The Hershey Company (NYSE:HSY) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jason English : Hey, good morning, folks. Thanks for fitting me in. My apologies I didn’t get a chance to go through all the prepared remarks. We have a lot going on this morning. Apologies if you have answered the question. I have two quick things. First, the capacity expansion. You give some quantification for the year? What’s the cadence? When should we expect to see that capacity coming along?

Michele Buck : Yeah, it’s going to be coming online throughout the year. And again, this sort of fits into a broader discussion we’ve had on capacity expansion. I think we’ve talked in the past, if you look at the 2020 to 2024, period, we were looking for a 15% ish increase in capacity across the network. And so what we’re going to see in 2023 is going to be a low single digit contribution towards that goal. And I would kind of think about it coming in ratably over the course of the year.

Jason English : Okay, and the elevated CapEx, it sounds like it’s a long slog. Should we expect this elevated level to continue into next year, for the year beyond as well?

Michele Buck : Yeah, not at this level. But I would say at least for the next — for 2024, we will have some amount of elevated capital. We will still be finishing off the ERP program, and still probably having some tail investments from a capacity standpoint. So those are the two things I would point to and, on the CapEx, as we talked about all the time, the majority of that CapEx is targeted on capacity expansion. If you click into that a large portion is driven by recent fantastic growth we’ve had there and recent capacity and network capacity has improved significantly. But we still have opportunities, some are recent, some in other brands to unlock more efficiency and capacity. And so that capacity expansion plus the ERP investments that will eventually drop out are the two kind of biggest components of the CapEx right now.

Jason English : Understood. The last question for me. I’ve always considered your European venture to be a bit opportunistic. It’s a small tactical export business. Yet, recently, you’ve kind of carved it out as a standalone business. Does this signal anything in terms of your strategic intent on expansion in Europe?

Michele Buck : No, not at all. If that’s in reference to any of the talent changes that we made, they were really in the course of just normal development and expansion for people to get new opportunities. Europe continues to be small. We continue to feel that we are making great strides and seeing a lot of growth there. But there is no strategic change in our approach to that market at all.

Jason English : Understood. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from line of Pamela Kaufman with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Pamela Kaufman: Hi, good morning.

Michele Buck : Good morning.

Pamela Kaufman: Can you talk about your key innovations planned for ’23? And how are you thinking about the drivers of top line growth between innovation versus existing brands, where you’ve been capacity constrained?

Michele Buck : Sure. So innovation continues to be an important part across our portfolio. And we have several items that are launching this year that we think will generate a lot of consumer excitement and merchandising. And if we look at our core confection business, the highlights there would be Reese’s Stuffed with Reese’s Puffs. We have a limited edition, which is a Reese’s Creamy, and then a Reese’s crunchy product. So a line of limited editions that let consumers pick their favorite, which texture they like. And then we have an exciting new kisses flavor that is called Milkilicious , which is a kiss filled with a milk chocolate filling. On our salty business, we launched as a limited time edition this year, a dot cinnamon sugar flavor.

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