Mondelez International, Inc. (NASDAQ:MDLZ) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Dirk Van De Put: Yes, everything you’re saying is true. Let me explain it a little bit. I would say the consumer, as it relates from a behavior standpoint, as in the fourth quarter show the biggest shifts, and I can explain a little bit the shifts that we’ve seen. But from a mindset perspective, from a confidence perspective in North America, probably the best in the last 2.5 years. So what they’re doing is still reflecting sort of the tension they’re under, but they are expecting the economy to improve and that better times are ahead for them. So what are they doing? We see a little bit more of an elasticity effect. And the way they react to that is they’re waiting more. We see particularly light buyers waiting for promotion.

So not buying with the same frequency, but buying more when it’s on promotion. We see them downsizing, going to smaller formats and buying more of those. We see shift in channels. They go to club channels, e-commerce channels, that’s the one we see winning. And then we have a number of sort of mechanical effects that we’re seeing, particularly the snap reduction in the U.S. And so we see less disposable income for a certain group of consumers. But overall, I would say we expect that that gradually will improve because of that mindset change that I was saying. So the overall volume expectations as the year goes by in the US, we’re expecting to accelerate and to get better. That’s a little bit our view on the US consumer at the moment.

Alexia Howard: Great. Thank you very much. I’ll hand it back to you.

Dirk Van De Put: All right, thank you. Well, thank you. I think that was the last question. As we said, we feel very good about ’23. It was a great year for us. We are entering ’24 with good momentum. I think we’re prepared for everything that we are seeing ahead of it. And as I said, there is some issues that we have to look at. But despite all that and including those effects into our forecast for the year, we think that we’re going to have a strong year. We’ll see how the client disruption goes in Europe. So we have to wait a little bit to see how the first quarter goes by. But overall, we think we will have an on to the higher side of our algorithm year at this stage that we can forecast. Again, thank you, and happy to answer any other questions that you would have through our IR department.

Luca Zaramella: Thank you, everyone.

Operator: This does conclude today’s program. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect at any time.