Kimberly-Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nelson Urdaneta: And again, another item to add, Anna, as you think about the next few quarters is currency. Currency has gotten more volatile. I mean we’ve seen the strengthening of the U.S. dollar. And as you would have seen in our outlook, we did take up our expected headwinds from currency on our operating profit. And again, we’re watching that carefully as we think about 2024.

Anna Lizzul: Great. That’s very helpful. And just as a follow-up, you did have the benefit from better-than-expected pricing in the quarter, while volumes were soft. So you did see a nice sequential improvement in the change of volumes from Q2 to Q3? I was wondering how we should think about the sequential improvement potentially from Q3 to Q4 in volumes?

Michael Hsu: Well, we’ve had, I would say, 4 quarters of successive volume improvement. So I think we were down 7, down 5, down 3, whatever, down 1. And importantly, Personal Care volumes were up this quarter. So I’d say we’re making solid progress. We’re seeing solid volume momentum. And I think I said in the prepared remarks that we would expect continued improvement. We’re not ready to call ’24 yet but I think volume — we cycled most of our big pricing actions from last year. And so we would expect volume trends to continue to improve as we drive our commercial programs and invest behind our brands.

Operator: Your next question is coming from Javier Escalante from Evercore ISI.

Javier Escalante: My question has to do with the pricing side, particularly in North America which is 80% of your profits and it’s where we have more visibility on. The pricing seems to be constructive, right, for private label. Promotional levels are below 2019. But we did see a little bit of a pickup on year-end, at least in track channels. So if you can talk about whether what is promotionally — is it what categories? What’s the point? Is it because the some of your categories are coming out of allocation? If you can comment on that? And then I have a more strategic question after that.

Michael Hsu: Yes. Well, I’d say part one, Javier, I think I said this in the past and philosophically, I think we view trade promotion as a path to drive trial, especially of new items. And so that’s kind of where it fits in our marketing mix. And so I’m not a fan of using promotion to rent or borrow share for a period of time. And so I think any data that you might say — I’d say, we are promoting still below, as you point out, 2019 levels. But I think we have participated in some promotions. I did see your note and I would say one thing that kind of skews the analysis a little bit is this whole metric the denominator is EQ, right, or equivalent units. And for all the tissue categories, the equivalent unit is 10,000 sheets and for diapers, it’s 1,000 diapers.

And so when you do it on that basis or on a per piece basis, what happens, especially in our consumer tissue business is Scott 1000 by definition has 1,000 sheets. And so that’s about, let’s say, between 4x and 6x more than any other brands. And so that tends to skew kind of the measures a little bit makes us look a little bit underpriced when you do it on an EQ basis. But overall, I think we’ve taken pricing, we’ve probably moved faster on pricing than other brands. And so I’d say to me, our normal price gaps have begun to normalize.

Javier Escalante: Very helpful on the note. The other is, given the setup, right, do you think that there is the possibility of gross margins going forward to be higher than 2019 given the mix, given the — if you add volume plus mix, year-over-year you are running flat, do you think that, that is possible that going forward, we’re going to be operating at gross margins above 2019 levels or that’s structural that cannot happen.