Our growth formula
Royal Unibrew remains committed to delivering profitable earnings growth in the coming years. We drive our everyday business by maximizing organic EPS growth in the long-term.
Volume growth
Royal Unibrew has market leading portfolios of non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages throughout its main markets with multi-beverage offerings in the Nordic region and the Baltic countries and leading market share positions in several categories. In addition, Royal Unibrew has strong niche positions in the Netherlands, Italy, France and Canada as well as export business in more than 70 additional countries.
Our focus on selected growth categories across geographies aims for higher organic volume growth than the underlying market growth. Strong multi-beverage portfolio, strong distribution power and excellent in-store execution contribute to slightly growing market shares in the markets we operate. Overall, we expect our markets to develop flattish in the coming years.
Value growth
We optimize the value of our brand portfolio through a focused price/pack strategy, balancing pricing and packing to meet consumer expectations. In combination with the right innovations and a focus on profitable channels and categories this is how we drive value every day.
Price per volume unit has also increased significantly as a consequence of cost inflation, which means that we need to stay focused on the underlying profitability of our products. We do so by monitoring consumer demand, leveraging our price/pack architecture and other price/mix tools.
Operating leverage
Costs efficiency and efficiency improvements in general have always been part of how we work and think. Our culture-driven can-do attitude combined with a pronounced degree of teamwork entail that we do things better and more efficient every day.
Our strategic focus on structurally growing areas within our portfolio, which mostly comes with higher margins, optimizes our ability to increase price per volume unit, forming a solid foundation for an underlying margin expansion.
Mergers and acquisitions
It has always been a core part of our strategy to create value through acquisitions of companies. We have created significant value through acquisitions over time, and the foundation for acquisitions will always be that they can be incorporated in our operating model and, likewise, that our business model enables us to extract synergies from the combination of businesses.
Timing of acquisitions is unpredictable and therefore not something that can be planned. Over the past couple of years, we have made several acquisitions of companies that have been on our radar for many years. These are as standalone units not transformative for Royal Unibrew, but in its totality they have transformed Royal Unibrew from a country-based company to a pan-Nordic company with several Western European growth opportunities.
On top of this, we have made bolt-on or brands/category acquisitions to improve our market positions and likewise acquired production assets to expand production capacity and bring production closer to consumption. All acquisitions are expected to contribute to organic EBIT growth in the coming years.
Share buy-backs
Our multi-beverage model is a highly cash generative business, and it provides us the ability to develop the business in line with our strategic priorities while at the same time enable us to distribute an attractive pay-out to our shareholders. It is our priority to create a positive total shareholder return through a combination of growing distribution (dividends and share buy-backs) and increasing share price. Share buy-backs will be the balancing instrument to secure that we remain financially flexible within our capital allocation policy (see page 30).
Due to our net interst-bearing debt/EBITDA being above our target of 2.5x, share buy-backs are currently on hold.
