The Clorox Company (NYSE:CLX) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Javier Escalante: Hi. Good afternoon, everyone. I am — I have another permutation of the same, observed retail sales in tracked channels versus the over-deliver in the quarter, but hopefully it’s from a different angle. So if you can talk about all channel retail sales growth, if you give us a sense of what were Clorox’s Q4 retail sales, including online and Home Depot and things like that, so we can better understand your guidance going into fiscal ’24? So if we can start with that and I have a follow-up.

Kevin Jacobsen: Javier, let me let me see if this helps. If you look at our Q4 performance and I think your question is sales across many different channels. As you saw, very strong growth, if you look at tracked channels, that’s true. But what I’d also tell you is some of the areas that are not showing up in tracked channels, we had very strong performance. Our PPD business grew both volume and sales in the quarter. In international, we held volumes and grew sales 14% organically. And then our non-track sales were even stronger than track. So, we’re seeing broad performance, not only in tracked channels, but we’re seeing it in all the areas where we’re selling product. And that contributed to the overall performance of the business. And that’s why you’ll probably see even stronger results on what you’re seeing if you’re just looking at tracked channel performance.

Javier Escalante: Well, the reason I’m asking that is because, I think Linda mentioned that consumption was stronger, right, and this is part of the over-deliver in the quarter, but we don’t see that in track channels. We see retail sales growth at 6%, both in the March the June quarter and then there is this very big difference in organic sales, and particularly on the volume side. So wondering if you could at least — let me tackle differently. What is — what percentage of your sales is in non-tracked channels, specifically in this quarter, given the seasonality of Kingsford? That would be helpful.

Linda Rendle: Javier, maybe it would be good just to back up again and go through to make sure we go through all the drivers of what drove track consumption versus organic sales, and Kevin just covered part of it. But we do have a fair amount of our sales in non-track channels. It’s a little complicated because non-track does not include international PPD, which is why Kevin broke it out the way he did. So, just to break it down, we had Q4 organic sales growth of 14% and we saw track sales consumption of about 7%. So the delta would be what Kevin highlighted. International and PPD are portion of that. PPD grew volume, international held volume. Remember that we’re lapping wipes inventory that Kevin spoke about, and that’s a portion of it.

And then we saw stronger, non-tracked performance in a number of retailers on a number of businesses. And that’s across e-commerce and brick and mortar, et cetera. And then in addition to that, we did, we haven’t spoken a lot about this yet, but we do always ship some of our Q1 events in Q4, and that contributed to that delta as well. But we do have a strong non-channel track channel presence. And so, yes, that absolutely can move the number. And this is pretty normal for us to have a quarter that is a bit disconnected from tracked channel sales, in addition that you have the fact that we have very strong merchandising in Q1 as we normally do, and we typically ship some of that in Q4. But those are really the — if you look at those four buckets, those are the four buckets of the difference between the 14% and the 7%.

Javier Escalante: Well, thank you. And if I squeeze in something when it comes to pricing for next year, how much is the carryover impact for fiscal — in fiscal ‘24?

Kevin Jacobsen: Javier, this one is pretty minimal. What we have left to lap is, the fourth round of pricing that we took for half a year. So if you look —

Javier Escalante: Okay.

Kevin Jacobsen: This year, we had in total, about 670 basis points of total benefit for the year, you should expect a much smaller benefit in fiscal year ‘24 because now we’re looking at just half a year on one of our pricing actions. And the fourth round was not as large as the third round.

Javier Escalante: Okay. Thank you so much. Very helpful.

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