The Cooper Companies, Inc. (NYSE:COO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Albert White: Yes. Well, part of Europe is we have a really strong team there. Debbie Alo runs that team. I was just over in Europe with our Italian team who’s crazy strong. Just really, really proud of that team, and they’re executing incredibly well. I wouldn’t highlight anything necessarily where I’d say, “Hey, there’s a different subscription model and so forth.” There are differences, but they’re more subtle. But the team is just executing well all over there, especially with respect to key accounts. Our key account team is really, really strong and they’ve been executing and being successful there. So we’re taking share and believe that there’s a decent chance we’re going to continue to be able to do that moving forward.

Matthew Mishan: Okay. And then on the investments you’re making in distribution and capacity. I remember a couple of years ago, you were kind of really making major investments to drive that. Just help me understand like put this investment that you’re making, these investments that you’re making in the context of the investments that you made a couple of years ago?

Albert White: Yes, that’s a good question. Yes, we took a decent step forward a few years ago in terms of investing in our distribution networks. What I would kind of describe this is we did a bunch of that work in some of our big distribution facilities and our big manufacturing facilities. We’ve continued to see significant growth around the world. So we’re needing to expand. Now one of the great things about this that actually gives me some comfort is a lot of the technology is already in some of our distribution centers as an example. We’re rolling it out to other distribution centers that used to be small that have now gotten larger and we need to automate or automate sections of that. When I look at manufacturing, we were upgrading a lot of our lines and improving a lot of our lines as we move to like really high volume production.

It’s expanding on those high-volume lines. So this is a pretty big expansion, though. I mean, I step back and kind of look at it, and Brian talked about the numbers, I mean it’s pretty sizable dollars. So we’re going around. We’re doing this expansion. We’re building out capacity to really support a long-term growth story. I’ve talked about that in the past, right? I continue to say that we’re in some great growth markets when it comes to contact lenses and fertility. And we’re investing accordingly to be able to continue to put up strong top line growth for many, many years. So this is real. I mean we’re spending some money and doing some hard work to do it. And why we’re doing it, by the way, it is hitting the P&L a little bit, but let me give you an example on that side of things.

When you’re doing an upgrade on some packaging lines as an example, let’s just — let’s say you’re doing an IT upgrade, right? We’re continuing to run those lines, while in — at the same time, we’re putting in the upgrades, right? And we’re not disrupting service. So we’ll get inefficiencies by doing 2 things at the same time. right? As soon as we’re comfortable that the new upgraded system is better, then we’ll stop using the old system, and we’ll get rid of it and get rid of those duplicate costs. So we’ve done this before. We’re doing it again. We’re trying to maintain high customer service levels. We’re trying to meet the demand that’s out there from a long-term perspective. We’re entering into contracts are tied to long-term growth. So there’s things that we’re comfortable that the demand is there.

So anyway, long story there, I guess, Matt, just kind of saying that I’m excited about it. I think there’s some really cool things that are going on and are going to support a lot of long-term growth for us.

Operator: We have no further questions. I would like to turn the call back over to Albert White for closing remarks.