Kerry Group plc (KYGA) Q1 2025 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to our Q1 2025 trading update call. I'm joined on the call by our CEO, Edmund Scanlon, and our CFO, Marguerite Larkin. As usual, Edmund and Marguerite will take you through our presentation, and we will then open the lines up for your questions. Before we begin, please note the usual disclaimer on our Q1 presentation regarding forward-looking statements. I will now hand over to Edmund. Thanks, William, and good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our call. So moving to slide four and my overview comments for Q1. We delivered a good overall performance in the first quarter, particularly given market conditions. Beginning with revenue, we delivered Q1 volume growth of 3.1%, which represented another strong end market outperformance. And this was driven by good volume growth in the Americas and AFMEA, with Europe similar to the prior year. From a channel perspective, food service delivered another good performance, driven by new menu innovations, LTOs, and solutions to reduce operational cost and complexity, with growth in the retail channel supported by increased nutritional enhancement activity with our customers. And across our end-use markets, growth was led by beverage, bakery, and snacks, driven by our savory taste and taste and salt and sugar reduction technologies, as well as integrated solutions incorporating our botanicals, natural extracts, and enzymes. Moving to margins, we delivered strong EBITDA margin expansion of 90 basis points in the first quarter, primarily driven by accelerated operational excellence. And we continue to see good margin expansion opportunity as we look out across the year. And on guidance, which I'll touch on in a little bit more detail later on. We remain on track to deliver our full year guidance an...