Colgate-Palmolive Company

Good morning. Welcome to today's Colgate Palmolive 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. This call is being recorded and is being simulcast live at www.colgatepalmolive.com. Now, for opening remarks, I'd like to turn this call over to Chief Investor Relations Officer and Senior Vice President, M&A, John Fauché.

Thanks, Betsy. Good morning, and welcome to our third quarter 2024 earnings release conference call. This is John Fauché. Today's conference call will include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from these statements. Please refer to the third quarter 2024 earnings press release and related prepared materials and our most recent filings with the SEC, including our 2023 annual report on Form 10-K and subsequent SEC filings, all available on Colgate's website, for discussion of the factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements. This conference call will also include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures, including those identified in Tables 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the earnings press release. A full reconciliation to the corresponding GAAP financial measures is included in the third quarter 2024 earnings press release and is available on Colgate's website. Joining me on the call this morning are Noel Wallace, Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, and Stan Satula, Chief Financial Officer. Noel will provide you with his thoughts on our results and our 2024 outlook, and we will then open it up for Q&A.

Noel? Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone, and thanks again for joining us as we report another strong quarter of top-line and bottom-line performance. Our strategy of delivering more impactful core and premium innovation Increasing our advertising spending and scaling capabilities to drive improved brand health and higher household penetration is paying off through strong volume-led organic sales growth. You're seeing this best represented in the fact that we have delivered volume growth in all six divisions for the second straight quarter with 3% growth in developed markets and 4.6% growth in emerging markets. It won't be every division, every quarter, but we believe our geographic breadth and category mix will enable us to better weather volatility over time, whether that's from economic, geopolitical, or other factors, and deliver organic sales growth in line with our long-term targets despite difficult comparisons. This will be well considered in our plans, and it's why we've been talking about building our business model to deliver sustained, profitable growth, even as category growth decelerates as pricing growth recedes. Our commitment to reestablishing our gross margin is paying off in gross profit dollar growth, even as we lack more difficult comparisons. We have used this gross margin expansion to continue funding the investment in advertising and capabilities. enabling us to deliver best-in-class volume growth, which is driving strong organic sales growth. And we believe the flexibility we have built into our P&L gives us the ability to turn that organic sales growth into consistent compounding earnings per share growth to deliver top-tier TSR over the long term. And with that, I'll open it up for questions.