Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Church & Dwight Third Quarter 2018 Earnings Conference Call. Before we begin, I have been asked to remind you that on this call the company's management may make forward-looking statements regarding, among other things, the company's financial objectives and forecasts. These statements are subject to risk, uncertainties and other factors that are described in detail in the company's SEC filings. I would now like to introduce your host for today's call, Mr. Matt Farrell, Chief Executive Officer of Church & Dwight. Please go ahead, sir. Matthew Thomas Farrell - Church & Dwight Co., Inc.: Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. I'll begin with a few comments on the quarter. Then I'll turn the call over to Rick Dierker, our CFO. And when Rick is finished, we'll open up the call for questions. So Q3 was an outstanding quarter for our company. Q3 net sales grew 7.2%, which reflects both strong organic sales growth and sales from prior year acquisitions. Sales growth is clearly a powerful earnings lever in an environment with rising input costs. Organic sales growth was 4.7%, which exceeded our outlook of 3%. Global consumer organic net sales have accelerated sequentially over the last five quarters, as price mix continues to improve. And this performance was a clear standout in comparison to our peers. Earnings per share was $0.58, which exceeded our outlook by $0.05. In the U.S., organic sales grew 4.7% with both volume growth and positive price. Our categories are growing and our market shares are healthy: 11 of our 15 categories grew during the quarter, 9 categories have grown for at least four consecutive quarters, and beyond category growth, our share results are solid with 7 out of 11 power brands growing share. As we have said in the past, we have low exposure to private label, about 12% share on a weighted average basis. Now we're having success in the online class of trade. Global consumer online sales continue to grow. And we continue to expect it to exceed 6% of sales in 2018. With respect to the promotional environment, 8 of our 11 power brands had a lower percentage of products sold on promotion in Q3 compared to Q3 2017 and still we grew. And this is the second quarter that we've seen this. And we don't expect that to change in Q4. Our International Consumer business delivered 8.3% organic growth. As you know, International has emerged as a growth driver for our company for the past four years. International markets are a bright spot for Church & Dwight, unlike many of our peers. Canada, Mexico and export had particularly strong quarters. The investments that we've made in new leadership, regional hubs, and our brand focus continue to pay off. On August 29, the company entered into a long-term cooperation agreement with Shanghai Jahwa, a respected and well established local Chinese CPG company. Shanghai Jahwa will be the exclusive omni-channel distributor for four of our categories, and they would be baking soda, toothpaste, dry shampoo and fem hy. And this is in Mainland China. This is an important step in our Asia-Pacific strategy. And we're very excited about the partnership, as Jahwa has demonstrated the ability to build strong brands for themselves and other CPG companies in the past in Mainland China. Our algorithm is 6% annual organic growth for the International business. And we expect to meet or beat that number in 2018. Now turning to specialty products. Q3 was another challenging quarter for us with a 3.3% decline in organic sales. And this of course reflects lower demand for animal productivity products from our dairy customers, who continue to be hurt by low milk prices. However, we still feel good about our long-term 5% organic sales algorithm, as a result of our acquisitions of businesses serving other species like cattle, swine and poultry. Now let's go back to the U.S. business for a moment to call out a couple of the big consumption winners in the quarter. In household, ARM & HAMMER detergent reached an all-time high quarterly share of 10.3%. And ARM & HAMMER unit dose consumption grew 31%. In personal care, BATISTE continued to gain share with 33.5% consumption growth in the dry shampoo category, while the category grew 26.7% in the quarter. Now BATISTE is the number one dry shampoo for the 11th consecutive quarter and continues to be the number one dry shampoo in the world. So to conclude, we had a terrific quarter. We have a sustainable evergreen business model, because we have brands consumers' love, our company is a friend of the environment, and that is important both to us and to our consumers, and our people make Church & Dwight just a great place to work. Next up is Rick to give you details on the third quarter and the outlook for Q4 and the full year. Richard A. Dierker - Church & Dwight Co., Inc.: Thank you, Matt, and good morning, everybody. We'll start with EPS. Third quarter adjusted EPS was $0.58 per share, compared to an adjusted $0.49 in 2017, up 18.4%. The $0.58 was better than our $0.53 outlook due to a stronger top line and a lower tax rate. Reported revenues were up 7.2%. Organic sales were up 4.7%, exceeding our Q3 outlook of approximately 3%. The organic sales beat was driven by our global consumer growth of 5.4%. We're extremely pleased with our results. This is the second consecutive quarter of global consumer product growth in excess of 5%. Now let's review the segments. First, Consumer Domestic, organic sales increased by 4.7%. As communicated last earnings call, we expected price mix to be positive in the back half of 2018, which is exactly what happened in Q3 with 2.1% price mix growth largely due to year-over-year couponing declines and lower promotional levels. International organic growth was up 8.3%, driven largely by BATISTE, VITAFUSION and FEMFRESH in the export business. We also had strong growth in Canada and Mexico. For our Specialty Products division, organic sales declined 3.3% due to lower volume as the dairy economy continues to struggle. Turning now to gross margin, our third quarter gross margin was 44.3%, a 100 basis point decrease from a year ago. This includes 160 basis point drag for higher commodities, a 70 basis point drag from higher transportation costs, and a 60 basis point drag from other manufacturing, offset by 100 basis points for our productivity program and 90 basis points of favorable volume and price. Moving now to marketing. Marketing was up $8.6 million year-over-year. Marketing expense as a percentage of net sales was flat at 11.6%, despite recent acquisitions which have a lower spend rate. For SG&A, Q3 SG&A decreased 20 basis points year-over-year. The $7.5 million increase was primarily due to acquisitions, including intangible amortization costs, incentive comp and IT plus R&D investment spending. Net operating profit, the operating margin for the quarter was 19.7%. Other expense all in was $16.9 million (sic) [$19.4 million] (7:49), primarily driven by interest expense and higher debt levels related to acquisition. Next is income tax. Our effective rate for the quarter was 21.9%, compared to 28.7% in 2017, primarily due to tax reform. We now expect the full year rate to be approximately 22%. And now to cash, we had a strong cash flow quarter. For the first nine months of 2018, net cash from operating activities was $568 million, an increase of about $145 million from the prior year due to higher cash earnings and a smaller increase in working capital. A bit of housekeeping here, diluted shares outstanding for the quarter were approximately 251 million and that is the expectation for the full year. So in conclusion, the third quarter highlights are 4.7% organic sales growth and adjusted EPS growth of 18.4%. Now, turning to the fourth quarter outlook, we continue to expect Q4 organic sales growth of approximately 3%. We expect fourth quarter earnings per share of approximately $0.57, a 10% increase over last year's adjusted Q4 EPS or a reported decline of 64% due to 2017 tax law changes. And now turning to the full year, we now expect organic sales to be approximately 4%. We continue to expect reported sales growth to exceed 9%. We continue to expect full year gross margin to be down 120 basis points, in line with previous guidance. And we are tightening our EPS range to $2.27 per share, or adjusted EPS growth of 17%. We're raising our marketing for the full year to be in excess of 11.5%, as we spend back any earnings beat to continue our momentum as we enter 2019. And with that, we'll turn it back over to Matt to discuss pricing before we open it up for questions. Matthew Thomas Farrell - Church & Dwight Co., Inc.: Okay. Thanks, Rick. Yeah. Before we open up the line for Q&A, I am going to cover a couple topics. Few words about pricing and tariffs. So rising commodity and logistics costs have put pressure on our gross margins over the last few months. We've had discussions with our retail partners and made decisions on pricing. In several household categories and geographies we are raising list price in the high single-digit range. And the price increases will start showing up on shelves in Q4. And the pricing covers about a third of our portfolio. Other categories are being planned for early 2019. Too early to talk about those. Naturally if input costs remain high, promotional support in 2019 would be reduced. And that would be consistent with recent trends. And then beyond cost inflation, we are impacted by the tariff war, notably in WATERPIK water flossers. And as a result, we are raising price there as well to protect gross profit dollars in 2019. And with that, I'll turn it over to Q&A.