Edgewell Personal Care Company

Good day and welcome to the Edgewell first quarter 2025 earnings conference call. All participants will be in a listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note, this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Chris Goff, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning for Edgewell's first quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. With me this morning are Rob Little, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Dan Sullivan, our Chief Operating Officer, and Fran Weissman, our Chief Financial Officer. Rod will kick off the call and hand it over to Dan to discuss first quarter commercial and operational highlights, followed by Fran who will discuss our financial results and 2025 four-year outlook. We will then transition to Q&A. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay via our website, www.edgewell.com. During this call, we may make statements about our expectations for future plans and performance. This might include future sales, earnings, advertising and promotional spending, product launches, savings and costs related to restructuring and repositioning actions, acquisitions and integrations, impacts from tariffs and other recent developments, changes to our working capital metrics, currency fluctuations, commodity costs, inflation, category value, future plans for return of capital to shareholders, and more. Any such statements are forward-looking statements for the purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 which reflect our current views with respect to future events, plans, or prospects. These statements are based on assumptions and are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described under the captioned risk factors in our annual report on Form 10-K for the year end of September 30th, 2024, as amended November 21st, 2024, and as may be amended in our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q filed with the SEC. These risks may cause our actual results to be materially different from those expressed or implied by our forward-looking statements. We do not assume any obligation to update or revise any of these forward-looking statements to reflect new events or circumstances, except as required by law. During this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of the non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is shown in our press release issued earlier today, which is available at the investor relations section of our website. This non-GAAP information is provided as a supplement to, not as a substitute or as superior to, measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with GAAP. However, management believes these non-GAAP measures provide investors with valuable information on the underlying trends of our business. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Rod.

Thank you, Chris. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us on our first quarter fiscal 25 earnings call. I'm pleased to welcome Fran Weissman, our new CFO, to the call this morning. Fran knows our business well and is more than ready for her expanded responsibilities. We delivered solid results this quarter, despite an external environment that has become increasingly more volatile and uncertain, largely driven by the strengthening of the U.S. dollar. Organic net sales were down slightly versus last year, but in line with our expectations with a sequential improvement over recent trend. Importantly, we saw continued growth in international markets with gains across wet shave, sun care and grooming and global growth in our right to win portfolio. Gross margin at constant currency was again strong in the quarter and served as an important catalyst for year over year incremental brand investments. Despite the worse than planned foreign exchange headwinds, as Fran will discuss later in the call, for the whole year, we still expect to deliver organic net sales, adjusted EBITDA, and adjusted earnings per share within our previously provided outlook ranges. This reflects our continued focus on driving operational performance, being disciplined in our investments, and management of costs and controlling the controllables. It also assumes the current macro conditions do not materially deteriorate. Importantly, we believe our performance demonstrates traction against our broader strategic priorities and gives us confidence in our ongoing efforts to further transform the business. Putting our first quarter performance in the context of our broader strategy, there are three important themes that underpin our performance to date, as well as the broader outlook for the full year. First, The categories we compete in remain mostly healthy and consumption trends are in line with our expectations. While organic growth remains mostly a result of price, volume gains have returned in many markets and consumer sentiment related to experiential spend and personal travel continues to be positive. Consumers remain resilient and at the same time cautious. Though in our categories, which are mostly non-discretionary, In everyday use, we see no material signs of purchasing hesitancy nor trade-down behavior. Having said that, the U.S. wet shave and femcare categories remain highly competitive and promotional. Importantly, we have no material indications of a similar trend across international markets. We will continue to actively participate as needed in support of our brands on shelf making our outsized productivity savings and gross margin expansion even more important as it unlocks our ability to remain in an investment stance commercially. The second comment I would make relates to our international business. I am extremely pleased with our results here. And as Dan will discuss, the underlying drivers of our performance further reinforce the durability of our top-line growth. Of course, in the absence of weekly scanner data, the success is not as readily visible. But for international, the first quarter was our fifth consecutive quarter of organic sales growth, and 11th in the last 12 quarters, delivering a three-year kegger of nearly 8%. Importantly, share results were also strong, especially in leading sun care markets like Australia and Mexico, and also high-growth wet shave markets like China. Now representing 40% of our global business, we've never been in a better position internationally, and I'm increasingly confident in the future of this business. Relatedly, we're also seeing the initial benefits of our rebuilt innovation platform. As I've shared, we are committed to a more consumer-centric, locally driven new product development model, and we spent much of last year taking the appropriate organizational steps necessary to deliver on these objectives. While work remains, our consumer insights are better, we're more locally focused and informed, and we're faster in bringing new products to market, some of which are already having an impact. Our strong international results this quarter include contribution from the highly successful and disruptive launch of Schick First Tokyo in Japan, the broadening of our Bulldog range to deepen our skincare penetration in Europe, and meaningful new forms and formats in Suncare that supported strong share gains in Australia and Mexico. Third and finally, our business transformation continues to be most dependent on our talented people. I've said from the beginning, we are equally committed to both a business and a cultural transformation, as we will not have one without the other. Our team is highly motivated and continues to perform with excellence, in the face of an increasingly challenging environment. Having been recently recognized as the number two best midsize company to work for out of 400 ranked, our efforts are clearly being recognized externally and our ability to attract and retain top talent is a key catalyst for continued strong performance. Over the past six months, we've announced a series of leadership changes and organizational changes designed to strengthen our capabilities and operating model, streamline decision-making, and improve enterprise execution. In the quarter, we saw notable improvements in commercial and operational performance. Dan will share more about this shortly. Last quarter, I announced the appointment of Jeff Spence to the role of president of our North America business. At that time, I noted my desire to both continue the strong performance across our right to win portfolio, while equally accelerating our recovery and our right to play portfolio in the US market. And I'm excited about our early progress. Jeff and the team are moving with pace to confirm the strategic clarity and commercial baseline for the path forward for our North American business. We've already begun to enhance our talent profile in the US market, and we are better connected with our top retail partners. We're very excited about the path forward and the opportunity we have here. Finally, Jess and team are raising the bar on brand building, and I expect our portfolio, brand plans, and our in-market activations will be significantly improved over the coming quarters. I'm confident in Jess and the team's ability to have impact and create a lot of value in our North American business as we move forward. So in summary, I'm pleased with our performance in the quarter and more broadly expect continued stability across our categories as we move through the fiscal year. Our strategy is clear and we remain committed to its successful execution with our global teammates at the core of our success. And while the macro environment remains challenging, we will stay focused on controlling the controllables, delivering products that our consumers love and ultimately winning on shelf and online. And now I'd like to ask Dan to take you through our operational performance highlights. Dan?