Colgate-Palmolive Company (NYSE:CL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Chris Carey: Hi. Good morning, everyone. So just a couple quick follow-ups for me. Just — and apologies for asking a North America question. This is more about making sure expectations are set and we know how to think about this going forward. But a little bit of promotions come back in, but you’re really focusing on a more sustainable total P&L. Could still see some volume pressure for a bit until you lap some of these strategy adjustments that you made. And by the time we get beyond that, perhaps the volumes start to smooth out a bit more. So am I characterizing that correctly? And then second, just a quick clarification or follow-up. Olivia asked a question about freight. I think the 10-Q just says the year-over-year change. Dan, you had said 9.5% of sales was the freight number in Q1 and you expected it to trend low 9s for the rest of the year. Did that come through in the quarter? So thanks so much on those two items.

Noel Wallace: Let me — Stan answer the logistics question, then I’ll get back to your North American question.

Stan Sutula: Yeah. So logistics is playing out like we expected and improved slightly from the previous quarter. And we expect that, that improvement will also continue in the second half.

Noel Wallace: Chris, on North America, so I think you said it well. I mean, we’re looking very deliberately to improve the structure of that P&L as we move forward. Again, it’s — the inherent objective there is to improve brand health. So we will clearly continue to fund advertising. We will be very choiceful on where we start to look at elevating promotions to recover some of that promotional share. Our focus is driving non-promoted share moving forward. But we need to be careful that we’re not pulling back too much there. So we’ll monitor that moving forward. And we’ll see, I think from quarter-to-quarter, there will be a little bit of volatility in the gross margin line as we move forward as we see costs ultimately level out and where the pricing and the mix ends up.

But we feel good about the back half relative to our ability to continue to drive operating margin expansion. I remind everyone that North America — the North America HPC business is about 20% of our total business. And what is so nice about the Colgate business is that we have such diversity of our business around the world that as we need to fund opportunities in North America or Asia, we will have the ability to pull from certain regions around the world. So we’re well balanced in that regard. And I think North America has a good plan for the back half and we’ll be very deliberate on their spending and their focus on recovering some of the share loss that we’ve had in the quarter.

Operator: Our last question will come from Peter Grom of UBS. Please go ahead.

Peter Grom: Thanks, operator and good morning, everyone. So I wanted to just circle back to the top line growth, which the second half organic sales guidance is still relatively wide and implies a decent slowdown, which makes sense as you start to cycle pricing. Can you maybe just talk about the moving pieces that would put organic revenue growth at the higher end or the lower end of that range as we move forward here? And maybe specifically, you mentioned several times throughout this call the sequential improvement on a two-year stack for volume. And just given the step up in investment innovation, should we expect that trend to continue as we move into the back half of the year? Thanks.

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