Hilton Food Group Plc (HLTFF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Hilton Foods full year results 2023. I'm Steve Morales, the group's chief executive, and I'm presenting today with our chief financial officer, Matt Osborne. We'll share our full year performance this morning, review the progress that we're making in the business versus our strategic priorities and lay out the strength of the platform that we have in place to go after future growth. This has been a good financial performance for the year achieved against a backdrop that has remained volatile. As a group, we've seen a pleasing uptick in group revenues and volumes. In addition, and particularly encouraging, has been the growth in profits, which is largely down to delivering our seafood turnaround ahead of our plan. We've also made progress in further strengthening our balance sheet with notable improvements in our free cash flow, which positions the business well to support future growth opportunities. I'm also pleased to announce the final dividend of 32 pence an increase of 7.7% on the prior year and in line with our progressive dividend policy. Our financial outturn has been driven by the strong operational performance across all the businesses. Our core meat category has performed well in both retail and food service. In APAC, we've seen another strong year of revenue and volume growth, whilst in the UK and Europe, we've shown good resilience given the economic backdrop. Particular credit must go to everyone within our seafood business who have delivered the turnaround ahead of plan and returned the business to full year operating profit. This has created a sustainable business foundation to support future growth. We've responded to market trends in vegan and vegetarian and taken decisive action in the second half of the year to ...