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

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Steve Voskuil : Sure. On the — in general, we have pretty good visibility, I would say across cost and commodities. I’d say the hedging program gives us some of that visibility. The caveat is that if you look at the last two years, where we’ve been bitten, in some cases, those are the things that we don’t hedge and have been volatile, things like packaging, and resins and specialty ingredients and so dairy. So those are ones that I think we keep an eye on and movements at some of those, material movements can move the needle on. We saw some of those material movements in the last few years. I think our expectation is some of that will settle down and with that settling down in our visibility into the rest of the talks. I agree with you it’s still potential for volatility, but we feel we’ve sort of picked the guidance range to try to accommodate most of that volatility.

Christopher Carey : Okay, that makes sense. One quick follow-up and perhaps something that’s even better suited to, the Investor Day coming up. But this sounds confidence on long term margin improvement. And clearly we saw an inflection in the snacks business today with positive commentary on the medium term in that business. So when you think about that long term margin between the confection the sack size do you have any sense of what would be driving that between those segments? Or is it more of a holistic target for the organization over time? Thanks so much.

Steve Voskuil : Yeah, that is a great one for the investor conference. And — but I will say, our expectation is we want to see margin improvement across all parts of the business, all segments. And so we’ve seen a lot of improvement in international in recent years. But we have the same expectation that that’s going to continue also. And that we’re going to optimize and grow but grow in a sustainably profitable way there. Salty, probably expectations, given the capital that we’ve deployed in those acquisitions and the opportunity, we touched on things like private label and the impact that still has on the business as we look to the future. Opportunities to extract more margin out of that business. And in always on the confection side, we want to have a model that drives margin accretion.

Christopher Carey : Okay, thanks for the answers.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from line of David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

David Palmer: Thanks. A question on gross margin in this latest quarter, especially versus the third quarter. The reason I’m asking for color about what might have been your biggest unlocks that fourth quarter is because on a one and multi-year basis, it looks like pricing was rather similar to the third quarter. Yet your margin trend improved. And that fourth quarter was actually higher than it was in the in the fourth quarter of 2019. So any color about unlocks and gross margin would be helpful?

Steve Voskuil : Yeah, I think the biggest drivers that we touched on, we did have some better productivity dropping through supply chain efficiencies that had ramped up and essentially, Michele said we’re not all the way back in terms of that supply chain efficiency. But we’ll get to see an uptick in the fourth quarter. And then the — I’ll say the volume growth on the elasticity side, helping dropping some fixed costs absorption through the P&L as well. Those are probably at the point, just a couple of things, those are the ones I point to.

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