This year highlighted our business’s resilience, adaptability, and agility. In these unprecedented times, our resilience was evident in our company’s ability to protect the safety and wellbeing of our people, while delivering accelerated results across all of our strategic fronts—from portfolio management and digital transformation to milestones in sustainable development—highlighted by our issuance of the first ever sustainability-linked bonds in the Mexican market.
Consistent with our strategy, we are further adapting and reshaping our company to thrive in the new global business environment. Together with The Coca-Cola Company and the Coca-Cola System in Brazil, we redesigned our distribution partnership with Heineken. This agreement enables us to continue our relationship with Heineken as a key partner, allowing us to serve the Brazilian market with a customer-centric portfolio of premium, mainstream, and economy brands and affording us the flexibility to further complement our portfolio. To this end, we acquired Brazilian craft beer brand Therezópolis, and we agreed to distribute Estrella Galicia’s beer portfolio in Brazil.
Importantly, we worked with The Coca-Cola Company to bolster our successful, longstanding relationship. Our enhanced cooperation framework ensures the long-term alignment of our partnership, growth plans, and strategies—enabling us to not only continue building a winning consumer-centric portfolio, but also explore new multi-category opportunities across our markets while we develop new strategic digital initiatives.
Consistent with this framework, we’ve already rolled out pilot programs to test the distribution of complementary categories such as spirits, other alcoholic beverages, and consumer brands in certain markets—working together to improve distribution economics and open new revenue streams by providing other leading brands access to our company’s deep customer relationships, distribution network, and rapidly evolving omnichannel commercial platform.
Re-Evolving Business, Vision & Strategy
Aligned with our purpose and our vision, we are working across six strategic corridors: Build out an Open Omnichannel Platform; Develop a Winning Consumer-Centric Portfolio; Foster an Agile, Digital Savvy, People-Centric Culture; Place Sustainability at the Heart of our Organization; Digitize Our Core; and Actively pursue Value-Enhancing Acquisitions.
To this end, we’re developing a winning consumer-centric portfolio that is allowing us to consolidate our industry leadership within the non-alcoholic ready-to-drink (NARTD) space. Underscored by the success of the new formula and visual identity of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, our sparkling beverage category posted solid volume and share growth, while our still beverage and personal water categories achieved double-digit growth and share gains across most of our territories.
On the omnichannel front, we accelerated the expansion of our B2B customer-centric omnichannel commercial platform. To give you a sense, we now have approximately 300 thousand active monthly purchasers, up over twofold from a year ago. Notably, digital purchases now represent over 6% of our total orders, generating close to US$360 million in sales. This marks triple-digit growth in our digital orders and revenues compared with 2020.
Additionally, in the direct to home channel, we substantially increased the number of home delivery routes—from almost 800 routes to over 1,200 routes, allowing us to reach close to 600 thousand Mexican households.
We’ve further deepened our company’s commitment to sustainable development, placing sustainability at the heart of our organization. As a result of our Climate Action Strategy, 85% of our bottling operations’ power came from clean energy sources, up more than fourfold from 2015. We increased the use of recycled materials in our PET packaging to 31%, while increasing the collection of bottles that we put into our markets, thus accelerating the transition to a circular economy. Through our water stewardship, we improved our water use ratio to an average of 1.47 liters of water per liter of beverage produced, an industry benchmark. Furthermore, we issued the first sustainability-linked bonds in the Mexican market, enabling us to align our financial strategy with the achievement of ambitious water efficiency targets that are now public commitments. Indeed, for the second consecutive year, our sustainability (ESG) performance enabled us to be the only Mexican company in our sector included in the S&P Global Sustainability Yearbook 2022.
Aligned with our commitment to ESG, we acknowledge the importance of evolving towards a more balanced governance model to enrich our corporate governance profile. We are working to ensure our board’s composition includes the skills, experiences, diversity, and capabilities required to provide effective oversight into the future.
To win in the market and our industry, we are re-evolving the way we work, creating an agile, digital savvy, culture while we continue to foster a diverse, inclusive, and people-centric culture. To improve gender diversity, we’re systematically working to recruit, develop, and retain female talent at all levels of the organization. Indeed, this is the fourth consecutive year that Coca-Cola FEMSA is part of the Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index.
Looking ahead, we plan to actively pursue value-enhancing acquisitions. We’re not only exploring traditional opportunities to shape our company’s future NARTD footprint, but also prioritizing adjacent categories for portfolio expansion. To this end, we acquired Brazilian craft beer brand Therezópolis, our first ever acquisition in the beer segment. We also acquired Brazilian Coca-Cola bottler CVI Refrigerantes Ltda., bolstering our NARTD leadership position in the region.
Performance
As we navigated a dynamic environment, our focus on affordability and execution enabled us to deliver 5.3% year-over-year volume growth—2.6% ahead of our 2019-baseline year. For the year, total revenues increased 6.1% to Ps. 194.8 billion. Operating income improved 8.6% to Ps. 27.4 billion. Operating cash flow increased 4.0% to Ps. 38.8 billion. Controlling net income rose 52.4% to Ps. 15.7 billion to achieve earnings per share of Ps. 0.93 and per unit of Ps. 7.48 (Ps. 74.77 per ADS).
Notably, our return on invested capital improved for the fifth consecutive year, closing out the year in the double digits. Moreover, our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio ended the year at 0.9 times—while our cash position was more than Ps. 47 billion—reflecting our strong balance sheet, while putting us in a great position to grow.
As we move forward, one of our key strengths is our business relationship with The Coca-Cola Company. Working together, we’re able to successfully navigate ever changing macroeconomic and industry dynamics, driving a consumer-centric approach and fundamental transformation in the way we operate and collectively go to market.
Building on this longstanding relationship, our overarching strategic priorities are to accelerate the build out of our open omnichannel commercial platform; and ensure the necessary investment behind our capabilities to escalate our business growth.
When we reflect on our vision for Coca-Cola FEMSA and the actions we’re taking, we are confident that we are building the right set of capabilities to expedite our company’s growth and value creation for many years to come.
On behalf of our employees, we thank you for your continued confidence in our ability to deliver economic value and to generate social and environmental wellbeing for you all.