Coca-Cola Company (The)

At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to the Coca-Cola Company's second quarter 2024 earnings results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. If you have any objections, please disconnect at this time. All participants will be on listen only mode until the formal question and answer portion of the call. I would like to remind everyone that the purpose of this conference is to talk with investors and therefore questions from the media will not be addressed. Media participants should contact Coca-Cola's Media Relations Department if they have any questions. I would now like to introduce Ms. Robin Halpern, Vice President and Head of Investor Relations. Ms. Halpern, you may now begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I'm here with James Quincy, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Don Murphy, our President and Chief Financial Officer. We've posted schedules under Financial Information in the Investors section of our company website. These reconcile certain non-GAAP financial measures that may be referred to this morning to result as reported under generally accepted accounting principles. You can also find schedules in the same section of our website that provide an analysis of our gross and operating margins. This column contains forward-looking statements, including statements concerning long-term earnings objectives, which should be considered in conjunction with cautionary statements contained in our earnings release and in the company's periodic SEC report. Following prepared remarks, we will take your questions. Please limit yourself to one question. Re-enter the queue to ask follow-ups. Now, I will turn the call over to James.

Thanks, Robin, and good morning, everyone. After a good start of the year, we continued our momentum in the second quarter. In a world with a wide spectrum of market dynamics, our all-weather strategy is working. We're winning in the marketplace by leveraging our scale and continuing to foster a growth mindset. Given our strong year-to-date results, we are raising both our top-line and our bottom-line guidance today. This morning, I'll start by discussing the current operating environment and reviewing our second quarter performance. Then I'll explain how we're enhancing our capabilities to drive more effective and efficient operations, including leveraging digital and tech-enabled innovations to ultimately contribute to our earnings growth. Finally, John will discuss our financial results in the RAISE 2024 guidance. In the second quarter, we grew volume, generated strong organic revenue growth, and expanded margins while continuing to invest in our business. We also gained value share. This culminated in 7% comparable earnings per share growth, despite 10% currency headwinds and 2% headwinds from bottler re-franchising. Overall, our industry remains attractive and is expanding. We believe we're well positioned to capture the vast opportunities available to us. Across the world, we'll continue to navigate many varying market dynamics locally to deliver our global objectives. In Asia Pacific, we had strong performance across most of our footprint. In ASEAN and South Pacific, the re-franchising of the Philippines is off to a good start. In the Philippines, we grew volume by double digits and drove strong value share gains by increasing focus on affordable packages, including accessible price points and refillable offerings. Growth across ASEAN and South Pacific was driven by strong end-to-end execution across our sparkling portfolio. Our business in India recovered nicely from a slower start to the year, driven by Sprite and Fanta, as well as strong local brands such as Thumbs Up and Mazza. Strong end-to-end execution across our growth flywheel led to double-digit volume growth. In China, consumer confidence remains subdued. We continue to focus on our core business and invest behind profitable, long-term growth. Lastly, in Japan and South Korea, we generated volume growth during the quarter and won value share. We successfully relaunched Ayataka, a much-loved local tea brand in Japan, and we're also benefiting from stronger execution in e-commerce channels. In EMEA, the external environment remains mixed. In Europe, we saw pressure in our away-from-home business due to some reduced foot traffic and adverse weather in Western Europe. To capture value, we're investing in several highly anticipated activations, including music festivals, the Euro 2024 Football Championship, and of course, the Paris Olympics. We're increasing our focus on brands with strong momentum across our total beverage portfolio, including Fuse Tea and Powerade, and on promising sparkling innovations such as Coke Lemon and reformulated Sprite. In Eurasia and Middle East, geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty continue to impact our business. We're working closely with our local partners to navigate these headwinds while investing for the longer term. In Africa, despite multiple currency devaluations, strong integrated execution led to robust performance across our markets. For example, in Nigeria, our system quickly responded to the intense inflationary environment by focusing on affordable packages, including accessible price points and refillable offerings, and increasing outlet coverage to win both volume and value share. Across Africa, we grew volume in mid-single digits and similarly won both volume and value share. In North America, we generated robust top-line and bottom-line growth and won value share. Our volume decline was driven by softness in away-from-home channels. To offset this, we're partnering with food service customers to market food and drink combo meals to drive traffic and beverage incidents. Excluding mainstream packaged water, at-home volumes held up well. Fairlife and Trademark Coke finished number one and number two as the at-home retail sales growth leaders for the industry during the quarter. Our juice business also had a strong quarter, and recent innovations including Sprite Chill and Topo Chico Saboris are off to solid starts. In Latin America, volume momentum continued, led by strength in Mexico and Brazil. Growth was driven across our entire total beverage portfolio. Coca-Cola Zero Sugar had a standout quarter with over 20% volume growth, and we're continuing to take integrated execution to the next level by increasing investments behind cold drink equipment to win share of visible inventory and create additional consumer demand. Finally, in global ventures, despite pressures in key markets such as the United Kingdom and China, we generated organic revenue growth and expanded margins. Costa is driving loyalty through targeted promotions like TreatDrop and Innocent gained value share in Europe. Putting it all together, despite an ever-changing external environment, our business remains very resilient. The power of our portfolio, amplified by our system's unique capabilities, is a clear advantage. While we're delivering on our near-term commitments, we're also building capabilities and innovating across our flywheel to become a more agile, effective, and efficient organization. Starting with marketing and innovation, last year we stood up Studio X, which is our digital and organizational ecosystem that integrates marketing capabilities and connects them to our global network structure. We're producing tailored content at scale and with speed and are able to measure impact in real time. We're also refining our innovation process to prioritize bigger and bolder bets. And we're removing barriers to deliver a more holistic approach, shorten the time to launch, and increase success rate. We know that innovations that grow in the second year have a much greater odds of multi-year success and deliver far greater impact. We've focused on sustaining investment and have consistently improved second-year performance success rates in each of the past four years. Continued innovation successes include Sprite and pantry reformulations, fused tea in Europe, and it made zero sugar in North America, among many others. As a result of these combined initiatives, we have greatly improved our ability to rapidly produce and deliver marketing content, integrate activations with timely innovations, and scale successes to drive the greatest impact. One example from the second quarter, Coca-Cola's partnership with Marvel, which featured nearly 40 different limited edition collectible graphics and QR codes on our packaging to connect consumers with unique augmented reality experiences. We collaborated closely with Marvel Studios and the Walt Disney Company and tapped into the best-in-class animation and activation to quickly scale to over 50 markets. As a result of this and other growth initiatives, trademark Coca-Cola grew volume and won volume and value share during the quarter. Our marketing and innovation transformation journey contributed to Trademark Coke winning Creative Brand of the Year for the first time ever at the Cannes Lions in June. We won 18 different awards at Candelaria. Beyond marketing innovation, we're flexing our muscle in revenue growth management and integrated execution to sustain competitive development. Even in markets with very well-developed capabilities, there's potential to be even better. For example, Mexico is one of the markets at the forefront of revenue growth management and has the highest conflict equipment density in the world. During the quarter, we drove affordability with refillables and premiumization with single-serve transactions. Our system also added over 80,000 coolers year-to-date. Through these and similar initiatives, we grew volume in mid-cycle digits during the quarter, continuing the momentum for the past few quarters. Each day, consumers enjoy approximately 2.2 billion servings of our products, translating into about 800 billion servings annually. This kind of scale gives us unique insights into the consumer, which helps us to better tailor offerings. Emerging technologies, including those enhanced by AI, have the potential to create value for retailers and consumers. For example, we're piloting an AI-based price-packed channel optimization tool across several markets that evaluates opportunities to better tailor solutions to drive incremental volume and revenue. Early results show the tool helps improve both our offerings and speed to market. Our system is also piloting an AI-driven initiative to push personalized messages to retailers with suggested items based on previous orders and market data. Initial pilots indicate that retailers who receive the messages are over 30% more likely to purchase recommended SKUs, which results in incremental sales for our retailers and the system. We're just scratching the surface of what's possible, and we're taking steps to seize opportunities down the road. To sum it all up, while we recognize there's still much work to be done to capture the vast opportunities available, we're encouraged by our year-to-date results and efforts to improve every aspect of how we do business. As we look forward to the second half of the year, the external backdrop remains uncertain, including some signs of pressure in various consumer segments across developed markets. However, thanks to the power of our portfolio and the unwavering dedication of our system employees, we are confident we will deliver on our updated 2024 guidance and longer-term commitments. With that, I'll turn the call over to John.