Compañía Cervecerías Unidas S.A. (NYSE:CCU) Q4 2022 Earnings Conference Call March 1, 2023 10:00 AM ET
Company Participants
Claudio Las Heras - Head-Investor Relations
Felipe Dubernet - Chief Financial Officer
Conference Call Participants
Felipe Ucros - Scotiabank
Lucas Ferreira - JPMorgan
Sorabh Daga - HSBC
Henrique Brustolin - BTG
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Good day, and welcome to CCU's Fourth Q2022 Earnings Conference Call on the 1 March 2023. Today's conference call is being recorded. At this time, I would now like to turn the conference over to Claudio Heras, the Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.
Claudio Las Heras
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for attending CCU's Fourth Q2022 Conference Call. Today with me are Mr. Felipe Dubernet, Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Carlos Anwandter, Financial Planning and Investor Relations Manager. You have received a copy of the company's consolidated fourth Q2022 results. Felipe will now review our overall performance, and we will then move on to our Q&A session. Before we begin, please take note of our cautionary statement.
The statements made in this call that relate to CCU's future performance or financial results are forward-looking statements, which involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual performance or results to materially differ. These statements should be taken in conjunction with the additional information about risks and uncertainties set forth in CCU's annual report in Form 20-F filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and in the annual report submitted to the CMF and available on our website.
It is now my pleasure to introduce Felipe Dubernet.
Felipe Dubernet
Thank you, Claudio, and thank you, you all for joining us today. In 2022, we faced a particularly challenging year for the profitability of the business, especially in Chile. Consolidated EBITDA dropped 19.6%, while EBITDA margin deteriorated from 17.9% to 13.2%.
Financial results were mainly affected by negative external effects coming from the depreciation of our main local currencies against the U.S. dollar and higher prices in raw materials, packaging and energy, impacting our costs. The latter was partially offset with prices and efficiencies.
Net income contracted 14.7%. In spite of the deterioration of our results, I would like to comment on the actions that we took in 2022, which put us in a position to look for profitability improvement in 2023. First, we were able to preserve business scale as volumes decreased 1.1% despite a high comparison base from last year and a weaker consumption environment. Second, we overall kept market share in our core categories.