Coca-Cola Europacific Partners PLC (NASDAQ:CCEP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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So on top of that, I’d say, as a bottling business, we continue to drive better execution and customer service. So it’s hard to pick one single element. I also think that we did a good job in ’22, managing price realization with affordability. I remember on some of our calls last year, there was a question around what are we taking enough price. I think we were pretty consistent saying that we wanted to balance the midterm with the short-term cost headwinds, and I think we took the right level of pricing, which allowed us to continue to promote our brands and keep them accessible for our consumers. So yes, I suppose what I feel good about is it’s not one standout action. I think it’s a myriad of good decisions over a number of years and a category that people continue to enjoy on a daily basis.

And I think that’s part of its resilience. And I think you also see that we’re looking to connect much more on the digital platforms on social media. I think some of the new assets, particularly around brand Coke and Coke Zero whether it’s on the gaming side or on music continue to kind of build out that preference. So a bit of a long answer, Ed, but there’s a lot in there, and I think it’s reassuring for our investors that, that’s over multiple years. It’s not just one thing we did in ’22.

Operator: We will take our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Eric Serotta from Morgan Stanley.

Eric Serotta: Great. Thank you. So just a quick housekeeping item and then a question. In terms of the customer dispute, and I apologize if you answered this already, but what’s the state of that? Has that been resolved? And if so what was the timing on that? And then the main question I had was looking at cash flow. Nik, you’ve spoken about the further opportunity in the past and you gave some pretty healthy midterm guidance. Can you talk a bit about where API is in working capital metrics versus the rest of the portfolio and the scope for both API and the rest of the portfolio to free up additional cash over the next few years?

Damian Gammell: So Eric, I might take the first question. So that customer situation was resolved in Q4. So we’ve come into 2023 in a good place. It was mainly in Germany but that’s now resolved. So — and it really impacted Q4 early December. But as you saw in our results, we still had a very, very strong Q4 on the back of that. So I’ll hand over to Nik to talk about free cash flow.

Nik Jhangiani: Yes. And we did call out — actually, when you exclude the impact of that disruption actually Q4 was in a nice level of growth. So as Damian said, it had quite a short-term impact of about 5 to 6 weeks. On free cash flow, listen, I think we’ve hopefully demonstrated our commitment on that key metric. And as I highlighted, we’ve delivered over €1.2 billion in benefits from working capital and only since the acquisition of API, which we all seem to forget, it was only about 1.5 years ago, we were able to deliver about €120 million of benefits by taking some of the actions that we took here in Europe. So from an angle of where are we, I think there is some more opportunity, both in Europe and API differences in terms of where we would get that.

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