‘Outlook for the repositioned business is excellent’: Aryzta CEO
As the company posted full year 2012 (FY12) revenues of $3.7bn (€2.87bn) – up 11.3% - for its food group dedicated to speciality bakery, focus remained on pushing ahead with its €400m transformation initiative ATI.
Announced in September 2011, the program will create a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system ensuring a single point of contact for customers to access Aryzta’s entire portfolio.
“Our transformation is a working progress; we are about half way complete,” Owen Killian, CEO of Aryzta, said in today’s investors call.
Sales teams in North America have had access to a new centralised ERP system since July, Killian said, and “further capacity reorganisation and investment will take place in the financial year 2013 (FY13) and this will reconfigure our capability and our capacity in line with customers’ needs.”
“Speciality bakery is still a fragmented industry and there are substantial consolidation opportunities to facilitate future growth,” he said.
“The outlook for the repositioned business is excellent,” he added.
Consolidation opportunities
Aryzta has traditionally operated on several ERP systems with different configurations, product coding and customer coding, the CEO said.
“These operations just weren’t able to operate globally,” he added.
“What we are trying to achieve is a single point of contact for customers so that they can access our entire capabilities and enable our talented chefs and bakers to therefore play on a much bigger stage,” he said.
While a completion date was not outlined, Killian made clear that substantial revenue growth will not be seen until completion.
‘Satisfactory’ FY12 earnings snapshot
Killian said that results for FY12 were “satisfactory given the challenging macro environment”.
North America represented 40% of overall revenues and posted a 13.2% rise, Europe pulled in 44% of overall revenue and spiked 7.5% and the remaining 8% for the rest of the world (Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia) was up 23%.
The quick service sector represented the biggest sales channel (30%) compared to large retailers at 25%, other food service (25%) and convenience and independent retailers (20%).
