Specialist
Former divisional leader at Guala Closures SpA
Agenda
- Guala Closures’ portfolio and geographical exposure
- Cost management and ability to pass costs through to customer segments
- Market growth areas, including within liquors and spirits
- Russia-Ukraine conflict – Guala’s sales and production exposure to Ukraine, Russia and Belarus
- M&A, sustainability and product innovation outlook
Questions
1.
Could you give an overview of Guala Closures’ product portfolio and the key end markets it addresses?
2.
Spirits, wine and liquors are pretty significant in terms of overall revenue. Could you highlight the competitive dynamics across some of the key geographies here and how Guala Closures is sized comparatively to competitors in those spaces?
3.
To what degree does local presence make a sales difference? Is Guala selling the majority of its products directly to the bottlers of spirits or wine or liquors, or is it selling to distributors and the like?
4.
Recovery from the pandemic has continued, and I know revenue increased around 15% from 2020 to 2021. What are your thoughts on the recovery in volumes vs Guala’s ability to push through pricing increases?
5.
Could you break down the 2-3% price increases that Gula has been able to achieve? How much of that is accounting for increased input prices or costs on Guala’s side? How much is actually competitive advantage or market share?
6.
Could you discuss the profitability of Guala’s end markets or key products in the premium liquors and spirits markets? Could you put it into comparison with its competitors, if we are seeing higher quality and higher pricing on Guala’s end?
7.
What are the key profitability drivers of Guala’s different plants?
8.
What are the growth opportunities in the liquors and spirits market? How is this market expanding? What are your thoughts on a reasonable CAGR estimate in this segment for Guala?
9.
What are your thoughts on Guala’s exposure to Ukraine, Russia and Belarus from a production and plant perspective, given the Russia-Ukraine conflict?
10.
How significant is the facility in Ukraine in terms of production size or product mix? How could Guala look to replace some of those volumes if there were a prolonged period to get the plant back up and running?
11.
You mentioned Russia as a significant sales market for Guala. How is the business thinking about sales there? Are sanctions impacting it in any way? Is it more of a slow phasing-off of some of the business activity?
12.
Guala seems to have a significant bit of exposure to Ukraine and Russia. Would you say that’s pretty similar across its competitors in the closure market? Is it more impacted than some other players?
13.
You highlighted the impact of raw materials pricing. What are the key materials that Guala sources for its products? How are some of these costs trending recently?
14.
We are seeing costs rise across the board, especially in some of the more premium end market segments such as premium liquors. Is there any chance that these cost increases will decrease demand in 2022-23?
15.
We’ve talked about the competitive environment. Could you walk us through Guala’s positioning and the key competitors across some of its end markets and product areas?
16.
How you would assess Guala’s approach to inorganic growth? What M&A opportunities remain out there?
17.
We’ve seen sustainability highlighted as a trend in a lot of packaging spaces. What’s your view on how much customers in this space, including Guala’s customers, are using sustainability metrics or looking at sustainability of closures as a purchasing criterion? How do you see this developing over the coming years?
18.
You mentioned Guala having a differentiated portfolio in terms of quality. How important is product development and investing in innovation to long-term growth or market share increases?
19.
Are there any points we’ve touched on or anything that we might have missed that you would care to highlight before we conclude?
