Snellman Group’s year 2024: Success in all business units enabled profitability growth

Group CEO Markus Hellström comments the year: 
"2024 was a successful year for the Snellman Group in many ways, but at the same time, it included an enormous amount of work and even difficult decisions. We focused strongly on the implementation of our new Group strategy. In particular, we invested in improving profitability, and it paid off. Our operating result grew significantly from the challenging previous year. The Group's total net sales grew moderately, although this was not our central goal. The reputation of our products remained the best on the market, and we successfully launched several new products. However, our operating environment had been challenging for a long time, and we had a need to streamline and reorganise our operations. This required change negotiations, which were tough. During the year, we also focused on occupational safety and the company's safety culture in different ways. I am happy to see the safety figures that have already developed in the right direction. This work will continue. I would like to thank our personnel for their good and hard work during the year and the owners, partners and customers for their cooperation and trust." 

Financial development
The financial development of the Snellman Group's business was excellent in 2024. Our total net sales increased slightly during the review period and were EUR 461.7 (2023: 453,7) million. Increasing the total net sales at the Group level was not a main goal for 2024.

We made a significant performance improvement of over EUR 12 million compared to the weak previous year, and our operating result was EUR 21.7 (2023: 9.4) million. We succeeded on several fronts and achieved all our key goals. Each of our business units was able to improve their result from the previous year's level. Our investments in product selection work, the successful procurement work and efficiency programmes in our units improved our profitability in every quarter of the year. Our economic development in 2024 is the best in our history so far, both in terms of operating result and net sales.

Sustainability
Sustainability work and actions have a central role in our everyday work. During the review period, we increased our own ambition level in terms of sustainability matters, and at the same time, the EU's increasing sustainability regulation brought us an increasing number of obligations. The importance of sustainability topics was also reflected in the increase in the resources for our sustainability work. During the review period, we conducted a double materiality analysis to identify the Snellman Group’s material topics which provide valuable information to support strategic decision-making and guide us in sustainability reporting.

Looking at our corporate ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) targets which are set for 2026; free farrowing; domestic protein feeding for pigs; and occupational accidents, we can say that we took big steps in the right direction. We encourage our producers to use free farrowing by paying them a free farrowing premium. More than 60 (2023: 52.3) % of our facilities have already switched to free farrowing. From the autumn of 2024, Snellman's pork pig chain switched to completely soy-free feeding. We worked hard on safety at work throughout the Group and managed to reduce both the number of occupational accidents and the accident frequency by more than 30% compared to the previous year. 

Personnel
The number of employees in the Snellman Group at the end of 2024 was 1,983 (2023: 2,000). Our employees represented more than 40 different nationalities.

Outlook for 2025
The business environment for 2025 is expected to pick up in the second half of the year. We will continue to implement our strategy within the Snellman Group. This means continuous work to improve efficiency, investments in consumer-oriented product selection work and sustainability efforts. Our Petfood and Ready Meals Sweden businesses, which are growing rapidly, will need investments to support continued growth. Our brands are in a strong position in all markets and provide a good foundation for success in 2025. We aim to further improve our operating result in 2025.