Bic Sa Unsp/Adr

Hello and welcome to the BICS Q3 and 9 months 2024 results. My name is Laura and I will be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call your lines will be on listen only mode. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call. This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your questions. I will now leave the floor to Breeze Paris, your host of the day. Thank you.

Good morning and welcome to BIC's third quarter, a nine-month 2024 results call. I am Brice Paris, Head of Investor Relations. We are in Clichy today with Gonzales BIC, our CEO, and Chad Spooner, our CFO. This call is being recorded and the replay will be available on our website along with the presentation and press release. We'll start with the usual presentation, followed by a Q&A session. First, please take the time to read the disclaimer at the beginning of the presentation. With that, I give the floor to Gonzales.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for BIC's third quarter and nine-month results conference call. I'll begin with a summary of our performance in the third quarter, then Chad will take you through our detailed financial results. I'll conclude with our outlook for the year. Today, I have four key messages I want you to walk away with. The resilience of our operating model and the actions we took in the first half led to strong margins and free cash flow generation in the third quarter. As a result, I'm pleased to announce that we're upgrading our full year adjusted EBIT margin outlook for 2024. Second, we saw strong sequential improvement in North America net sales performance during the third quarter. particularly in our U.S. lighter business. Third, we continue to perform strongly across the rest of the group with multiple growth initiatives, contributing to net sales growth of more than 5% year-to-date. And finally, we successfully gained market share during the back-to-school season in our key geographies. However, the challenging consumer environment affected overall market trends. This, combined with the soft performance of our skin creative and digital writing businesses, negatively impacted our growth in Q3. That said, we must remain cautious. The overall trading environment and economic outlooks in North America and Europe remain highly uncertain, contributing to ongoing softness in global consumption. Let's dive a little deeper into each of these takeaways. To start, despite a trading environment that did not improve during the quarter, we experienced an increase in our net sales growth, up 110 basis points versus the second quarter, at 0.2% at constant currency if we exclude Argentina. This mainly came from solid performance in Blade Excellence and a return to growth in our Flame for Life division. When it comes to profitability, the implementation of our Horizon Plan and our cost control initiatives enabled us to deliver a rock-solid adjusted EBIT margin of 18.9% in Q3, a growth of 370 basis points year-on-year. Chad will go into more details on the main drivers in a moment. This strong performance leads us to raise our full year margin outlook, and we now expect an adjusted EBIT margin approaching 15.5% in 2024. In North America, we saw 720 basis point improvement in net sales growth compared to the second quarter, driven by good performance in blade excellence and gradual progress in our lighters business. Since the end of June, the U.S. lighter market declined stabilized. On a year-to-date basis, the market was down 5.1% in value. However, we continued to outperform the market and our added value products like Decors, EasyReach, and our new EasyLoad refillable utility lighter successfully drove market share gains. Additionally, growth across the rest of the group remained strong year-to-date as we continued to execute our horizon strategy. In Europe, we delivered mid-single-digit growth in both our Flame for Life and Blade Excellence divisions during the third quarter. In Flame for Life, growth was boosted by continued geographic expansion in Eastern Europe with further distribution gains. Our easy-reach lighter continued to perform well, achieving high single-digit net sales growth versus last year, notably across Western Europe. In Shavers, Our value for money proposition continued to resonate in an inflationary environment driven by the success of added value products like BitClick Soleil and Hybrid Flex. This momentum solidified our position as the number two player in the European wet shave market. In Latin America, our blade excellence division led the way, achieving double-digit growth in net sales, bolstered by the success of our trade-up strategy with products like BIC Comfort 3 Shaver and the Soleil range. Similarly, we recorded double-digit net sales growth in the Middle East and Africa region, driven by strong performance in human expression. That said, we continue to face headwinds from declining consumption trends across all geographies. Market trends during the back to school season proved challenging in key geographies, leading to lower replenishment orders from retailers during the third quarter. However, I'm proud of our team's solid commercial execution as we managed to gain share in declining markets during the season. In Europe, our value for money positioning has proven effective, particularly in France where we achieved market share gains of 130 basis points in value. This success was driven by strong in-store visibility and an impactful write more, spend less advertising campaign. In the US, despite a decline in consumer spending, we outperformed the market in core stationary segments like highlighters, mechanical pencils, and correction products. We also successfully launched our new advertising campaign featuring American singer Charlie Puth to promote our iconic four-color pen. Overall, The campaign generated remarkable results across print, broadcast, and social media with more than 4.2 billion impressions. Our human expression division was also impacted by the underperformance of our skin creative and digital writing segments, worsened by the challenging consumer environment. Nevertheless, we remain confident in the long-term growth prospects of these businesses. To conclude, we demonstrated remarkable resilience in the third quarter. While we recognize the complexity of the current global geopolitical and macroeconomic landscape, we remain confident in our ability to navigate these challenges. With that, I'll now turn it over to Chad, who will review our financial results. Thanks, Gonsalve.