ORIOR news

ORIOR has a clear vi­sion for a re­turn to suc­cess

Zurich, 17 June 2025

The in­ter­na­tional food and bev­er­age group ORIOR is to un­dergo ex­ten­sive re­struc­tur­ing. As pre­vi­ously com­mu­ni­cated, man­age­ment er­rors and in­ac­cu­ra­cies at busi­ness unit Al­bert Spiess forced the com­pany to make one-off im­pair­ments in 2024. Fur­ther­more, it did not act quick enough to adapt the pric­ing and cost struc­tures to the sourc­ing costs, some of which had risen sharply. Ul­ti­mately, this led to the con­sid­er­able loss of or­ders and ten­ders, es­pe­cially for its in­ter­na­tional busi­ness. Al­though the core busi­ness proved to be ro­bust and sales rose slightly over­all, these de­vel­op­ments led to a con­sid­er­able de­cline in prof­itabil­ity in 2024 and a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in the group’s net debt.

The Board of Di­rec­tors is work­ing on far-reach­ing mea­sures, has al­ready de­cided upon the ini­tial steps and has im­ple­mented some of them.

Its fo­cus is on strength­en­ing the com­pa­ny’s prof­itabil­ity by op­ti­mis­ing the struc­tures, mak­ing the nec­es­sary ad­just­ments to the or­gan­i­sa­tion and in­tro­duc­ing a range of value en­hance­ment ini­tia­tives. How­ever, var­i­ous in­vest­ments will also be scru­ti­nised with re­gard to their long-term con­tri­bu­tion to the prof­itabil­ity of the group. The aim is to rapidly re­duce the level of debt and, in do­ing so, re­claim en­tre­pre­neur­ial free­dom of ac­tion and ul­ti­mately be in a po­si­tion to dis­trib­ute a div­i­dend, which is cur­rently not the case.

In this con­nec­tion, sales processes have been ini­ti­ated for build­ings that are not used for op­er­a­tional pur­poses. To op­ti­mise the cap­i­tal struc­ture, op­tions for sale-and-lease-back agree­ments are be­ing re­viewed for dif­fer­ent prop­er­ties. At the same time, to safe­guard the re­quired in­fra­struc­ture, the com­pany is plan­ning to ex­tend ex­ist­ing leases, in­clud­ing the com­mit­ments they con­tain for nec­es­sary in­vest­ments in the build­ings. The cur­rent as­sets will be op­ti­mised by re­duc­ing in­ven­to­ries, and the cap­i­tal that is thus tied up un­nec­es­sar­ily will be freed up. An in­crease in share cap­i­tal is not up for dis­cus­sion at the cur­rent point in time.

To make the or­gan­i­sa­tion more ef­fec­tive and ag­ile in its var­i­ous mar­kets, com­pe­ten­cies and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties are be­ing de­cen­tralised and out­sourced to the busi­ness units to a greater ex­tent. Only the cor­po­rate di­vi­sions such as Fi­nance, Le­gal, Sus­tain­abil­ity, Group Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and IT will con­tinue to be man­aged cen­trally. Fi­nally, be­sides the ex­ist­ing prof­itabil­ity and ef­fi­ciency pro­grammes, the pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ties are to be bet­ter utilised by bundling to­gether cross-di­vi­sional vol­umes. Main­tain­ing the recog­nised high level of in­no­va­tion re­mains a key strate­gic task.

Busi­ness per­for­mance to date in 2025 is in line with ex­pec­ta­tions. Ac­cord­ingly, the re­turn to sat­is­fac­tory sales and earn­ings fig­ures is not ex­pected be­fore 2026.

Con­tact
Milena Math­i­uet, Chief Cor­po­rate Af­fairs Of­fi­cer
Tele­phone: +41 44 308 65 13, e-mail: in­vestors@orior.ch

In­vestor’s agenda
21 Au­gust 2025: Pub­li­ca­tion of 2025 Half-Year Re­sults and Half-Year Re­port
4 May 2026: An­nual Gen­eral Meet­ing, The Hall (for­merly Sam­sung Hall), Düben­dorf

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