Jeronimo Martins Pe (JRONF) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining this call dedicated to our first quarter results. In our corporate website, you can find the results release, a slide presentation, and a fact sheet for the periods. Our recently approved 2024 annual report is also available there, including our sustainability commitments for the 2024-2026 period. Unsurprisingly, 2025 started with a volatile and extremely uncertain landscape, further limiting visibility on consumers' behavior trends. Overall, the rise in minimum wages increased household disposable income in the countries where we operate. Notwithstanding, families remained cautious in their food spending and highly promotions-driven. In the light of this refrained context, we maintained our key strategic priorities. to ensure price competitiveness to earn the preference of consumers and continue to strengthen our market positions. Although basket inflation turned positive at our main food banners, the challenge, well known to us at this point, of operating with low top line inflation and high cost inflation persisted. Therefore, together with unwavering focus on sales, our teams maintain the tight control over all profitability drivers to mitigate the impact of margin pressure. With price competitiveness ensured, sales grew 3.8% or 1.9% at constant exchange rates. Following sales and even stricter cost management, EBITDA increased 3.8% or 1.2% at constant exchange rates, with the respective margins standing in line with prior year at 6.3%. This performance was achieved in a quarter marked by a negative calendar effect that for our main businesses ranged from 3 to 4 percentage points of sales growth. At the end of March, the group registered a positive cash position of €332 million. Looking now at the quar...