NVZMY - Novozymes A/S (NVZMF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

2024-02-01 15:26:03 ET

Novozymes A/S (NVZMF)

Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call

February 01, 2024 3:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Tobias Björklund – Head-Investor Relations

Ester Baiget – Chief Executive Officer

Rainer Lehmann – Chief Financial Officer

Anders Lund – Executive Vice President, Consumer Biosolutions

Tina Fanø – Executive Vice President, Agriculture and Industrial Biosolutions

Amy Byrick – Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Transformation

Conference Call Participants

Alex Jones – Bank of America

Lars Topholm – Carnegie

Alex Sloane – Barclays

Charles Eden – UBS

Günther Zechmann – Bernstein

Søren Samsøe – SEB

Chetan Udeshi – JPM

Nicola Tang – BNP Paribas

Sebastian Bray – Berenberg

André Thormann – Danske Bank

Presentation

Tobias Björklund

Thank you, operator, and welcome, everyone, to Novozymes Conference Call for 2023. So my name is Tobias Björklund, as mentioned, and I'm the Head of Investor Relations at Novozymes and now Novonesis. At this call, our CEO, Ester Baiget; and our CFO, Rainer Lehmann, will review Novozymes' 2023 unaudited performance and key events of the year. Also attending today's calls are Tina Fanø, EVP, Agriculture and Industrial Biosolutions; Amy Byrick, EVP Strategy and Business Transformation; Anders Lund, EVP Consumer Biosolutions; and Claus Fuglsang, CSO and EVP of Research and Development, all in Novozymes. The entire call will take about 50 minutes, including time for questions at the end. As always, I would like to remind you that the information presented during the call is unaudited and that management may make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and beliefs and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in any forward-looking statements.

With that, I'll now hand you over to our CEO, Ester Baiget, who will lead the very last conference call for Novozymes as a standalone company. Ester, please?

Ester Baiget

Thank you. Thank you, Tobias, and welcome, everyone. Could you please turn to Slide number 3. Before we start the presentation of our 2023 performance, I would like to take this opportunity to thank our employees, our shareholders and all our stakeholders for their support over the past 13 months. Three days ago, we completed the combination with Chr. Hansen creating our new company, Novonesis, and marking the start of a new era of biosolutions. Working with our customers, Novonesis will enable an acceleration of the use of biosolutions across multiple markets, and by combining these two amazing companies, we are set to create even greater shareholder value.

I would like to also welcome Rainer Lehmann, our CFO, at Novozymes and Novonesis. Rainer joined us on November 1st and brings a wealth of knowledge on how to lead, optimize and drive efficient finance organization focusing on returns, cash utilization and process efficiencies. I am very excited to have Rainer on board. And together with the rest of our new leadership team, we are in a very strong position to execute on and build Novonesis' future.

With that, let us now look to the 2023 performance for Novozymes. Overall, we performed very well in 2023 and in line with expectations. Organic sales growth of 5% was driven by pricing with flat volumes. In the fourth quarter, organic sales growth stood at solid 6% with pricing at around 4% and volumes growing by roughly 2%. Pricing for the year and the fourth quarter continued to be roughly similar across business areas, although a slightly less positive in Household Care. As mentioned, the overall growth performance for the year was very much in line with expectations we provided at the beginning of the year. We are expecting a stronger second half. We were expecting a stronger second half of the year, and the results we are presenting today confirm just that.

We continue to see that our well-diversified portfolio of solutions and broad market exposure provides us stability and growth in a volatile market. The solid 6% organic sales growth in the fourth quarter was driven by Bioenergy at 20% as well as Household Care at 10%. Agricultural, Animal Health & Nutrition was impacted by timing issues and continued destocking in BioAg whereas Grain & Tech Processing reversed the declining trend and posted growth. The ongoing destocking trend in the food-related part of the business continued longer than expected as customers' optimized inventories at the end of the year. Coupled with a strong comparator, Food, Beverages and Human Health declined. Adjusting for a one-off in the first quarter, the segment was roughly flat for the year....

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