Matthew Farrell
Management
Okay, gang. We’re going to get going now. Okay. Thank you all for coming today and thanks, everyone, who is dialing in from office or home. I’m going to begin with the Safe Harbor statement. I recommend everybody to read that at your leisure. Say who is with us today from management, we have our CMO, Britta Bomhard; our Head of International and Global New Products, Steve Cugine; our General Counsel, if you have any legal questions; Rick Dierker, our CFO; Rick Spann, who runs Supply Chain; and Paul Wood, who runs U.S. Sales. All right. So here’s – I’m going to give you a short story right now. So you don’t have to really pay attention to the other 150 slides. We had a terrific year. This is the second consecutive year that our company grew organic sales 4%. The U.S. posted 4% organic sales growth and 10 out of 12 of our power brands grew or held share. International posted 9.2% organic growth and continues to be a juggernaut for the company. And as we ended the year, organic growth returned to the Specialty Products business after two down years. Last time, we had an up quarter was Q4 2017. And the reason it turned positive is because the dairy market became healthy. And another encouraging sign is that domestic volumes turned positive in the fourth quarter. And finally, we had record cash from operations in 2019. So now looking ahead to 2020. We’re calling 3.5% organic growth, and that is net of exiting the low-margin gummy private label business. And consistent with our Evergreen model, we’re calling 7% to 9% EPS growth and that is top tier in CPG. Now I want to recap for a minute why Church & Dwight is a standout in the consumer space. Number one, we have an Evergreen model that our shareholders are very familiar with as our employees. Number two, we focus on cash. Number three, we have an ability to execute and that’s what drives our performance. We deliver meaningful top line and bottom line growth year-after-year. We have a very lean company with the highest sales per employee of any of our peers, and that sales per employee stat is an underappreciated metric. We are innovators with new product offerings across many categories year-after-year and we’re becoming digitally savvy. The 8% of our sales are online today and that does not include buy online, pickup in store. If we included that, it’d be much higher than 8%. But we made good choices when it comes to acquisitions. Those choices have led us to dry shampoo, gummy vitamins, women’s hair removal, water flossers and hair thinning solutions. So we believe there’s no better place to invest in CPG than Church & Dwight. So here’s our track record. Let’s go to the next slide. Here we are. So look at our last three, five and 10 years, we delivered double-digit TSR returns to our shareholders. And if you look at 2019, 8.3%, and that’s on top of a 2018 that was plus 30%. Let’s move on to the formal part of the program. So who we are, why we’re winning. Britta is going to come up and talk about them – give you an update for the master brand. And also Britta and I are going to ham and egg the consistent innovation story. Steve is going to come up and talk about international, I’ll kind of come back and tell you about animal productivity and how we run the company, and then we’re going to end with Rick on financials. All right, first, who we are. So let’s talk about our Evergreen business model. This is in green not only in the hearts of our employees, but all of our long-term shareholders as well, 3% top line, 8% bottom line. And if you say, well, how’s it going for you? And you look at the last 10 years, the average organic sales growth has been 6 – 3.6%. So where’s that 3% coming from? Well, it’s kind of 2% from the U.S., 6% international and 5% Specialty Products. We don’t always hit this in the market any one year, but that is the long-term algorithm. If you say, what are your brands? We have lots and lots of brands. Well, we have 12 power brands. And those 12 power brands account for 80% of our revenues and profits. And we have very well-balanced portfolio. A little bit more than half is – or consumer products part of the house. For those of you at home, those are just couple of balloons going off. The personal care, 49%; household, 44%; and you can see Specialty Products at 7%. Now it’s a diversified portfolio, in that, 63% is premium and 37% is value. That means we perform well in virtually any economy. And we have a lot of runway for international. So international has been a juggernaut, as I’ve said, for the last five years, still only 70% of the company. So we’ve got a long way to go there. And we do operate in the land of the giants. You can see, we have $4.4 billion in sales, all of our competitors are significantly larger than we are. We think this gives us an advantage. So we’re fast, we’re nimble. When you have only 4,700 – 4,800 employees, you can make quick decisions, you can move fast, your communication is easier, and you can adapt to change better. And we have a long history of acquisitions. We’ve added almost $3 billion in sales since 2004 over the last 15 years, and a lot of that came from acquisitions. And we have very specific acquisition criteria. We’re only going to look for a brand that has number one or number two share, high-growth, high-margin, needs to be asset-light. We need to be able to leverage our supply chain footprint and they must have a sustainable competitive advantage. And since the year 2000, so over the last 19, 20 years, we’ve acquired 11 out of our 12 power brands. In the year 2000, the only big brand we had was ARM & HAMMER. So what we say around the house is 12 brands today, 20 tomorrow. Now why are we winning? We have five reasons. One, we’re in the right categories; two, we know how to grow shares; three, we don’t have a high exposure to private label. We’re growing online and we are on trend. So let’s look at the categories. So if you look at the categories over the last four years, in general, our categories’ weighted average grow 3%. So this is the underpinning for the company’s long-term organic growth of 3%. As far as growing share, this is our report card. You don’t get this report card for many CPG companies. but every year, we tell you how we’re doing. So for our 12 major brands, we maintain our growth share. And you can see this year for the first time 10 out of 12, we’re green. And we get lots of questions generally about the laundry category. So what’s the long-term trend in laundry? So over the last three years, we’ve had 120 basis points of share in laundry. The other winner was Procter & Gamble and Henkel has struggled. Now, you know, as we go from quarter-to-quarter, you’ll have some questions on non-measured channels. Let me give you a sense for how big our non-measured channels for some of our categories. Most of these categories are going to be 70%, 80%, 90% represented on Nielsen. But if you go to the far right, you’ll see some of our more recent categories, power flossing, hair thinning and even electric – women’s electric grooming are all significantly less than 50%. So something to bear in mind going forward. We have low exposure to private label. The weighted average share of private label for our categories is only 12%. Only five of our categories have private label exposure. And as you can see from the lines on that chart, you can see it’s relatively stable and we’re growing online. Back in 2015, we were fourth quartile when it came to online sales. Today, we are first quartile. We hit our goal of 8% in 2019 and we have a goal to be over 9% in 2020, and we have lots of products – number one products on Amazon. And Amazon, of course, is the number one online retailer. Okay, on trend. So we’re all through four of our brands and while we think we’re on trend. Take BATISTE, it’s a business we acquired in 2011. So dry shampoo was a convenient solution to women between wet shampoos. This was a business with $20 million in sales in 2011. If you look at what kind of runway do you have in the U.S.? Well, in the U.S., 125 million women – there are 125 million women over the age of 18. Two-thirds of them don’t wash their hair every day and 13% of them today use dry shampoo. Now, if you look at household penetration, it’s only 7.5% in the U.S. So that’s why we’re trying to figure out, well, how big could it be in the U.S. We look at the UK. The UK is the most mature dry shampoo market, that’s where it originated. So if we compare with where the U.S. is, the U.S. is in the middle innings. And we can see by in comparison to where the UK is that the dry shampoo market will double from $225 million at retail to $450 million over time. So being the number one dry shampoo means, we have a lot of runway ahead of us. So next up is women’s electric hair removal. So we bought the number one women’s electric hair remover in FLAWLESS. So these are tools to remove – so I’ll go left to right, face, brow, leg and whole body. So women are looking for convenient ways to remove hair. And if you look at the household penetration, it’s only 2% in the U.S. and less than 2% rest of the world, so a lot of runway here for this business. Next up is water flossers. We have the number power pulse and recommended by the ADA. So what’s the story there? We can do a show of hands. Everybody knows, 80% of the people don’t floss everyday, even though they should. And consumers are discovering water flossers. Water flossers are the easiest solution to flossing. Again, look at household penetration. 22% in the U.S. not bad, but we think that could go as high as 48% if you just look at the penetration for electric toothbrushes. And then if you look at – in Europe, for example, it’s only 3% to 5%. So we’re just getting started with water flossers outside the U.S. Again, on trend, got a lot – lots of runway ahead of us. Next up is gummy vitamins. You know the story pretty well. The gummy form is more appealing than pills and capsules. And if you go back to when we bought the business, the adult gummy form was 3% of the category. Now it’s 18%. And if you look at the size of the category, it just continues to grow. It grew from 2015 to 2016, 2017 from $800 million to $1.5 billion today, lots of runway. And then finally, is hair thinning solutions. We have the number one hair fiber and the number one hair thinning supplement. We all know it’s on people’s mind. 40% of men and women have noticeable hair loss by the age of 40. So we have great solutions to that. And now I’m going to bring up Britta to talk about the master brand.