PepsiCo, Inc. (NASDAQ:PEP) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Vivien Azer: Hi, thank you. Good morning. I was hoping that we could dive into the Frito-Lay margin expectations, please. Obviously, the top line has seriously benefited from very effective advertising, but we have seen a couple of years of margin compression there. So how should we think about that going forward, please? Thank you.

Ramon Laguarta: Yes. Listen, the Frito business is the jewel of PepsiCo. And this business, we’ve put a lot of investments in the last couple of years and continues to respond every year better to those to those investments. Investments went into quality of product, investments wanting to increased advertising, broader portfolio of brands that we’re supporting. Investments wanting to go to market, even some infrastructure bottlenecks that we had in our distribution systems. The truth is that we feel very good about this business growing very close to 18%, I think, in the — for the full year. And the operating profit growth of Frito this year is in the double digits, which we haven’t seen in like in the history almost. So we’re feeling good about the balance of growth, top line, bottom line that we see in Frito.

And as you can imagine, we will continue to invest in Frito-Lay in the coming years because that’s the highest margin business in PepsiCo and the highest ROIC that we can have in our investment.

Hugh Johnston: Yes. And again, just to put a few numbers to the points Ramon was making. We have a Frito business with a 27% operating margin for the full year, which is a really wonderful operating margin, obviously. And when you have a margin that high, your goal should be grow that business as fast as you possibly can. We grew at 18% in the fourth quarter and 17% for the full year. This is Frito-Lay, 17% full year revenue growth. So look, obviously, you can’t continue to see margins go down. But at the same time, with 11% dollar operating profit growth for Frito-Lay, that’s terrific operating profit growth. That’s an equation we’re certainly happy with for the year. We feel like Frito had just an outstanding year. We’d love to have a couple more like this one here.

Ramon Laguarta: What we feel very strong is about the quality of our commercial execution in a broader sense from the way we’re innovating to the way our brands are coming in front of consumers, both our large brands, right, Doritos, Lay’s, Ruffles, Cheetos, but also the smaller brands, small portfolio there, we’re building a beautiful small brands like Smart Foods or PopCorners or off the Eaten Path and some others that are completing that portfolio to compared to multiple occasions, different type of cohorts. And I think the team is doing a fantastic job.

Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Robert Ottenstein with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

Robert Ottenstein: Great. Thank you very much. Just wanted to kind of circle back to Dara’s first question and maybe if you could give us a little bit of sense. I mean the 6% sales growth, is there — are you contemplating any volume in that? Or is it all — you could almost be almost a rollover pricing from 2022. So just trying to get a little bit more granular on that. And then how does the — in the U.S., how does the promotional environment look? Are you seeing any sense or any pull from retailers to do a little bit more promo? Thank you.

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