“We had to raise our prices a number of times in 2022 to maintain a healthy margin,” says Hein Schumacher, CEO of FrieslandCampina. That healthy margin seems to have succeeded. The company, which has branches in Beilen and Meppel, made a profit of 292 million euros last year. That is 120 million euros more than two years ago.
According to Schumacher, that healthy margin was not entirely successful. “Especially in our domestic market, we proved unable to fully pass on the huge cost increases to our customers.”
These cost increases are partly due to the war in Ukraine, the associated energy crisis and, above all, rising inflation. Incidentally, cost increases are not necessarily bad news for FrieslandCampina. Schumacher: “In 2022 we had to deal with a significant increase in basic dairy quotations. That in itself is beneficial, because it gave us more money per kilogram of milk.”