Cementos Pacasmayo S.A.A. (NYSE:CPAC) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call July 21, 2023 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Claudia Bustamante - Head, IR

Humberto Nadal - CEO & Director

Manuel Ferreyros - VP, Administration & Finance & CFO

Conference Call Participants

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Pacasmayo's Second Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions].

I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Mrs. Claudia Bustamante, Sustainability and Investor Relations Manager. Mrs. Bustamante, you may begin.

Claudia Bustamante

Thank you, Jenny. Good morning, everyone. Joining me on the call today is Mr. Humberto Nadal, our Chief Executive Officer; and Mr. Manuel Ferreyros, our Chief Financial Officer.

Mr. Nadal will begin our call with an overview of the quarter, focusing primarily on our strategic outlook for the short and medium term. Mr. Ferreyros will then follow with additional commentary on our financial results. We'll then turn the call over to your questions.

Please note that this call would include certain forward-looking statements. These statements relate to expectations, beliefs, projections, trends and other matters that are not historical facts and are therefore subject to risks and uncertainties that might affect future events or results. Descriptions of these risks are set forth in the company's regulatory filings.

With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Mr. Humberto Nadal.

Humberto Nadal

Thank you, Claudia. Welcome, everyone, to today's conference call, and thank you for joining us today. This quarter, we experienced some demand-side challenges as heavy rains during March and April caused a decrease in demand. Since May, we have seen a consistent decrease in our cement daily shipments, which gives us the confidence to believe that the second half of the year should be much stronger in terms of demand.

It is also important to note that even though revenues were down 12.1% in the second quarter when compared to the second quarter of last year, EBITDA margin reached 25.5%, an increase of 1.5 percentage points year-over-year. This is a very clear indicator of how we are maximizing profitability by striving for efficiencies in this complex demand environment.

I would like now to focus on a remarkable event that happened this quarter. As we have mentioned before, last year we launched the EcoSaco, a new technology that allows the cement bag to disintegrate completely within the concrete mix achieving 0 waste. This is a significant innovation in a country like Peru where most cement is still sold in bags, but it's also a challenging one.