Edgewell Personal Care Company

Good morning and welcome to Edgewell's third quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. 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 third quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. With me this morning are Rod Liddle, our President and Chief Executive Officer, Dan Sullivan, our Chief Operating Officer, and Ben Weissman, our Chief Financial Officer. Rod will kick off the call then hand it over to Dan to discuss our third quarter commercial and operational highlights, followed by Fran who will discuss our Q3 financial results in our 2025 updated full year outlook. We will then transition to Q&A. This call is being recorded and will be available for replay via our website, .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, brand investment, organizational and operational structures and models, cost mitigation and productivity efficiency efforts, 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 to 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 that are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described under the caption, risk factors in our annual report on Form 10K for the year ended September 30th, 2024, as amended November 21st, 2024, and as may be amended in our quarterly reports for Form 10Q 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 CAP 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 subs-substant to, not as a substitute for, as superior to measures of financial performance prepared in accordance with CAP. 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 third quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. This was a challenging quarter, with our top and bottom line performance falling below expectations. Our results were significantly impacted by very weak sun care seasons in North America and certain Latin America markets, largely related to adverse weather. While sun care performance pressured overall results, we continued to see strong results in two important areas. Internationally, we delivered another quarter of growth, coupled with strengthened market share performance. And strong supply chain execution led to further productivity gains above the -to-date trend. Importantly, our market share performance in the U.S. also improved, most notably across our Hawaiian Tropic, CREMO, and Schick Hydrosilk brands, which saw stepped-up investment levels in the quarter. The operating environment remains challenging, with both tariffs and foreign exchange contributing to full-year profit headwinds. On the consumer side, apart from sun care, our categories grew modestly in the U.S., in line with the 26 and 52-week trends. However, retailers further tightened inventory levels, most notably in the Fem Care category, leading to some divergence between our organic net sales and category consumption levels. Despite this challenging environment, as we discussed last quarter, we remain committed to incrementally investing across our business to support new brand campaigns, ensure robust backing for our newly launched innovations, and deliver the necessary improvements in our U.S. business in order to strengthen our portfolio for the longer term. We are encouraged by the early results from these incremental investments, which bolster our confidence going forward. And I will say more on this shortly. Our performance in the quarter and over the first nine months of this fiscal year further reinforced three fundamental strengths of our business. First, we continue to seamlessly execute our international market growth strategy. Across the business, it now represents 40 percent of our global sales. These markets have collectively delivered consistent -to-high single-digit organic growth over a four-year period. And we expect this business to deliver -single-digit organic growth again this year, with notable strengthening share positions across shave, sun, and grooming in key markets. Second, we are committed to delivering consumer-led, locally designed innovation across our portfolio. We have expanded Billy's geographic reach, launching the full wet-shave line in Australia in July. In grooming, Bulldog has entered the premium skincare category, driving sales and market share growth across Europe. And we are seeing significant benefits from the broad and criminal range in the United States and Europe. In sun care, WineTropic is experiencing strong U.S. growth due to a successful marketing campaign, updated formulations, and its on-trend branding. And in Japan, we've taken the Chic brand to premium skincare with the launch of the Progista brand in premium channels. Third, productivity and efficiency remain at the cornerstone of how we operate, as demonstrated by the delivery of another quarter of almost 300 basis points in realized gross savings. The work our teams are doing across the supply chain is more important than ever, as we tackle the impact of global tariffs and increasing macro complexity. Now let's talk about North America, where our results have been below our expectations and where we've been on a journey to strengthen our business in the U.S. as a catalyst for a return to profitable, sustained, top-line growth. Let me provide an update on the work that has been done thus far. Following Jess's appointment last October, she and the team have focused their efforts in three distinct areas, working with both diligence and urgency. First, performing a rigorous assessment of the business and gaining a clear understanding of the challenges inherent within our U.S. portfolio and broader U.S. business model. Second, leveraging deeper consumer understanding and taking a modern approach to brand building that allows us to enhance brand message and better activate our brands with consumers. And finally, designing an organization that can achieve meaningful improvements in both commercial effectiveness and operating efficiency, underpinned by improved capabilities simplification and a lower cost to operate. This holistic approach is designed to fundamentally strengthen our business for the future, and I'm very pleased with the progress we are making, elements of which were visible in the quarter. During the quarter, we were highly proactive in the market, taking actions to support our brands at a different level, and we saw promising results. We designed and executed targeted brand campaigns across our focus brands of CREMO, Hawaiian Tropic, and Chic Hydra Silk. In support of these exciting programs, we have stepped up investments and have strategically shifted our spend to better balance both upper and lower funnel activities. The consumer has responded well, and we've seen each brand's consumption trends improve, with Hawaiian Tropic's share up 150 basis points in Q3. Continued share gains and grooming, with CREMO up 40 basis points and sequential improvement in Hydra Silk's share. Also, we just completed the redesign and launch of the new U.S. commercial organization, underpinned by what is essentially a new U.S. leadership team, bringing together a talented, proven, and highly capable leadership group under JESS. This team will be fully in place by September and operating in a simplified, streamlined structure, with laser focus on U.S. consumers building brands that consumers love more and can win and market. As you saw last quarter, and will continue to see this quarter, this will come with targeted, increased investment in both trade support and A&P, along with a more efficient overhead structure. Where we have winning campaigns, as I highlighted earlier, we will invest. Many of the changes we are making in the U.S. market are in line with the changes we have successfully driven across our international markets, which are now delivering consistent -single-digit sales growth and operating margin expansion. As with anything, driving a step change in results takes time, but I'm confident the team we are putting in place and focused on doing all of the right things to create value in our most important market. The team is actively building plans for 2026, and we will share more on the U.S. transformation effort as part of our Q4 earnings call. This leads me to our outlook for the full year. We are in a pivotal moment in our transformation. We are orchestrating significant change across North America commercial operations, while facing numerous external headwinds, including foreign exchange, tariffs, and a significantly reduced sun care consumption profile for this season. Last quarter, we discussed the importance of maintaining investment levels for key brands, even in the face of a challenging macro environment. Similarly, as we look at the remainder of the year, we will continue to press forward on investment to support the required changes in the U.S. that are already beginning to demonstrate returns through our improved share performance. While these investments weigh on profitability in the near term, we believe they serve to strengthen our business and better position our portfolio in the competitive U.S. market to set us up for long-term success. And now I'd like to ask Dan to take you through our operational commercial performance highlights in the quarter. Dan?