Coca-Cola FEMSA, S.A.B. de C.V. (NYSE:KOF) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Fernando Olvera: Hi. Good morning and thanks for taking my question. The first one is related to volumes. If you can comment what has been the performance so far in April in your different markets? And the second question, can you give us some color of how margins performed by country in South America? Thank you.

Jorge Collazo: Hi, Fernando. How are you? It’s Jorge. Regarding your first question, I would say, April pretty much a continuation of the performance we have seen, which is encouraging. Obviously, giving inter-month performance is challenging. We have information for a little over 20 days. But so far, we haven’t seen any significant changes to what the quarter was. So, we continue to see positive performance. The plans that we are executing across our territories are coming along well. So we see nothing really to flag with regards to April performance at this point in time, Fernando.

Ian Craig Garcia: Regarding margins, Fernando, the pressure since our budget that we see in margins comes from Mexico, given increased labor, maintenance and freight expenses that we have been seeing. Sure. [Technical Difficulty] This is not only in Mexico, but in all of our territories. So we are working especially in Mexico to try to close any margin [Technical Difficulty] expecting for the year, looking for savings initiatives mainly, but the rest of our operations were being in terms of profit, expecting to achieve our budget as we have projected it.

Fernando Olvera: Okay. Thanks, Ian. I couldn’t hear the last part. Thanks for the comment about Mexico. But in South America, how margins performed in Brazil, Colombia after the solid top line growth?

Gerardo Cruz Celaya: We had a very good performance in South America margins excluding Argentina and we made those remarks in the prepared remarks of the call. So Argentina is a dragger for margins as could be expected, but the rest of South America showed great performance in margins during the first quarter.

Fernando Olvera: Okay, great. Thank you, Gery.

Operator: Thank you very much. As we have no further questions left in the queue, I would like to turn the call back over to Mr. Collazo for any closing remarks.

Jorge Collazo: Well, thank you very much, everyone, for your interest in Coca-Cola FEMSA and for joining us on today’s call. As always, myself and the rest of the Investor Relations team, we are available to answer any remaining questions. And we look forward to speaking to all of you again very soon. Thank you and have a great day.

Operator: Thank you very much. That concludes today’s conference. You may now disconnect.