Nestle highlights organic year-on-year growth trends for 2014

Nestle has announced its financial results for the 2014 business year, during which it achieved a sales total of 91.6 billion Swiss francs (62.68 billion pounds).

This represented an organic growth rate of 4.5 percent and a 2.3 percent real internal growth rate, although in concrete terms the figure fell by 0.6 percent, due to negative foreign exchange rate trends.

Its organic growth was broad-based, including improvements of 5.4 percent in the Americas, 1.9 percent in Europe and 5.7 percent in Asia, Oceania and Africa. Its core waters and nutrition businesses both performed strongly.

Key 2014 highlights include the creation of a skin health division and a new business excellence initiative at an executive board level.

Paul Bulcke's, Nestle's chief executive officer, said: "We expect 2015 to be similar to 2014 and we aim to achieve organic growth of around five percent with improvements in margins, underlying earnings per share in constant currencies and capital efficiency."