Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (The)

Good day and welcome to the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company's fourth quarter earnings conference call. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Jim King. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Scotts Miracle-Gro fourth quarter conference call.

We're going to modify the structure of the call this morning, so let me set your expectations. I'm here today with Jim Hagedorn, our CEO, Randy Coleman, our CFO, as well as President and Chief Operator Mike Lukemeyer, Chief Marketing Officer Josh Peoples, and Hawthorne General Manager Chris Hangedorn. We've got a lot to cover this morning. Randy will go through the numbers and provide some clarity around the guidance we outlined in this morning's press release. Then Jim, Josh, and Chris will share their thoughts, mostly about the opportunity we see going forward in fiscal 21. At that point, we'll open the call for your questions. I respectfully ask that all of you participating in the Q&A ask one question and one follow-up. I'm glad to set up time later today or tomorrow for anyone who has additional questions. I want to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements this morning, so our actual results could differ materially due to a variety of risk factors. Those risks are highlighted in our press release this morning and explained more extensively in our Form 10-K, which is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I also want to remind you that this call is being recorded. An archived version of the call will be made available on our website, investor.scotts.com. With that, let's get going, and I'll now turn things over to Jim Hagedorn for some opening remarks. Jim? Thanks, Jim, and good morning, everyone. As you saw in our release, we capped off our record-setting 2020 results with a strong finish across the board in the fourth quarter. For both the quarter and the full year, we saw growth in every category of both the U.S. consumer business and Hawthorne. We also announced this morning our plans to increase our existing 25% financial stake in Bonnie Plants through a 50-50 joint venture with its current owner, Alabama Farmers Co-op. I don't want this news to get lost in the headlines around our financial performance for 2020 and our guidance for next year. We see live goods as an essential part of our long-term strategy, and having a more significant stake in Bonnie is the right place to start. I'll elaborate on this point later in my remarks. I know most of you want to focus today on our outlook for fiscal 21. Frankly, that's our focus as well and where I want to spend most of my time. Our EPS guidance, which projects 10% to 16% growth in 2021, demonstrates we're in a good place entering the year. We're going to handle things a little different this morning so that my comments have some better context. I'm going to turn the call over to Randy now. He'll walk through a few highlights for 2020 and then provide some of the details for our fiscal 21 outlook. Then I'll come back and share the remainder of my time with some of my colleagues so you have a better sense of our vision for the business as we enter fiscal 21.