Givaudan S.A. (0QPS) Q2 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our 2024 half-year results conference call. The company news on our half-year results have been published earlier this morning on our website, where you will also find the slides for today's presentation and the half-year report. Tom Hallam and myself will take you through the presentation before we answer your questions at the end. Now, I'd like to start the presentation with a highlight and invite you to turn to page three. And so before moving to any numbers, first thing first, and let me start with the last bullet first. As you've seen the announcement this morning, Tom Hallam has decided to retire and will hand over the CFO position to Stuart Harris, effective August 1st, 2024. Along with my EC colleagues, I have very much enjoyed the great partnership with Tom as CFO over the last eight years, driving our industry-leading financial performance. Many of you on this call know Tom and can testify the great CFO he has been for Givaudan. I'm very confident it will continue with Stuart, who has grown in Givaudan over the last 15 years in many functions of our finance organization, and over the more recent past, driving the numerous acquisitions we made to their successful completion. Finally, it demonstrates the strong continuity we have at Givaudan in succession planning. Let's move now to the numbers. So I'm very pleased to present to you a strong performance in the first half of 2024, driven by a high level of sales growth in volumes across all markets, all segments, and all customer groups, which translates into a broad set of industry-leading financial results. These results once again highlight the unique position of Givaudan and the strategic choice that we have made to focus on an extensive range of highly value-added pro...