Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. (NYSE:FDP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Mitch Pinheiro: Okay. Yes, it’s a nice – it’s a nice high margin business therefore. And then on the fresh and value added, margins were down versus a year ago in the quarter, which explained why – what do you expect for 2023 in this business? Is it going to be dependent upon product mix or do you see some fixed cost leverage and some things that you’re doing that you can sort of outrun some of those headwinds?

Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh: The headwinds were the packaging materials and transportation and we are seeing this to be now easing kind of to mitigate some of this additional costs that we faced during ’22, and also the product mix, Mitch. I mean sometimes you’ll have shortage on certain items which increases your cost, but I believe all-in-all, we should be able to maintain our historical kind of margins on the value-added like products, which is fresh-cut in particular.

Mitch Pinheiro: And you were talking – another question, you were talking about within that segment, the avocado business. With avocado prices down, do you expect margins to stabilize in the early part of 2023, that’s really get back to again more normalized margin level?

Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh: Yes, well, you know what has happened during the last, I would say, four, five months, is that the avocado pricing was more – very consistent and very stable unlike ’21 and ’22 first half was crazy. The kind of cost increases, price increases in Mexico. And what we have seen from – in the last few months is that, the prices were more stable, no volatility, which helped the industry in general, to be able to predict better. And as I mentioned, we are using now Artificial Intelligence, which we have been working on for several years now and we have come to almost 95% predictability and we’re going to roll that as well for supply and demand as well. So we’re going to be using technology as well in terms of predictability for avocados, which is the most difficult, and that’s actually why we chose avocado to be the best commodity to apply AI, is because it’s the most difficult.

And then once we do that and once we did that actually we are going to roll it out to all other SKUs or commodities that we handle and this will help us going forward in the future.

Operator: And there are no further questions at this time, I will turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Mohammad Abu-Ghazaleh: I would like to thank everyone for joining us on this call today and hope to talk to you on our next call in May I hope. Thank you and have a good day.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that will conclude today’s meeting. We thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

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