Is Beyond Meat getting back into shape?
The market for vegetable meat and plant-based products in general, due to the increase in prices, is going through a complicated moment but Beyond Meat is attempting to recover and raises its sales forecasts for 2024. Facts, numbers and comments
After a downturn , Beyond Meat, a leading plant-based meat company, shows improvement amid disappointing quarterly results . In fact, despite the ninth consecutive quarter of revenue decline compared to the previous year, the Los Angeles company beat analysts' revenue estimates and raised its sales forecast for 2024.
BEYOND MEAT'S QUARTERLY RESULTS
Beyond Meat's second-quarter net revenue fell 8.8% to $93.2 million from a year earlier. However, according to LSEG data , analysts expected revenue of $87.8 million. That, and bullish sales forecasts for the current year, sent the company's shares up about 2% in after-the-bell trading yesterday. In the last 12 months they had fallen by 66% .
Notably, Beyond Meat reported a 6.1% increase in quarterly net revenue per pound, thanks to reduced trade discounts and product pricing across U.S. retail and restaurant channels.
In the domestic retail channel, the company reported a 20.5% increase in net revenue per pound, compared to -6.3% a year earlier. The company's quarterly volumes fell 14% following a 22.9% decline a year earlier.
SURVIVAL STRATEGIES
Beyond Meat explained that the increase in net revenue per pound was primarily driven by “reduced trade discounts, increased prices of some of its products in the U.S. retail and foodservice channels, and, to a lesser extent, changes in the product sales mix, partially offset by unfavorable changes in foreign currency exchange rates".
The plant-based meat company's move to raise prices and cut costs last year, Reuters notes, also helped boost quarterly margins, which rose to 14.7% from 2.2% a year earlier .
Furthermore, easing production and logistics expenses has helped Beyond Meat offset the impact of rising raw material costs, which are weighing on the results of a giant like McDonald's . And promotional and marketing activities helped attract customers who had switched to lower-priced animal proteins.
FORECASTS INSIDE AND OUT BEYOND MEAT
“We expect pricing actions in the U.S. to provide a boost to net revenue per pound in both [retail and foodservice] channels throughout the year,” CEO Ethan Brown said following the share of the results.
Beyond Meat, in fact, expects net sales of between $320 and $340 million for fiscal 2024, compared to the previous forecast of $315-345 million.
For eMarketer analyst Blake Droesch, “the second quarter results show a preview of what Beyond Meat's near and medium future is likely to be: a gradual decline in sales losses with a path to profitability.”
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/beyond-meat-si-rimette-in-forma/ on Thu, 08 Aug 2024 09:14:16 +0000.