Church & Dwight Co., Inc. (NYSE:CHD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Kevin Grundy: Great. Kevin Grundy, Jefferies. So thank you for the presentation. A question for the group with Matt certainly start with you. So last year, certainly, probably one of the more challenging to get that the most challenging yet that the company has dealt with the economic environment, excuse me, certainly challenged, but it was for your competition as well. So as you kind of do a postmortem on the year and you kind of think about supply chain, you think about your portfolio, you think about your relationships with retailers. What are sort of like the biggest learnings would you say operationally for the company? And then looking forward, what’s the message for the investment community that there should still be a lot of confidence in the Evergreen target?

Matthew Farrell: Yes. Okay. It’s quite a big question. I think every companies have flexibility and so it creates options. And I think going into the COVID, the pandemic and certainly the recession this past year, on our supply chain side, we didn’t have the options. I think less than 15% of our raw materials had redundancy. And our target right now is to have 50% redundancy. So we’ve come a long way over the last couple of years. And that’s why I said earlier that we’re focused on — be ready for the next black swan event. As far as the portfolio goes, 80% of our portfolio did exceedingly well. And we had 20% of the portfolio went backwards. And some of it is self-inflicted, and that is with respect to vitamins and our ability to supply.

That has certainly hurt us both on sales as well as in the market share, but we’re starting to turn underrun. And then from a device standpoint, certainly learned our lesson with respect to FLAWLESS. FLAWLESS struggled in ’20 and ’21 through COVID, ’22 because of the pullback as it’s a discretionary purchase. But WATERPIK is different. WATERPIK is also a device, but do you have a secular trend towards interest in gum health. And that’s the business we bought in 2017. It grew high single digits in ’17, ’18, ’19, ’20, ’21. And went backwards this year. Why we had the recession, $5 gas, et cetera. But that’s going to turn around, and that’s going to be growing, not only in the U.S. but also internationally for us, but I could go on. But there are many areas of the company that I would say we’d look back and say, “Yes, okay, we’ve been a little bit differently now but now we’re — we got our eyes open going forward.

Thanks, Kevin. Rupesh?

Rupesh Parikh: Thanks for taking my question. So just on pricing, I guess, looking forward to this year, is there any pricing — new pricing incorporated in your guidance for this year? And if you look at last is, how do they play out versus expectations? Have they gone back to where you’ve historically been? Or are they still better than the history?

Matthew Farrell: Second question, price gaps.

Rupesh Parikh: Elasticity question, just elasticities, how they compare versus your expectations and versus history?

Matthew Farrell: Yes. We’ll do it the elasticities first. And elasticities have been surprisingly good over the past year. So — and I think you probably heard that from all of our CPG competitors. The first part of your question was

Rupesh Parikh: Just on pricing .

Matthew Farrell: Yes. Well, I’ll just start off, and he’s going to have a little bit of chance to think of a better answer, but my answer would be the following: we already have pricing in place that’s going to be in the marketplace in February and March, but it was sold in already. So we don’t have anything ahead of us with respect to, hey, we got pricing planned in the second half or in the fourth quarter because it’s going to be — it’s becoming exceedingly more difficult in order to push price through and get away.

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