Lamb Weston Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:LW) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Tom Werner: Yes. Andrew, we are going to stay disciplined with our revenue growth management initiative. And so, as we think about opportunities going forward, we are going to look at maintaining our margin profile and we are going to stay disciplined. And, you know, a testament of that is our decision to walk away from some of this lower margin business that we have been talking about. So, it’s all about maintaining the discipline and what we are going to focus on. We have worked really hard to rebuild our margin profile in this business and we are going to continue to focus on that and maintain our discipline around the margin structure.

Robert Moskow: Great. Thanks. See you next week.

Tom Werner: Yes. See you next week, Andrew.

Operator: We will now take a question from Rob Dickerson with Jefferies.

Rob Dickerson: Great. Thanks so much. I was on mute. I guess, quick question for you, Tom. Just, I guess, with respect to the China plant, right, that’s sort of up and running, maybe coming back to Andrew’s question a little bit, but asked a different way. I’m just curious. Exiting this business back in Q4, but now you have a new facility. Is there now this conversation that you’ve been having, and now can be activated, kind of, with the salesforce such that you say, okay, there [Technical Difficulty] opportunity here, right, the trends [Technical Difficulty] is up, maybe off a lower base, but still up. There’s not real demand destruction you know going forward. It sounds like really expected such that that salesforce can actually go try to take material share, let’s say, even in non-US market just kind of given the new facility. First question.

Tom Werner: Yes. So, the China facility, we are in early stages of our start-up. So it takes some time to get it up and running. We are running production there today. It’s going to be specifically targeted for that market. We have got things identified in — in China market from an opportunity business standpoint, but it takes some time to get the plant up and running and efficient and kind of work the kinks out. But we are early on. So it’s going to be several more quarters before we see the impact of that coming online.

Rob Dickerson: All right. Fair enough. And then I just think you probably said, correct me if I’m wrong, that traffic was up, I believe, mid-single-digit in Europe [Technical Difficulty] QSRs, but I know traffic was up in Europe, it sounds like better than the US. Maybe just any kind of general perspective as to why that might be the case kind of market — [B2B] (ph) market.

Tom Werner: Hey, Rob. It’s probably a little bit of, might have a little bit of softness last year, just coming out of COVID and everything like that. But overall trends seem to be pretty good. I think with inflation still a factor, but it’s cooling or at least a little bit better than people were expecting at least from the energy cost standpoint. [indiscernible] income helping traffic generate or we’re holding up pretty well.

Rob Dickerson: All right. Great. And then just quickly, obviously harvest coming in line with historic averages, coming off two bad years. Maybe just as a reminder, kind of, you know when we start to see that, you know, 35% of COGS maybe starts to disinflate or let’s call it deflate year-over-year. It sounds like that might be like a back half fiscal 2025 dynamic.

Tom Werner: Yeah, Rob, so just a reminder, our cost and contract raw input structure is baked. So, wherever the crop yields and all that comes out, it really isn’t going to impact our overall input cost for the balance of this fiscal year. So it’s — you’re not going to see any, any decline in our cost structure, because the crop is great. It’s just we have agreed to a contract last year ago and it is what it is.