Compañía Cervecerías Unidas S.A. (NYSE:CCU) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 9, 2023 11:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Claudio Las Heras - Head, Investor Relations

Felipe Dubernet - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Felipe Ucros - Scotiabank

Thiago Bortoluci - Goldman Sachs

Fernando Olvera - Bank of America

Henrique Brustolin - BTG Pactual

Carlos Laboy - HSBC Securities

Operator

Good day, everyone and welcome to CCU's Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call on the 9th of November. Today's conference call is being recorded.

At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Claudio Las Heras, the Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead sir.

Claudio Las Heras

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for attending CCU's third quarter 2023 conference call. Today with me is Mr. Felipe Dubernet, Chief Financial Officer. You have received a copy of the company's consolidated third quarter 2023 results. Felipe will now review our overall performance and we will then move on to a Q&A session.

Before we begin as usual, 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 the 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 our 20-F form filed with the US 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, Mr. Felipe Dubernet.

Felipe Dubernet

Thank you, Claudio, and thank you to you all for joining us today. During the third quarter 2023, CCU continued making progress to recover financial results and profitability in a challenging and volatile economic environment, the later is strong at the operation at the operational level, increasing consolidated EBITDA by 27.7% and improving 269 basis points EBITDA margin.

The performance of the quarter shows that the path to improve our profitability under the regional plan HerCCUles is moving forward. However, stronger efforts are needed in the context of economic deacceleration and volatility in exchange rates and commodity prices. This drives us to focus on the pillars of HerCCUles.

First, maintain business scale, strengthening revenue manageable efforts, deliver efficiency gains through our transformation program, optimizing CapEx and working capital, focusing on core brands and high-volume margin innovations and continue investing in our brand equity.