Vita Coco Company Inc (COCO) 2025 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Hello, and welcome to The Vita Coco Company's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Liz. I'll be coordinating your call today. (Operator Instructions) I'd now hand the call over to John Mills with ICR.

Thank you, and welcome to The Vita Coco Company fourth quarter 2025 and full year earnings results conference call. Today's call is being recorded.

With us are Mr. Mike Kirban, Executive Chairman; Martin Roper, Chief Executive Officer; and Corey Baker, Chief Financial Officer. By now, everyone should have access to the company's fourth quarter earnings release issued earlier today.

This information is available on the Investor Relations section of The Vita Coco Company's website at investors.thevitacococompany.com. Also on the website, there is an accompanying presentation of our commercial and financial performance results.

Certain comments made on this call include forward-looking statements, which are subject to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future events and are subject to several risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements.

Please refer to today's press release and other filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements made today.

Also during the call, we will use some non-GAAP financial measures as we describe our business performance. Our SEC filings as well as the earnings press release and supplementary earnings presentation provide reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures and are available on the website as well.

And with that, it is my pleasure to now turn the call over to Mike Kirban, our Co-Founder and Executive Chairman.

Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results and our expectations for our performance in 2026. I want to start by thanking all of our colleagues across the globe for our continued strong performance and overcoming the unusual challenges of 2025 to deliver a record year, while also staying committed to The Vita Coco Company and advancing our mission of creating ethical, sustainable, better-for-you beverages that uplift our communities and do right by our planet.

I'm incredibly pleased with our 2025 full year performance and yet even more excited about the opportunities for our category, our current momentum and our ability to deliver very high execution levels, which all bodes well for our future.

Coconut Water remains one of the fastest-growing categories in the beverage aisle according to our retail data for 2025 growing 22% in the US, 32% in the UK and over 100% in Germany. For the full year, Vita Coco Coconut Water, excluding our coconut milk products like Treats, grew 21% in retail dollars in the US, 32% in the UK and over 200% in Germany. This helped drive a strong full year growth in global net sales, gross profit, net income and adjusted EBITDA.

Our international business is accelerating, driven by strong performance in Europe. Our increased investment in the UK, Germany and other select European markets is paying off with healthy growth and brand share wins such that the International segment growth contributed 29% of the 2025 total company net sales growth. We will continue to invest in these core markets whilst exploring opportunities in additional international markets where we are well positioned to enter or drive profitable growth long-term.

Our recent appointment of Charles van Es as Chief Commercial Officer with global responsibility is indicative of our focus on international business and our commitment to strategically invest in this long-term opportunity. Charles has been with Vita Coco almost 10 years, most recently leading our U.S. sales team, which has delivered years of strong growth as he built our sales and category management capabilities. I'm excited that he is taking on this larger role, as I believe that our International business could eventually be as large as our US business is today.

In 2026, we will continue to double down on active hydration across markets as a driver of consumer growth, positioning Vita Coco as the natural choice for performance-minded consumers. Building on our strong occasion-based marketing framework, we'll be expanding more deliberately into sport and recovery.

We'll endeavour to leverage professional athletes and partnerships to authentically demonstrate the role Vita Coco plays in real performance and recovery moments. With 3.5 times the electrolytes of the leading sport drinks, and clean ingredients, we believe that Vita Coco is uniquely positioned to recruit new consumers, increase usage frequency and even further unlock the next phase of sustained consumer growth.

The acceleration of the category that we saw in late 2024 continued through 2025, which combined with improved inventory and strong execution produced our excellent full year results. Looking forward, we expect to maintain strong growth trends as we invest in and develop the Coconut Water category in our priority markets and develop and nurture new markets. Our asset-light model, leading market share and strong cash generation positions us well to take advantage of the opportunities ahead.

As I've said before, I believe that the coconut water category is in the very early stages of gaining mainstream appeal on a global level. Coconut Water appears to be transitioning from niche to mainstream, and we are at the forefront of that trend. If we continue the household penetration and consumption gains that we're seeing, I'm confident that Coconut Water will one day be as large as some of the major categories across the beverage aisle.

And now I'll turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Martin Roper.

Thanks, Mike, and good morning, everyone. I am pleased to report Vita Coco's record performance in 2025. We finished with net sales up 18%, driven by full year growth of Vita Coco Coconut Water of 26%. Our brand trends are very healthy and driving the company growth. Our recent private label trends represent the previously discussed net effects of lost and gain business with some business wins expected to start in 2026, which will improve these trends.

Our Q4 branded scan results in the United States continue to be very strong with a small benefit at the end of the quarter from the Walmart reset that took place mid-November, in which we recovered most of the distribution loss at the end of 2024 and improved our total distribution and space allocation from 2024 levels now in what we believe is a higher traffic aisle.

We show some photos of a range of the set in Walmart in our investor deck to demonstrate the improvement. Our US Vita Coco branded business is benefiting from strong volume growth and also the net impact of the two price increases taken in the US last year. In November, it was announced that going forward, most coconut water products would be exempt from the tariffs announced earlier in 2025.

These changes are applicable to most of our products sold in the US but did not materially affect our fourth quarter results as we continue to sell inventory, which has been imported subject to tariffs in place before these changes.

We expect cost of goods in 2026, the benefit from the tariff exemptions for coconut water and from lower full year average ocean freight costs with those benefits partially offset by increased finished goods costs driven by normal inflationary pressures and some weakness in the US dollar and increased domestic logistics costs.

We believe average ocean freight rates during the quarter were still slightly elevated relative to historical levels, even as we saw rates soften through the quarter. We operated the quarter primarily on spot rates with some fixed price arrangements on certain lanes to secure capacity.

At the end of the quarter, we started exploring medium-term fixed price commitments as we received offers closer to spot. We have made some commitments as of today that would cover approximately 25% of our expected 2026 ocean shipping requirements.

This will allow us to reduce volatility in 2026 from potential fluctuations in ocean freight rates. As we look to 2026, we expect healthy brand growth in our focus markets and positive growth in private label after the first quarter, benefiting from the new and regained business referenced earlier.

We have secured capacity to support our expected growth and are well positioned with inventory and supply capability. We are excited by our start to the year, particularly the Circana US trends of 24% growth for both the Coconut Water category and Vita Coco Coconut Water through February 8, '26, where we have benefited from some favorable timing of promotional activity early in the year and the impact of the improved distribution at Walmart, which we estimated is adding approximately 6% to the year-to-date brand trends.

While we expect to hold most of our pricing taken in 2025 to cover our inflationary cost of goods pressures, we do anticipate some increase in promotional initiatives so that we remain competitive. We still have the residual impact of the 2025 tariffs in our inventory, which means we will not see the long-term cost of goods representative of our ongoing business until Q2.

From an investment perspective, we are endeavouring to deliver leverage on our SG&A spend, even as with the strong momentum for the category and our brand, we plan to increase investments in marketing and sales to secure long-term brand growth opportunities.

To summarize, our category is very healthy. Our brand is performing well, and we are turning around our private label trends. We expect our international business to continue to grow at strong rates of a larger revenue base, which should contribute more meaningfully to our total growth.

Our supply chain is performing well and capable of supporting continued strong growth. We are confident in our team's ability to execute and deliver on our plans for 2026, and our confidence in the category and Vita Coco brand trends remains very high.

With that, I will turn the call over to Corey Baker, our Chief Financial Officer.

Thanks, Martin, and good morning, everyone. I will now provide you with some additional details on the full year 2025 financial results and our outlook for 2026. For 2025, net sales increased $94 million or 18% year-over-year to $610 million, driven by strong Vita Coco Coconut Water net sales growth of 26%, partially offset by private label declines of 19%.

On a segment basis, within the Americas, net sales grew 15% to $509 million led by Vita Coco Coconut Water that grew net sales by 24% to $424 million. That was partially offset by private label, which decreased 30% to $63 million.

Vita Coco Coconut Water saw a 19% volume increase and a 4% net price/mix benefit. Our Q4 shipments benefited from stronger-than-expected shipments at the end of the year, which resulted in higher distributor inventory than we had anticipated. We estimate that this inflated our fourth quarter net sales by approximately $7 million. Private label sales decreased 30% driven by a 26% decrease in volume and price mix decrease of 5%. The weakness in private label Americas shipments was due to the loss of regions of key retailers that started early in Q2.

Our international net sales were up 37%, where we saw continued strong net sales growth across branded and private label coconut water. Vita Coco Coconut Water net sales grew 43% and private label increased 34%.

Consolidated gross profit was $223 million, an increase of $24 million versus the prior year. On a percentage basis, gross margins finished at 37% for the year. This was down approximately 200 basis points from the 39% reported in 2024. The decrease in gross margins resulted from higher product costs and the impact of tariffs, partially offset by branded coconut water pricing and favorable product mix.

Within the year, we expensed $14 million of the $16 million in tariffs we paid, representing about 2 points of gross margin impact on the year. The remaining $2 million of tariffs capitalized in inventory will flow through our P&L in early 2026.

Moving on to operating expenses. SG&A costs increased to $140 million driven by increased investments in people resources focused on driving future growth and adding supply capacity in addition to increased marketing spend.

Net income attributable to shareholders was $71 million or $1.19 per diluted share compared to $56 million or $0.94 per diluted share, the 27% increase in net income was primarily driven by the increase in gross profit and a gain on the fair value adjustments to FX derivatives in the current year versus a loss in the prior year, partially offset by higher SG&A investment and increased income tax expenses.

Our effective tax rate for 2025 was 23% versus 21% last year. The increase in the effective tax rate is largely driven by the mix of discrete tax items recognized during the year, which were less favorable than in the prior year.

Adjusted EBITDA was $98 million or 16% of net sales, up from $84 million or 16% of net sales in 2024. The increase was primarily due to the increased gross profit, partially offset by higher year-on-year SG&A expenses.

Turning to our balance sheet and cash flow. As of December 31, 2025, our balance sheet remained very strong, with total cash on hand of $197 million and no debt under our revolving credit facility. For the full year, we generated $32 million of cash driven by strong net income, partially offset by increase in the working capital, mostly due to our $27 million investment in inventory to support service levels and expected growth in 2026. Share repurchases of $11 million and $8 million of capital investments, primarily related to our new office spaces, which is significantly above our normal CapEx levels.

We started 2026 with very strong category trends in our major markets, healthy inventory levels and confidence in our team and our Vita Coco brand. We're excited about our ability to continue to deliver strong results. We expect net sales between $680 million and $700 million, with expected gross margin for the full year of approximately 38%, delivering adjusted EBITDA of $122 million to $128 million.

We are planning strong net sales growth based on the U.S. category growing mid-teens and our international business, led by the U.K. and Germany, maintaining their healthy growth rates. We expect consolidated growth of Vita Coco Coconut Water of low- to mid-teens with our U.S. Vita Coco net sales slightly lagging the category due to impact from the strong year-end 2025 shipments to our DSD partners mentioned above as well as investments in distributor incentives to deliver growth and the anticipated impact from the launch of private label at a large US retailer.

We expect strong private label net sales growth of 20% to 25% in the US as we regain some geographic regions of multiple resellers and launch a new one, as previously discussed. From a phasing perspective, we expect the Vita Coco promotion at a major US retailer to move forward by one month. While this will result in consistent major promotions over the first half, we expect the shift of a portion of our net sales from Q2 to Q1 provide [Coco] Coconut Water.

We expect 2026 gross margins to improve from 2025 levels as we benefit from the branded pricing taking in 2025, the removal of tariffs and favorable ocean freight rates, offset by the aforementioned promotional and incentive impact. We expect to invest a portion of the pricing we took in 2025 into incremental US branded promotions. We expect that this will result in full year brand pricing increases of low single digits with a higher mix of private label resulting in consolidated net price realization growing slightly.

The phasing of branded pricing actions implemented in Q2 and early Q3 of 2025 will result in stronger net pricing early in the year and potentially declining net pricing starting in Q3 due to the promotional investments.

We expect SG&A to increase mid to high single digits as a percentage of net sales as we increase investments in marketing in key personnel areas to deliver the expected 2026 results and invest for long-term growth.

These investments will be partially offset by a planned reduction in incentive compensation. We expect to deliver SG&A leverage of about 1 point over 2025 as we continue to deliver strong growth with disciplined investments.

And with that, I'd like to turn the call back to Martin for his closing remarks.

Thank you, Corey. To close, I'd like to reiterate our confidence in the long-term potential of The Vita Coco company, our ability to build a better beverage platform and the strength of our Vita Coco brand and the Coconut Water category.

We have strong brands and a solid balance sheet and believe that we are well positioned to drive category and brand growth both domestically and internationally. We are confident in our ability and are excited about our key initiatives to drive long-term growth.

Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for your interest in The Vita Coco Company. That concludes our fourth quarter 2025 prepared remarks, and we will now take your questions.

(Operator Instructions) Eric Des Lauriers, Craig-Hallum.

Congrats on another very strong quarter. My first question is on private label. So there's certainly been a lot of movement in recent years. Nice to see the regained regions and some new additional wins. Could you give us a bit more of a sense of the cadence of growth expected throughout the year?

I think you said you expect it to improve after Q1. And then just in general, with all the movement in recent years, how should we think about the white space opportunity in private label in the Americas, just from here on out?

So Eric, as we've talked about the phasing of the private label is quite hard, we have a difficult lap in Q1 as we still retain many regions. And then post Q1, we should start to see that new business impact the P&L. What is still hard to call because of the way we account for it is when new customers will come on board. So you should see that full year growth, 20% to 25% in Americas, starting in Q2, but somewhat of a ramp towards the back half.

Okay. That's helpful. And then--?

I would just add, the private label business is much more diversified than it would have been in the past, both new retailers that have been added or being added in the US, but also internationally.

Okay. Great. And then just in terms of like the white space opportunity in private label, should we think of there as being considerable more opportunities for you guys to win in the Americas? Or are you sort of -- look, you mentioned your diversified, you have a solid chunk, like should we not look for that as being a major growth driver in the US going forward? Again, just trying to get a better sense of the white space opportunity after you've won all these new regions.

Yeah. In the US, private label is a little bit dominated by one major club player and just putting that player aside for a bit in the remaining private label universe in the US, we aren't supplying at all. There are still some retailers there that we would look at that business and say it was attractive.

And so there's still opportunities to win that business or parts of that business with some retailers that we currently don't service. As it relates to the major player, we have serviced that player sort of pretty consistently but reduced regions over time and we remain open to adding more regions or I suppose, they could take reasons away. It's the nature of the business, right? We've described it as lumpy. But given their size, their decisions are significant decisions to our business.

Yeah. No, that all makes sense. And then just last one for me, just looking to drill down a little more into international, certainly very encouraging results there. I think we've talked previously about -- I think this was sort of specific to Germany about the need to sort of get in via private label first and it's sort of a crawl, walk, run type ramping.

Just wondering if you could provide a bit more kind of qualitative assessment of international as we kind of look at it right now. Are we sort of poised to see continued acceleration in growth here? Are we still in the sort of building out phase? Just a bit more color on the international opportunity would be great.

Sure. I think you can see in our reported numbers, international sales, I think, grew 37%, which is an acceleration on the growth of the prior year. And now off a larger base, right? And so I think we've said all along that, over time, international will become a larger part of our business, so it should grow faster than our overall business. And as it does so, we'll add more incremental growth to our business over our base domestic business. We still look at Europe as a developing market. Obviously, the -- within that, there are different countries that are different be developed.

If you look at our investor deck from June last year, you'll see some per capita consumption numbers by country, which give you a sense for at least where those countries were. I think that data is 2024, where those countries were in their development.

And so I think we've talked about how the UK is 5 to 10 years behind the US in development, and then you've got -- our next largest market, which we talked about, is Germany, which is at least 5 to 10 years behind the UK.

So there's a long ramp there. I think if you imagine that Europe could have the same per capita consumption as the US, then there's no reason to believe that Europe and therefore, our international markets couldn't be as large as our American business today.

But our American business today is still growing sort of double digits, right? So that's a moving target. And so we aim to close that gap in market development, but we know it will take time and we're doing it one market at a time as we see the opportunities, as we put people into that market to sort of seed it and then get it going and then make sure we can ramp it up from a supply perspective.

It's going really well. The European team is doing a great job, and we look forward to hopefully many years of ongoing growth. Obviously, as the base gets larger, the growth rates will come down. But our plan is for international to continue to provide a significant part of our total growth for the foreseeable future.

Jim Salera, Stephens.

I wanted to start off, maybe you could give us some detail around the Walmart placement given the step-up visibility there. Is there any characteristics of the consumers that are coming to the product via that channel that you might be able to share the primarily new to the brand, if there's any, like I said, age or kind of demographic characteristics you could share given the significant increase in visibility being in that new set?

So I think it's too early for any information on that buyer -- change in buyer or the impact of new set to show up in our consumer data, right? It's two, three months old. I think what we would say is we are very happy with the outcome of the set process if you've had an opportunity to go into Walmart, depending on the type of Walmart you're in, you'll see a slightly different set ranging from absolutely huge.

And I would refer you to slide 10 in our investor deck on the right-hand side, where you've got an example of one of the really large ones, two more normal, which will probably be the left-hand side and then the smaller ones is sort of the central photo, right? All of them are significant improvements over where we were before in terms of SKUs that we have in store and also shelf space and visibility.

And that is showing up in our data on Walmart as growth. I think we said in the prepared remarks, Walmart is adding 5%, 6% to our total scans right now, which is very cool. And given that growth rate, Walmart is gaining share of the Coconut Water category as a retailer. So that's really good. So I think that shows that the consumer is there. Obviously, the set, while it's in the same aisle, now it's a little bigger and maybe it moved a few feet. So people need to find it. But the actual consumer won't go up (technical difficulty) a few months or maybe even 12.

What we would say is the Walmart consumer is showing that they're willing to buy coconut water. We don't see any reason why Walmart shouldn't be a strong coconut water destination, and certainly, that was our pitch to them, and they seem to have bought off on that and how they've used coconut water to anchor that part of the set on the juice aisle, and so we're excited.

But in the big scheme of things, Walmart is a certain percentage of the business, and this growth helps, but it doesn't necessarily significantly move the top line, but it's certainly very helpful. And I think we look at it and we think people -- it's more likely that other retailers will follow Walmart in allocating the space because people follow Walmart and they want to be competitive. So for us, it's a very positive leading indicator for what might happen this year or next year in the rest of --

Great. And then Michael, I wanted to follow up on some of the commentary you had around the hydration use occasion, particularly with kind of more active users as a sports drink replacement. I know there's a lot of opportunity in the different -- for these different use cases, but sometimes consumers don't really know what use occasion Coconut Water fills.

Do you have anything, whether it's on advertising campaign or in-store activations, packaging planned for this year that will really drive home that particular kind of active hydration use occasion? And if so, any thoughts of kind of how that should layer in for the year and when we should expect to see that really driving that visibility to that use occasion?

Yeah. Well, being built more into our overall communication in general, the 3.5 times the electrolytes of leading sports drinks and being all natural from a tree, not a lab. So it's become a bigger part of our communication. We are activating in youth sports in a big way. I don't know if you've seen our partnership with Rush Soccer and getting into other youth sports programs. We have a program around some of the US World Cup soccer players for World Cup activation. And so we're really focused on these type of activities.

But all in all, it is -- and we're also -- we've actually been testing some media, which some of you might have seen, TV specifically. So all in all, it is a big focus. But it is the underlying reason that coconut water has been and is becoming so successful in the category is continuing to grow, is the main functionality. Whether product is used in a smoothie or in a cocktail or all the other usage occasions, the hydration aspect of the electrolytes, I think, is the underlying reason that -- and the functionality that it is working so well.

(Operator Instructions) Michael Lavery, Piper Sandler.

This is [Luke Mahoney] on for Michael. I just want to ask -- just wanted to ask what your expectation for cash is? You're sitting on about $195 million of cash. I know you guys have always had M&A on your to do list, but there hasn't really been something interesting or at the right price. But how do we think about what the cash is meant to go for?

Luke, you're right. The priority is to continue to grow the core brand and grow the category. And as we said, we do believe M&A will play a role at some point. It hasn't yet, and we remain active, but disciplined. We have returned some cash to shareholders through repurchases.

So at this point, we'll continue to look for opportunities and continue to work with our Board and subsets of our Board on repurchases as we move along. So really no overall change in our approach at this point.

Okay. That's great. And can I just ask about innovation for 2026? Is there anything in the pipeline. And separately then what are your expectations for marketing spend in 2026?

I didn't hear the second part.

The marketing spend.

Okay. On the innovation side, we're continuing to push the things that we were pushing last year. Treats has performed nicely, getting additional distribution. And we expect at some point in time to add an additional flavor. And I don't think we're quite ready to announce that sort of on these airwaves right now. But that's our expectation, and it looks pretty promising. And then we obviously are continuing to push the multipacks and the different pack formats.

Innovation is playing a role by driving new news and sort of building our shelf space. When you look at the Walmart shelves, it's obvious that we're going to need a pipeline of pack innovation to maintain that as fresh longer term. So we're working on that.

And then as it relates to marketing, we are increasing marketing. We want to increase marketing maybe a little faster than net sales of the branded side partly because we believe that those opportunities, as we've talked about in pushing the hydration message, and we're excited by some of the programs that Mike talked about coming this summer, partly also to protect the brand versus private label.

The private label price gaps that are currently there may widen as the private label vendors sort of past tariff savings back and we're prepared to try and hold our price where it is and see what happens, but reserving sort of price promotional investment, which is obviously part of how we think about marketing as a way to potentially react.

And that's how we're thinking about the planned increased pricing that we -- investment that we think for the rest of the year. So we're going to watch that closely, and we will balance increased marketing versus pricing actions to try and maintain our position relative to the competitors in the marketplace as they adjust pricing or not through the year.

That concludes today's question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the call back to Martin Roper for closing remarks.

Thanks, Liz. Thanks, everybody. We know a lot of folks are down at CAGNY, and we're looking forward to sharing a coconut water-based cocktail with folks, Thursday night or Friday. So I hope everyone has a good week, and thank you for your interest in Vita Coco, and we look forward to talking to everybody when we announce our Q1 results in late April. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.