Our growth formula
Royal Unibrew remains committed to delivering profitable earnings growth in the coming years. We drive our business to maximize long-term Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) and Earnings per share (EPS). Organic EBIT growth is our most important short-term value driver.
Volume growth
We are a leading regional multi-beverage company with market-leading portfolios of non-alcoholic and alcoholic beverages and strong market positions in numerous categories across the Nordic and Baltic countries. Additionally, we hold strong market-niche positions in Italy, France, BeNeLux, and Canada and have significant export business to more than 70 additional countries worldwide. Our local brand portfolios are complemented by renowned international brands under license.
Our focus on selected growth categories across geographies enables us to target higher organic volume growth than the underlying market growth. Our strong multi-beverage portfolio, strong distribution power and excellent in-store execution contribute to slightly growing market shares in the markets, in which we operate. Overall, we expect limited market growth in the coming years, with best prospects for non-alcoholic beverages.
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.
The price per volume unit has increased significantly over the past couple of years as a consequence of cost inflation, which means that we remain 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.
Our strategic focus on premiumization and on structurally growing the areas within our portfolio that comes with higher margins, enhances our ability to increase the price per volume unit, forming a solid foundation for an underlying margin expansion.
Operating efficiency
Cost efficiency and efficiency improvements in general have always been part of how we work and think.
Our decentralized organization, lean corporate set-up, and culture-driven”can-do’ attitude combined with a pronounced degree of team-work and sharing of best practices across the organization enable us to do things better and more efficient every day.
Acquisitions & partnerships
It has always been a core part of our strategy to create value through acquisitions. 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 that our business model enables us to extract synergies from the combination of businesses.
The timing of acquisitions is unpredictable and therefore not something that can be planned. Over the past couple of years, we have made several acquisitions that have been on our radar for many years. As standalone units, these are not transformative for Royal Unibrew but in combination with legacy business they have transformed Royal Unibrew from a country-based company to a pan-Nordic company with several Western European strongholds and 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.
Shareholder return
Our multi-beverage model is highly cash generative, allowing us to develop and grow the business in alignment with our strategic priorities while delivering an attractive return to our shareholders. Our focus is on creating positive total shareholder returns through a combination of increased distributions (dividends and share buy-backs) and share price growth.
Share buy-backs will serve as a balancing tool to ensure we maintain financial flexibility within our capital allocation policy
