Oatly Group AB (NASDAQ:OTLY) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christian Hanke : No, in terms of the capital — the lower capital requirement, a big part of that is related to the strategic direction that we laid out in the call, in terms of turning into a more asset-light model. We also talked about the CapEx phasing actually in our previous earnings call when we reduced our annual CapEx by $200 million in 2022. So that combined sort of reduced the capital funding that we have by $200 million.

Rob Dickerson: Right. Okay. But I mean this next phase that we’re discussing today it doesn’t sound like that was the lion share. The lion’s share was kind of what we were talking about on the reduction in the Q2 call. Is that fair?

Christian Hanke : Yes. But also looking ahead, if you’re looking more — moving towards an asset-light model, that will also drive a lower capital need going forward as well.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Bryan Spillane from Bank of America.

Bryan Spillane : Thanks operator. Good morning, everyone. Just two questions on my end. The first one, in Ogden, you described technical — some technical issues. Can you provide more color on what the technical issues are? Is it the equipment doesn’t work? Is it a lack of training? Just really trying to understand like what actually isn’t working.

Jean Christophe : Thank you, Brian. Jean-Christophe. I will take this one. So on Ogden, we need to deal at two different things. One is the continued ramp-up of the factory. I think we said last quarter, we were in the last mile improvement to ramp up production. And the reality is that we are still improving and stabilizing production. So Daniel and myself have been three times to the site. We have now a very clear root cause analysis of what’s driving this long ramp-up and we have now a clear action plan. I’m happy to report that over the last 6 to 8 weeks now, we are seeing stable production there. On the other side, what Toni referred to is we had a onetime incident, technical incidents in the line at the end of the third week of August that kept one of our two oat-based line still up to mid-September.

And because you asked for specificity, what happened is we had an incident with one of our fire suppression systems, which is a safety device that is connected in the pipe between the oat, where we received oat from our oat tank into the process. It’s a safety device that didn’t work anymore and it took us a lot of time to get it replaced simply because it has an anti-explosive device into that, which means we cannot air tight it, and it has to go through the hole. So that’s exactly what happened. But the main topic is we continue the ramp up of our production, and we see good stability in the past weeks.

Bryan Spillane : Okay. No, that’s very helpful. Thank you for the detail. And then I guess maybe to follow up on the earlier question around multiple financing tracks. Toni, have you thought at all? Have you — has Oatly at all explored the potential of just merging with someone who’s larger has more scale? I mean, there’s a little bit of like the dog caught the car here, like you’ve got the growth but really having a difficult time scaling up to sort of service that growth. So in the range of possibilities, it is that something you’ve considered? And if not, why?

Toni Petersson : No, it’s a good question, and the answer is no. We’re not exploring that path.

Bryan Spillane : And why?