Good day, everyone, and welcome to The Estée Lauder Companies Fiscal 2014 Second Quarter Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded and webcast. For opening remarks and introductions, I would like to turn the call over to the Vice President of Investor Relations, Mr. Dennis D'Andrea. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone. On today's call are Fabrizio Freda, President and Chief Executive Officer; Tracey Travis, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer; and Thia Breen, Group President of North America for The Estée Lauder Companies. Thia is going to give us the strategic overview of the region and a review of the holiday results. Since many of our remarks today contain forward-looking statements, let me refer you to our press release and our reports filed with the SEC, where you'll find factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. Our discussion of our financial results and our expectations are before restructuring and other charges. In addition, we will discuss results before the impact of accelerated retail orders that took place in the prior year quarter due to the implementation of our Strategic Modernization Initiative. You can find a reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP figures in our press release and in the Investor Relations section of our website. And I'll turn the call over to Fabrizio now.

Thank you, Dennis, and good morning to everyone. I'm pleased to say that by executing our strategy successfully, we delivered strong sales growth in the fiscal 2014 second quarter, in line with our expectation and at the same time, advanced our business in many important ways. Our strong performance came despite a mixed holiday season and several soft retail markets across the globe. Our balanced portfolio enabled us to capitalize on our winning brands, geographies and channels, culminating in strong sales growth. We introduced exciting innovations, gained shares in pivotal markets, including China and the U.K., and increased our brand's penetration around the world. Our sales performance continue to an unbroken record of growth over the last 4.5 years. Since our current structure began, our business has grown every single quarter, which underscores the strengths of our long-term plan. In the most recent period, sales rose 4% in local currency. However, reflecting our true underlying business, sales grew more than 7% after adjusting for the $94 million of accelerated retail orders recorded in the second quarter last year prior to our Strategic Modernization rollout. To put that performance in perspective, our 7% sales increase is about double our estimated annual prestige beauty growth worldwide. Our results were especially noteworthy given the headwinds we face, including heavy promotional activity in our largest markets. Diluted earnings per share came in at $1.09, which was better than we had forecast. We overachieved our estimate by leveraging our strong results in several markets in high-profit channels and driving down costs. The beauty of having a diverse portfolio of 30 prestige brands is the balance and sustainability it provides. If some brands experienced a period of softer growth, it has been our experience that they are more than offset by others which are flourishing. Similarly,…

Thank you, Fabrizio, and good morning, everyone. Before I begin, let me give you a little background about myself. I am Group President, North America, and have led our teams in the U.S. and Canada for the past 4.5 years. I've been with Estée Lauder Companies for more than 35 years in several brands and varied positions, starting as an account executive for Clinique in 1977. When I was appointed to lead North America in July 2009, we renewed our focus on the U.S., our largest and home market, to reinvigorate our department store growth, working to enhance their competitiveness with mass, as well as fuel sales in other high-growth channels. We developed a winning strategy and enhanced market-specific capabilities. This enabled us to continue to leverage the company's strengths and best practices in a more efficient and effective manner across brands and retailers with one strong voice. For us, North America also includes Canada, which is one of the top 10 markets for prestige beauty globally with many opportunities for growth. To capitalize on these opportunities, we established Canada as an affiliate in 2012 and have seen increased sales results. With this distinct focus on the U.S. and Canada, we've been able to successfully recruit consumers from mass by creating more innovative product, offering customized High-Touch services and experiences and tailoring marketing programs for specific consumers. This strategic focus has led to strong results for North America. Over the past 4 years, we have grown retail sales by approximately $1 billion and continue to be the leader in prestige beauty in both markets. Now I will focus specifically on the U.S., first talking about holiday in the quarter, followed by what we see as the longer-term trends. Our U.S. holiday business was solid, driven by outstanding programs across all…

Thank you, Thia, and good morning, everyone. I will first review our second quarter financial performance and then share with you our outlook for the remainder of fiscal 2014. As a reminder, my commentary excludes the year-over-year impact of restructuring and other charges. And as the quarter and year-to-date comparisons are impacted by the company's Strategic Modernization Initiative or SMI activity in the prior year period, I will highlight for you both the reported and adjusted comparable growth rates, which I would encourage you to reference as well in this morning's press release. Net sales for the second quarter rose 3% to $3.02 billion, in line with our expectations. Excluding the impact of currency translation, sales grew 4%. Net earnings and earnings per share each decreased 6% to $430.2 million and $1.09, respectively. EPS was above the top end of our expectations, reflecting strong growth in our makeup artist and luxury brands and high-profit channels and more disciplined cost management in response to some softening market trends. As we have previously discussed, in the prior year, some retailers accelerated their orders into our second quarter that otherwise would've occurred in our third quarter in advance of the January 2013 rollout of SMI. The impact of that shift was an additional $94 million in sales and $78 million in operating income, equal to approximately $0.13 per share. Excluding the impact of the SMI-related order shift and the restructuring activities from last year, local currency sales would have grown 7% for the quarter, and EPS would've grown 6%. Looking at our sales growth by region. Net sales in our Americas region increased 6% in local currency, with 4% growth in North America and double-digit growth in Latin America. The strongest performance in North America at retail came from double-digit sales growth, both…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Nik Modi with RBC Capital Markets.

Just a quick question on some of the competitive activity you're talking about. If you could just provide a little bit of clarity on exactly kind of where it's coming from, if it's focused in a particular region or category, just to give us a little bit of color around that would be really helpful. And then just a quick follow-up to that, unrelated, is how did e-commerce impact margins this quarter? I'm just curious on what the mix shift impact was on profitability.

So on the last one, how e-commerce impact margin, the more we grow e-commerce or online as a mix in our business, the better the margin goes because it's a high-margin channel for us. I don't think we can share specific indication and numbers, but basically, you need to associate the growth of online above average of the growth of the company to margin increase in general. The -- in terms of competitive activities, we see many. I mean, here in North America, the biggest competitive activity, and Thia can expand on it later, has been the promotionality of the holidays in general, and a lot of launches in the fragrance categories and the important activity in skin care, particularly in the cleansing and device areas. In Asia, we see a -- we see strong performance from us and some other international brands, but also we see strong performance from Korean brands that are growing market share in the region. And in terms of Europe, I think, it's the traditional competition, just that because of the recessionary environment that's been in general more promotional.

Your next question comes from Dara Mohsenian with Morgan Stanley.

Tracey, could you discuss your regional and profit results a bit more in the quarter? I was surprised Americas was up so much and then Asia looked weak, so I just wanted to get some detail on the drivers behind that. And also, ad spend you had slated to be up substantially year-over-year in Q2. I'm wondering, did you spend in line with that given SG&A came in better than we expected, or some of that shifting into Q3?

Sure. So regarding our regional performance, as Thia indicated, we had a good holiday season in the North America and certainly in the U.S., so our growth was quite strong given some of the holiday programs that we had. In Latin America, as I mentioned, it was up double digits. So overall, from Americas standpoint, we certainly had strong growth as we -- as I spoke in the call and as we reflected in the press release. Asia had a number of issues, and even adjusting from an SMI standpoint, we continue to see, although we mentioned it was stabilizing, softer growth in Korea, we have low mid -- low single-digit growth in Japan. And then China was softer this quarter for the reasons that we mentioned. So the Asia region was a bit softer than we have experienced in prior quarters. And part of the reason that we looked to bring down our guidance for the full year was because of some continued softness although picking up in the second half of the year relative to what we've seen, certainly, in the fourth quarter. But we do expect some muted performance out of that region for the balance of the year. In terms of expenses and your question on advertising, yes, we did, as we looked at some trends in the quarter, did reduce some of our advertising spend and certainly some of our G&A spend.

Your next question comes from Wendy Nicholson with Citi.

I have a question going back to some of the weakness in the skin care category, and maybe, Thia, this is for you. But is the weakness that you've seen in some of your existing products related at all to pricing that you might have taken? I know pricing is a new idea sort of for the company, and I'm wondering if you've taken some pricing and maybe pushed it too hard. And do you have a sense -- sounds like the new DDML+ is doing okay but maybe not as well as you had expected. Again, do you think the $1 price increase had any impact on that? And then just a quick question, Tracey, is there a specific time frame for when we might start to see improvements in the inventory levels?

So Wendy, it's Thia. The pricing really had nothing to do with the performance of whether it's Advanced Night Repair or DDML+, as evidenced in our tremendous growth that we've had in some of our high-end skin care such as La Mer. So it would not be a pricing issue. And we did very well with the new introductions. But as Fabrizio and I indicated, there was just more cannibalization in some of our existing products, a bit more than we had planned for. Certainly, as we move forward into the second quarter, we have looked at this, examined it and we focused our promotional -- our activity in terms of innovation to see a turnaround in skin care in the second half.

And Wendy, regarding inventory, we are taking some various specific actions towards the end of the year to reduce our current level of inventory. We do, however, have another rollout of SMI. And so even though that's not in our financial results right now, that will result in a build -- of the residual build of inventory in addition to additional shipments towards the end of the year. So in fairness, I would say that our inventory levels will start to sustainably improve after this last wave of SMI when we can start to manage them down far more aggressively than we have been over the last couple of years with the SMI rollout.

Your next question comes from Alice Longley with Buckingham Research.

I have a couple of follow-up questions. Why do you expect your results in Asia, in China in particular, to pick up especially in the fourth quarter? And similarly, what are you doing to make skin care pick up again, it sounds like, by the fourth quarter? And the final part of that is, could you list which categories grow fastest in fiscal '14 adjusted for currency? I think in the past, it was skin, followed by color, followed by fragrance. Could you give us an update on that for global results and also for the U.S.?

Okay. Well, we'll look at the ranking of categories. The -- let's talk about Asia. First of all, what's happening in Asia is a combination of factors, as we explained. First of all, in this moment, you have China with a slowdown. Let's talk first about that. The China slowdown is characterized by stronger slowdown in Tier 1 cities and in the luxury interest in general of Tier 1 cities population. But in Tier 2, 3, 4 cities, meaning the new population on China now, the growing middle class now are approaching more prestige products, actually the growth continued very solidly. So we are adjusting our strategy to this new reality. Meaning, we are building distribution and penetration in Tier 2, 3, 4 cities and aggressively building our online penetration in China. For example, the Clinique Tmall side has been extremely successful, and we are clearly ahead of goals. Because of this, we believe that we are sitting and adjusting our strategies to the new profile of growth in China, and in this sense, we should get better results even in a slowing down environment in the future months. By the way, we saw already a pickup in the month of January previous to the Chinese New Year. The second situation in Asia is temporary. I mean, Thailand is a big business for us, and Thailand, as we said, was minus 5% because of the political unrest. This was not expected, and we hope that as soon as Thailand will go to normalize the political environment, we'll continue to see the trend -- growing trends that, by the way, was double digit before the political unrest. So we are growing double digit to minus 5%. That's temporary. That's, obviously, for us, was a surprise. Then you have Korea that is…

And regarding your question on full year category growth, so makeup, as we've called out, has been a strong performer year-to-date, and we expect that it will continue to be a strong performer balance of the year. We are seeing tremendous, tremendous growth in our M-A-C brand and Tom Ford and others. So that will be our fastest-growing category. Second would be hair care, with the success of the Aveda brand and some of the expanded rollouts there. Third would be skin care. And as Fabrizio mentioned, we do have plans in the second half in addition to picking up in Asia that will impact the skin care growth to be faster in the second half than it was in the first half. So that's the ranking, and then fragrance would be last.

Your next question comes from Olivia Tong from Bank of America.

Are we to assume that skin care margins will be down for fiscal '14? And then on the U.S., what have you expected U.S. category -- the U.S. category to grow at, and where do you see category growth now? And can you give a little bit more color on sales growth for the bigger brands versus the smaller ones, since it looks like the bigger ones were perhaps a bit more sluggish than you thought but the smaller brands are clearly more than offset? So is that growth disparity between those 2 ends of the portfolio widening? And what implications does that have on spending need and ability to leverage fixed cost by brands?

Okay. I'll take this last one, while Thia and Tracey will prepare to answer the first 2 questions. Actually, you are correct. Our midsized brands are today growing in our portfolio faster than our biggest brand, with the exception of M-A-C which is one of our fastest-growing brand. And this is having a very healthy impact on our business because it's making our portfolio broader, meaning the amount of brands that, if growing, have a significant impact on our growth is increasing. And the fact that the midsized smaller brands today are becoming bigger and are growing faster is another balancing factor to our portfolio that actually reduce our risk of being exposed to 1 brand or another being soft for a short period of time, or being exposed to one competitor [ph] or another. So we are broadening our portfolio geographically, we are broadening our portfolio in terms of channel -- growing channel like the expansion in e-commerce as an example, and we are broadening our strengths by brand portfolio. All this is a very positive trend. Now, Thia?

In terms of the market and growth, we are thrilled because we are part of a dynamic market in terms of prestige beauty growth. If we take a look at the categories, department stores are certainly a major portion of our business today, and we have really figured out a way of attracting that mass consumer and recruiting for mass in our department store channel. We also have, in terms of high-growth channels, a tremendous growth in terms of online, also in terms of freestanding stores and specialty-multi. So we -- and you've seen the numbers and certainly makeup has been a key driver and it's a significant portion of our North American portfolio. We see the turnaround in terms of skin care, and Fabrizio had mentioned the white space in terms of acne and we have a new product in Estée Lauder as well that attacks that. And certainly, as we look at it, because of this growing marketplace, we're going to be a major player and expand our leadership position.

And lastly, regarding skin care margins, we do not expect them to be down for the full year. Obviously, skin care will grow a bit less than makeup. So from a mix standpoint, it will represent less of those margin mix upside for us. But that margin should be up year-over-year in the category.

Your next question comes from Jason English with Goldman Sachs.

I want to come back to China because, I guess, I'm still confused here. You gave us a lot of color, but I've heard some conflicting numbers. So first, can you just tell us what your growth in the market was, excluding the shift in retail ordering, both in all-in and same-store sales basis, as well as your view of the current category growth? And I guess a little more color on your deceleration. I suspect the same-store sales number is going to be behind where the category was growing. If so, what's driving the market share weakness?

So what was the growth?

So for the quarter, our comp growth adjusted for SMI was 10% in the quarter. And then in terms of the year-to-date number, so the 6-month number, the comp growth adjusted, Jason, was 16%.

Okay. And in terms of our -- we are growing market share because we are growing in this market above the market trend, and so we continue to beat market share. And the strategy is to expand our penetration into Tier 2, Tier 3, Tier 4 cities and online, which are within China, the fastest-growing segment of the market. So the strategy is pretty simple. We are exposing our brands to the fastest-growing segments of the market. And thanks to that, we are able to continue growing above the market. But however, the market is lowering and has lowered in the last quarter, and so that's -- those are the facts. Now the other important thing to understand are the China investment for taking a bit longer-term view is that the Chinese consumer continues to -- the middle class continues to grow and the Chinese consumers continue to spend. But they are -- some of them are traveling more, they're spending more when they travel in travel retail or in the countries they visit, and in a way, this is part of the reason why there's some slowdown internally, in our opinion. And so the combination of our sales with the Chinese consumer is still very, very strong, even if there is this slowdown trend internally. And that's the way we look at it for the long term.

Your next question comes from Caroline Levy with CLSA.

Just wondering, for both Thia and for Fabrizio, have you sort of given up on the idea or are you sticking with the idea that you don't want to be in the device business? Just given how successful L'Oréal has been there, it seems to be both a big and growing opportunity, and I know up until now you've said that's nothing that you want to do. Are you still of that view? And just similarly, with acquisitions, you spent a while getting Smashbox to perform as you hoped, I guess, and does that mean you're maybe more willing to step up to the plate now? And then just finally, the big investment in fragrance feels awfully disappointing looking at the results. And I'm just wondering if we could expect a big pullback in spending next -- as you move out because you're not getting the return on investment that you would've liked to have seen.

Okay. Let me start on this last one. It's that -- we -- as you see, we are managing our business very flexibly and focus on our financial results and on maximizing return of our investments. So we learned, and we have learned this year that certain investment we mentioned before, some cannibalization of some skin care launches, we mentioned some countries, now you mentioned fragrances where we had lower return, in some cases, than what we expected, and frankly, higher returns in other cases. Within fragrances, I mentioned some great success stories in our launches in my prepared remarks, and I also revealed there were some areas where we did less than expected. So yes, you can expect us to adjust to this new reality and to learn from what we're doing, and to refocus and rebalance our investment in the future based on the successful stories, and minimize or avoid to invest in areas with wrong rate of return. The -- so there was the -- what's the other point?

Devices.

Oh yes. The question on devices. Again, we watch the market, we watch the consumers and we learn. So I don't think we said never do anything about it, but we said that we were not going to launch devices at the point in time. The -- our strategy here is to try to create sustainable propositions to address the consumer benefits in that area, and we are working on it. So if we call it devices or different thing, or different kind of innovation, this is something I cannot discuss. But definitely, the benefit area of cleansing is a very important benefit area for the company, and we are going to address it in the future and I believe, very competitively. There was a third question.

M&A. Acquisition.

Acquisition, sorry. There were many questions. The acquisition, well, we continuously look at the market. We are very interested in growing acquisition. As you know, in our goals, we have the intent to build 1 point of growth out of acquisitions. So we are continually monitoring the market and we are ready to do the right steps when opportunity arises. Smashbox is a happy story so far, and we are definitely ready to consider opportunities if they arise.

Your next question comes from Javier Escalante with Consumer Research.

My question has to do with your margin goal. Early back in August, I understood that you said that the expansion in margins dependent upon making marketing and promotional spending more efficient, and it seems like you are now being compelled to increase both because of competitors' activity and the recessionary environment. And the other point that is also pressing margins, in my view, has to do with China. I don't fully understand the characterization that you are changing the strategy there. We have been hearing about this expansion in Tier 2 to Tier 4 cities since 2012, and what's the point of making this spending in brick-and-mortar if incremental sales are going into travel retail and e-commerce? So if you can explain us where the impact of these 2 in your margin goals.

I mean, on the impact on margin goals, to be clear, we have a strategy where all our high-growth areas are margin accretive. That's intentional. So travel retail, online, emerging markets, China, the new segments, skin care category, within skin care category, certain areas of benefit are all margin accretive. So our business is actually designed on purpose to grow faster in areas with higher marginality. And this is working so far. It's working very, very well. Now if you add cost-saving activity to this mixed asset, then you get the clear idea of what we are driving into margin progress and the way we're driving margin progress in long term. If you add to this the third element, which is leveraging growth with productivity gains, then you get the full picture. So I don't believe there is any risk in the strategy to decrease margin. Actually, I believe, we will continue to build margin gradually and we will relook our goals as opportunity arise and as our cost SMI saving programs become clearer. In terms of the China strategy, the -- I'm not sure -- I'm not very clear what you don't understand on the strategy because basically, the Tier 2, Tier 3 cities, the awareness of the brand today is low. Building brick-and-mortar there makes -- by the way, very efficient brick-and-mortars because few doors which sell a lot of products. And as you know, in our business, the profit is dependent from sales per door. So those few doors are very effective, very efficient. On top of this, they create awareness in this area, so these people that live in the city, when they travel, when they go online, buy our brands in travel retail, online or in Paris. And if we were not in the city to create awareness, first of all, we will have less productive doors; and second, we will not have the awareness for these people buying and preferring our brands in those channels. In that way, this strategy is definitely accretive to margin.

And the only thing that I would add with respect to your commentary on advertising, marketing and promotion, we have spent against everything that we had planned to spend on at the beginning of the year. As -- and Fabrizio mentioned that we are flexible as we have seen results, we have recalibrated some of the levels of spending behind some programs. But by and large, we have spent against everything that we had planned to spend on as we structured the year.

We have time for one more question. Your last question comes from Bill Schmitz with Deutsche Bank.

A few things. If I look at sort of the cash flow statement, obviously, cash flow from operations were up 19% for the year, but the share repurchase is down 37%. You obviously have this big, growing cash hoard and the multiple is coming down, so I couldn't think of a better opportunity to get more aggressive in the share repurchase. And I always thought the strategy was, we don't want to add any more leverage but we're perfectly content sweeping the cash that we generate from this point forward. So just any clarity on that? And then maybe I missed it, but can you just give us the actual travel retail sell-in and sell-through percentages? And then the real question, sorry for being so long-winded, but it seems like Clinique is having a real tough go of it right now especially in the U.S. So I wonder if there's a triage plan there, and I know there's tough comparisons, obviously. And then, if Jane being appointed as President of the business, if there's anything incremental that's going to happen with the brand?

Okay, that was a lot. In terms of share repurchase, we see the opportunity that you see. And yes, we are still very committed to our share repurchase program. In terms of travel retail, I assume you were asking about the second quarter, and the net sales in the second quarter, as we mentioned, were up double digit, and the sell-through was high single digit for the quarter.

Yes. And then on -- yes, the question was Lauder and Clinique?

Clinique.

Yes, I think -- by the way, as I said, we had a very strong program in the future on Clinique, so we are very comfortable for the plan to restart more aggressive growth on the brand in North America. And maybe Thia to say a few words.

And Bill, one of the many things we've heard since the appointment of Jane Lauder in this role, I worked with Jane when she was in the marketing role, actually, many, many years ago at Clinique, and the retail partners, retail community and internally, everyone is just thrilled with the fact that we have a family member now heading up this brand. So I mean, everybody has great expectation, and Jane has all of our support in what will be a tremendous role for her with the Clinique brand.

That concludes today's question-and-answer session. If you are unable to join for the entire call, a playback will be available at 1 p.m. Eastern Time today through February 19. To hear a recording of the call, please dial (855) 859-2056, and enter passcode 31881764. That concludes today's Estée Lauder Conference Call. I would like to thank you all for your participation, and wish you all a good day.