Nestle's first-half profit growth of 11% among the top 500 in the world's top 500

On Wednesday, Nestlé announced that its sales growth in Switzerland and cost-cutting measures have offset the impact of rising raw material prices, and promoted the company’s first-half profit growth by 11% to 4.15 billion Swiss francs ($3.38 billion).

Founded in 1867, Nestle Switzerland is the world's largest food company and ranks among the top 50 among the world's top 500 companies. The company owns many famous brands such as Nestle Coffee, Xiyue Cat Food and Polo Peppermint. This year, its sales increased by 11% to US$38.36 billion, and EBIT increased by 14.5% to US$4.92 billion.

This time Nestlé did not disclose its quarterly earnings, but the company said that the strong performance of emerging markets and the US market compensated for the weak demand in Europe. Its Chairman and CEO Peter Brabeck stated that the company's profit in the first half of the year showed a large increase, which was mainly due to the "organic growth" of 6% for food, beverage and health products.

The so-called “organic growth” is a key indicator of Nestlé’s performance, which includes factors that increase prices but do not involve mergers and acquisitions. The index rose by 6.4% this time, 1.5 percentage points faster than last year. Affected by this good news, the company's stock price also rose by 1.6%.

Nestlé CFO Paul Polman also revealed to the outside world that if nothing unexpected happens, the company will implement a new round of repurchase after completing the current 3 billion Swiss francs share repurchase. In addition, he also stated that due to the impact of the excessive incident of iodine content in Nestlé infant formulae last year, the recovery of the Chinese market will still take some time.