Fabio Sandri
Analyst · Barclays. Please go ahead.
Sure. Thank you, Ben. Yes. Europe is facing and precedent impact in terms of inflation. And I think the one important point that we have within the past, we talk about they’re having some cost plus contracts, and that was the, the main structure of the contracts in Europe, but it was a cost plus based on grain. So there was not a lot of influence of other costs to our contracts and to our overall cost structure. Today only 30% of the inflation that we are seeing in the region is based on grain, although as we mentioned because of the Russian-Ukraine, or we are seeing 70% increases in the wheat in UK, but only 30% of the inflation or the increasing costs is due to grain. What happened in the region was unprecedented increase in all other costs, being utilities, CO2, micronutrient, labor, packaging, and transportation. So those are the ones that we need to address with our key customers and overall customers, and include that into the formulas. I think the other issue that we are facing in Europe is that we have typically a three month lag when negotiating those prices and have those prices escalate every day. We’re always behind the, the eight ball, and we’re always trying to capture those increases into the prices. So there is a lag and because of the continuous increase in all costs, not only feed, we’re always behind, but we have great relationships there. Like we mentioned that’s our stronger value for its innovation, we are innovating creating new products and we are doing all the renegotiations with the key customers on those contracts. We believe that we have path and we have renegotiated contracts that includes all these other factors into the cost with all of our major key customers. And we believe that our operation will improve, starting already improve during the quarter. And we believe that in Q2, Q3, Q4 going to see the benefits of those renegotiations. At the same time of course, we are realizing the synergies of the, especially on the back office of having those three in companies together. As a matter of fact, we are going to produce some of the Richmond sausages in one of the former operations that we have in Pilgrim’s, UK. So that is already opportunity to reduce cost and to increase sales by producing branded products into the facilities we already have in the Pilgrim’s UK. And we are also benefiting from some innovation. The consumer in UK is also facing constraint in their ability to buy products because of the inflationary that is impacting every customer there. And the inflation, especially in utilities has been really, really impacting, the availability of disposable income for, especially for groceries. And we’re innovating, creating new products that will address those issues to those customers and helping our retailers to continue to increase their top line.