Nestlé chews on Credit Suisse collapse

Zurich — Nestlé will examine its banking relationships after the planned takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS, the food group’s CEO Mark Schneider said on Tuesday.

The world’s largest food and beverage company was a client of Credit Suisse, Schneider told broadcaster TeleZueri in an interview to be shown on Tuesday evening, and had been after the collapse of Switzerland’s second-biggest bank.

“We have worked closely with Credit Suisse for many decades in a spirit of trust,” Schneider told the broadcaster. “You can see from such an example that Switzerland as a business location and a financial centre are very closely linked. We now have to see how to reorganise our banking relationships, both with Swiss and international providers.”

Schneider said the intervention by the Swiss government, the central bank and financial market regulator to engineer a merger with UBS had stabilised the situation and restored confidence.

Schneider said Nestlé had made a good start to 2023, though it was likely to implement price increases to offset inflation of raw material costs, he added.

The maker of Nescafe instant coffee and KitKat chocolate bars raised prices by 8.2% last year, but that did not fully offset the impact of increased ingredient costs on margins.

Price increases had so far only had a “very limited” impact on consumer spending, Schneider said. “As inflation continues, and then also affects our own profitability, we will have to adjust prices.

“We will continue to do this in a responsible way, we don’t want to be a price driver. We respond to inflation, we don’t fuel it,” Schneider said.

The food maker is also working on savings to reach its goal for a full-year underlying trading operating profit margin of between 17% and 17.5%, Schneider added.

Reuters