Creating the future of dairy farming
We performed better than expected during a challenging year to achieve good profitability, while investing heavily in the future of DeLaval – and the dairy industry in general.
Despite the challenges of inflation, supply chain disruption and geopolitical tension in 2024, our dedicated team at DeLaval found innovative solutions to deliver strong results while enhancing our own internal efficiency. Market conditions improved during the year with higher milk prices and lower feed costs, which drove the demand for our offering among farmers in the second half of the year. I am proud of the resilience we demonstrated to manage a slight decrease in sales and maintain healthy profitability.
We achieved net sales of €1.3 billion and a sales decrease of 5.3% at prevailing rates. Our performance was particularly impressive when considering the heavy investments we made in the future of our company. This included continued R&D investments with a focus on sustainability innovation and enabling our farmers to do more with less. We also invested in our Enterprise and Resource Planning (ERP) system to future proof our business by making DeLaval easier to do business with and a great place to work.
Enabling the future of the dairy industry today
Global demand for dairy is at an all-time high, and so are the expectations for how milk is produced. These factors will continue to create significant opportunities for DeLaval’s products and solutions – particularly in terms of automation and digital services.
The theme of this Tetra Laval Annual Report is ‘The future of food production’, and DeLaval has a clear role to play in shaping the dairy industry. We innovate to enable farmers to operate more efficiently by producing more milk with less resources – to make dairy production more sustainable and profitable.
The redevelopment of our dedicated R&D and demonstration facility, Hamra Farm, offers another insight into the future of the dairy industry. A new maternity and calf barn was completed in 2024, and we continued to develop two other barns – a state-of-the-art VMS milking barn with five DeLaval VMS™ robotic milking systems (V300 and V310 models) and a heifer barn. We are looking forward to our inaugural event later in 2025.
Product innovation drives sustainability and animal welfare
The driving force behind our product innovations is making dairy production more sustainable in every aspect. This means ensuring the welfare of both animals and farmers, minimising environmental impact and supporting dairy farm profitability – all at once. By achieving this balance, we help farmers build more profitable, sustainable operations with healthier herds. This is the future of dairy farming, and it’s what inspires us to keep innovating.
As most of our value chain greenhouse gas emissions are generated by our products during their use phase, innovation in product efficiency is an essential part of what we do. We are also incorporating more recycled materials into our products, and are designing them to both have a long lifespan and be easy to service and maintain during their entire lifecycle, as well as recycle at their end-of-life.
During the year, we enhanced DeLaval Plus, our farm management platform designed to turn data into actionable insights, with improved applications that detect diseases, optimise milking performance and safeguard milk hygiene on farms. New physical products included our Titan™ teat disinfectant for automated spray systems, which use advanced technology to take udder health management to the next level.
Investing in our people
We continued to invest in a strong employer brand through structured employee training programmes to ensure we remain a knowledgeable and reliable business partner to dairy farmers around the world. We also implemented action plans in response to employee feedback from our bi-annual Employee Engagement Survey.
Our other strategic people topics include physical and mental wellbeing, health and safety, and our ability to track and retain a diverse workforce. Diversity and inclusion will continue to be an important strategic area for us as we believe that having a variety of people with different backgrounds and experiences makes us stronger by enabling better decision making and driving innovation. We increased our proportion of female employees during the year, but we still have work to do to meet our target of 30% by 2030. We will continue to promote our women’s networks, as well as providing awareness training on diversity and inclusion and in recruitment.
Facing challenges as a strong company
Together with the wider industry, we are faced with slow economic growth, geopolitical instability and trade barriers in the foreseeable future. On a positive note, dairy farmers are seeing improved margins and cash flow thanks to lower milk production costs and higher milk prices. We expect market growth during 2025, especially in the US and Europe.
We remain committed to making sustainable food production possible. We have knowledgeable and passionate people, but we cannot do this alone and must increasingly collaborate with other actors throughout the value chain. An exciting example of this is the Milk Sustainability Center (MSC) platform, which we run together with Deere & Company (John Deere). We launched a pilot version of the MSC during the year to help farmers improve their operations by automating and consolidating farm data flows as well as provide valuable insights into how they can enhance both sustainability and profitability. We will ramp up the MSC in 2025 to benefit more customers, partners and other value chain players.
We look forward to continuing to support the dairy value chain in 2025 and beyond to make sustainable food production possible.
Paul Löfgren