The Cooper Companies, Inc. (NYSE:COO) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Al White: Yes, so we’ve had a good start to the year, we had a good January, February was definitely a good month. So we’re seeing positive momentum. I’m speaking for Cooper. So I think we’re in a good place from that perspective. And you see that built into our guidance. If I think about the market a little bit more broadly, I would say we’re taking share, similar to what we’ve taken historically. So not a massive amount of share. But you know, point two points, something like that over what the markets growing, kind of similar to last year. So I think the market is going to have another good year, frankly, at this point in time, the way the year starting off and the visibility we have, I think the overall contact lens market is going to be certainly mid-single digits and probably on the higher end of the mid-single digits.

When you look at our portfolio, we have the broadest portfolio in the market, we also manage a lot of customer brands. And that definitely helps when you look at retailers right now some of our bigger accounts, who are looking at their own profitability and managing their own supply chain issues and so forth. One of the areas that they’ll have a tendency to turn around and focus on is their own store brands. Those are products that we have a tendency to support to them. And we take a lot, a lot of pride in that. And we work very closely with our key accounts and have strong relationships with them continue to spy their customer ran. So, I think that does help us and I think it’ll help us as we move through this year. We have not really seen much in terms of any wearing habit changes in terms of trade down or anything along those lines.

We’re still seeing success driven heavily by product like MyDay, frankly, within our franchise. We are having success with Clarity, that’s more of a mass market price point. I think that if you do see any moves associated with consumers being a little bit more concerned about the cost of things, and we have a great option in Clarity, and I think we’ll continue to do well with that. So, yes, net net at the end of the day, I’d say I’m envisioning a strong market this year and I’ve taken a little bit share of it.

Larry Biegelsen: That’s super helpful and thanks for the comprehensive answer. Brian on the margins, what they peak, the operating margin in 2019, let’s call it 27.6%. The past two quarters have been kind of in the low to mid 22% range, can you help us understand, the decline the bridge to decline, call it 500 basis points? And what’s the path back to 27.6%? And embedded is in 2023 is the margin — operating margin embedded in the guidance about 24%? Thanks for taking the questions.

Brian Andrews: Hi, Larry. Good question. So, yes, since 2019, FX has obviously a fairly decent headwind to us. So that’s been about 1.5%. The other sort of 2%, I will kind of bucket ties into three parts, kind of one-third each. One of them is just equity as share base comp, we moved a few couple of years ago from five years to four years best thing, and that’s created a headwind for us. So that’s about a third of the delta. Supply chain and distribution, no surprise, we’ve got about a third tied to that. And that’s just all the things we’ve been talking about recently here. And then, of course, the infrastructure investments that we’ve been putting into our business, and I kind of focus largely on IT. With that, that includes the automation work that we’re doing, but also just ERP and other sort of IT upgrades we’ve been making over the years.

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