Prestige Consumer Healthcare Inc. (NYSE:PBH) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Susan Anderson: Okay. Great. And then if I could maybe just add one more on the capital allocation. I guess, how are you thinking about you’re at 3x leverage, so almost reaching your goal by the end of the year? I guess, how are you thinking about beyond that, balancing share repurchases and debt paydown and then also M&A opportunities as we look forward.

Ron Lombardi: So really, it’s no different than it’s been for the last few years, Susan, which is we’ll continue to evaluate any M&A opportunities that come up, look at stock buyback as a way to offset dilution of shares each year and then longer term, we’ll consider a dividend. But again, our leverage target is below three, which is that next phase, and we’ll get there — anticipating getting there at the end of March. So we continue to feel good about the capital allocation optionality that we have going forward.

Operator: This question comes from the line of Jon Andersen with William Blair.

Jon Andersen: Hi. Good morning, everybody. During the first half of the year, your sales essentially flat, but you’ve reaffirmed the full year outlook for 1% to 2% growth, which means we’re going to expect to see an acceleration in sales growth in the second half of the year. Could you talk about your visibility to that and what some of the underlying drivers are of that improvement on a year-over-year basis that you’re expecting in the second half?

Ron Lombardi: So the first place I’ll start with Jon is comps. And as I mentioned during the prepared remarks today is for the second quarter in particular, we comped the highest level of quarterly sales ever in the company’s history. As a reminder, last year, we were still in kind of a funny ramp-up in return to normal activities and catch up in supply chain and a number of other factors last year that kind of drove the comp. So as we get into the second half of our year, we begin to return to, I think, more of a normal level of comp to help drive year-over-year gains. That’s really the big factor.

Jon Andersen: Okay. And you mentioned, Ron, in your response on — to the question on cough cold that one of the factors there you’re considering is changes in retailers’ planned inventory levels, I guess, thinking they might hold less inventory this year than last year. Is that comment specific to cough cold or is there a broader trend now with things normalizing from a supply chain standpoint where retailers are looking to just kind of hold less inventory in aggregate? And could that affect your shipments?

Ron Lombardi: Yes. So particularly the cough cold, right, last year, the supply chain of — many suppliers for cough cold were trying to catch up. So retailers are trying to carry as much inventory as they could because of that uncertainty in the supply chain. And then just as importantly, right, last year, cough cold incident levels were happening all year long. So retailers were carrying a different level of inventory to support a year-round cold incident level rather than the historical seasonal. And I think as we get into this year, we’re starting to see signs that return to seasonal peaks and valleys. So it’s really a different inventory profile held by the retailers rather than lower levels, if you see the fine difference there.

And then, yes, right, we’re hearing a lot of the same things you are from other CPG companies that their businesses are being impacted by retailers thinking about carrying lower levels of inventory. Not so much in our categories and specifically our subsections of our categories, right. So at this point, really no major impact that we would expect — and our outlook for the year, I think, is supporting the levels we would expect going forward.