of give us some indication maybe you've done it already but what the positives are from the Thailand plant if you compare with cost based 2019 for example and then what they expect for 2022 for the setup is it like 50 million improvement or how should we think about it

Without providing the figures, the values of the different activities, the cost efficiency will come from, first, currently we are running two factories, we will run one factory only. So it will be one site only instead of two sites where we were operating before. Secondly, we took the opportunity to build a new factory to have a state of the art facility with all the design of the lines, the design of the preparation area, the flow, designing the best possible way in order to have the maximum efficiency. Third, we will improve, I think I said that, but that will be one of the three global factories, currently global factories, meaning factories that are delivering products all over the world, meaning that the majority of the production coming out of that factory will not stay in Thailand, but will go outside the country. And we took also the opportunity to rebuild the factory, to redesign also all our logistic setup and logistic flow to have efficiency over there. Fourth one, this is not something that we will achieve in June, but it will come later. This factory is not designed just for what we have, but it is designed to prepare ourselves for future expansions. That means that in that sector, we will have additional production pretty soon.

Okay. Thank you very much. You're welcome.

Thank you. Due to time restraints, we will not be able to take any further questions, so I'll hand back to the speakers for any other remarks.

okay so thank you very much for for today and speak to you next time thank you and goodbye