speaker
Operator
Conference Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q1 2026 Prestige Consumer Healthcare and Earnings Conference call. At this time, all participants are in the listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1-1 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today, Phil Turpelillie, Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury. Please go ahead.

speaker
Phil Turpelillie
Vice President, Investor Relations and Treasury

Thanks, Operator, and thank you to everyone who's joined today. On the call with me are Ron Lombardi, our Chairman, President and CEO, and Christine Secco, our CFO and COO. On today's call, we'll review our first quarter fiscal 2026 results, discuss our full year outlook, and then take questions from analysts. A slide presentation accompanies today's call. It can be accessed by visiting PrestigeConsumerHelper.com, clicking on the Investors link, and then on today's webcast and presentation. Remember, some of the information contained in the presentation today include non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliation to the nearest GAAP financial measures are included in our earnings release and slide presentation. On today's call, manager will make forward-looking statements around risks and uncertainties, which are detailed at a complete safe harbor disclosure on page 2 of the slide presentation that accompanies the call. These are important to review and contemplate. Business environment uncertainty remains heightened due to supply chain constraints, high inflation, and geopolitical events, which have numerous potential impacts. This means results could change at any time, and the forecasted impact of risks is a best estimate based on the information available as of today's date. Additional information concerning risk factors and cautionary statements are available on our most recent SEC filings and most recent company 10Q that was released this morning. I'll now hand it over to our CEO, Ram Lombardi. Ram?

speaker
Ron Lombardi
Chairman, President and CEO

Thanks, Phil. Let's begin on slide 5. Q1 sales were approximately $250 million. We were disappointed by the start to the year, which did not meet the $258 to $260 million revenue forecast we communicated back in May. At the time, we had forecasted a -over-year decline in Q1 largely based on the timing of sales orders between Q4 last year and Q1 this year, as well as modestly lower sales in ICARE. Unfortunately, a planned production shutdown in ICARE, scheduled for early May, stretched longer than anticipated, resulting in a significant shortfall for clear eyes in Q1. We'll discuss the action steps we are taking to address this, including the announcement to acquire Pillar 5 on the next page. Elsewhere, our business performed largely in line with our expectations, including strong international segment growth and healthy long-term consumption trends for many of our key U.S. brands, such as Dramamine and Fleet, as well as the continued recovery of Summer's Eve. In addition to this, we experienced gross margin expansion of 150 basis points to .2% thanks to ongoing cost savings efforts resulting in a gross margin similar to our forecast. For EPS, we delivered 95 cents, which was below our expectations due to the sales miss, but still up approximately 6% versus the adjusted prior year thanks to the gross margin expansion, marketing expense timing, and lower interest expense. Pre-cash flow of 78 million was a quarterly record and continues to enable capital deployment used to enhance shareholder value. In Q1, we repurchased over 400,000 shares and maintained our leverage ratio of approximately 2.4 times. Now, let's turn to page six to discuss our iCare supply. Given the challenges faced in our iCare supply over the past year, we wanted to give a detailed update on our actions to address the issue. Over the past year, we began accelerating our long-term efforts focused on how to best position our supply chain to support clearized sales growth. The first phase of this was to bring on two new suppliers to supplement our long-term supply requirements and better align to our business needs. This phase has made significant progress with the first of these suppliers providing product deliveries in late Q1. The second supplier is on track to begin supply in early Q3. The second phase was to further invest in our North American-based partner to expand their capacity. Over the past year, we have made progress with them, but at the same time have been significantly impacted by shortfalls in production. As we evaluated our options to address this, we decided the best course for us was direct ownership of the facility to help secure and expand long-term supply, resulting in today's announcements of the agreement to acquire Pillar 5. This direct ownership will allow us to accelerate the expansion of capacity, including the startup of a new high-speed line that we expect production from in Q3, as well as future capacity additions to fully support our expected growth in I-Care demand. As a result of these actions, we believe we will see some improvements in supply late in Q2, but a more meaningful recovery in the second half of fiscal 26 and into fiscal 27. With that, I'll pass it to Chris to walk through the financials.

Disclaimer

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Investor presentation