GPDNF - Danone S.A. (DANOY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-02-22 21:02:10 ET
Danone S.A. (DANOY)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
February 22, 2024, 02:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Mathilde Rodie - Head, IR
Antoine de Saint-Affrique - CEO
Juergen Esser - CFO
Conference Call Participants
Guillaume Delmas - UBS
Jon Cox - Kepler
Warren Ackerman - Barclays
Pascal Boll - Stifel
Bruno Monteyne - Bernstein
Charlie Higgs - Redburn
Celine Pannuti - JPMorgan
David Hayes - Jefferies
Presentation
Operator
Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Danone 2023 Annual Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.
I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mathilde Rodie, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Mathilde Rodie
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being with us this morning for Danone's 2023 results. I'm here with our CEO, Antoine de Saint-Affrique and our CFO, Juergen Esser, who will first go through some prepared remarks before taking your questions in the second step. But before we start, I draw your attention to disclaimer on Page 41 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 over to Antoine.
Antoine de Saint-Affrique
Thank you, Mathilde, and good morning everyone. A warm welcome to our full year '23 conference call. Together with Juergen, we are delighted to be with you today to share what is a strong set of results. Almost two years after the start of Renew Danone in a year once again marked by significant external challenges and volatility, we have kept transforming the company at pace and with discipline, making it step by step stronger. And for this, I want to start with a big, big thank you to all Danoners. They made it happen.
Now let's go straight into the results starting with Page 3. We closed a year of strong growth at plus 7% on a like-for-like basis. As just said, we made good progress on our strategic agenda and it is starting to yield consistent results. Firstly, it shows with our volume mix dynamic, which is sequentially improving and turned positive in quarter four at plus 0.8% versus last year.
Importantly, improving the quality of our growth enables us to connect with a profitable growth algorithm. Better quality growth combined with record productivity on COGS led our margin from operations to increase by 142 basis points in '23. And as we said we would do, we kept addressing some of the competitiveness gaps we had by reinvesting back in our business to the tune of 97 basis points.
We stepped up our investment in advertising, in promotion, in product superiority and in capabilities as you will see later. It is better than it was. But the reinvestment journey, to be truly competitive, is far from over. And we made sure we do not only reinvest, but also kept improving the quality of our execution in store, online, on premise or wherever the consumer has an opportunity to meet our products. We did all of that while growing our recurring EPS by plus 3.4%, building on a 40 basis point increase in recurring operating margin, an increase I would certainly not qualify as moderate....
Danone S.A. (DANOY) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript