Oatly Group reports Q2 EPS (15c), consensus (12c)

Reports Q2 revenue $196M, consensus 209.67M. Jean-Christophe Flatin, Oatly’s CEO, commented, “In the second quarter, we continued to make progress towards our goal of achieving profitable growth in 2024. As expected, we continued our sequential improvement of gross margin and increased our advertising investments to continue to fuel growth. This progress is most evident in our EMEA and Americas segments, both of which continued to improve Adjusted EBITDA while increasing demand-generating investments. However, as Asia has transitioned to a post-pandemic era, consumers have behaved differently than we had originally expected, and we need to adjust. Similar to the improvement plans that we have been executing in EMEA and Americas, we have initiated a comprehensive improvement plan that will enable our Asia business to adapt to the evolving environment and strengthen the core business before building a significantly bigger business. We have also taken actions to further simplify our corporate functions and Americas segment overhead, which will lead to additional cost savings as well as increased focus and agility. While we are reducing our 2023 sales guidance, we continue to expect to achieve our fourth quarter gross margin target of the high 20%s, and we remain on-track for achieving positive adjusted EBITDA in 2024.”