Earnings Labs

The Hershey Company (HSY)

Q1 2016 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 26, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to The Hershey Company's First Quarter 2016 Results Conference Call. My name is Lindy, and I'll be your conference operator for today. All participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. This call is scheduled to end at about 9:30 a.m., so please limit yourself to one question so we can get as many of you as possible. Please note this call may be recorded. Thank you. Mr. Mark Pogharian, you may begin your conference.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Lindy. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to The Hershey Company's first quarter 2016 conference call. J.P. Bilbrey, Chairman, President and CEO; and Patricia Little, Senior Vice President and CFO, will provide you with a review of results, which will then be followed by a Q&A session. Let me remind everyone listening that today's conference call may contain statements which are forward-looking. These statements are based on current expectations, which are subject to risk and uncertainty. Actual results may vary materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements because of factors such as those listed in this morning's press release and in our 10-K for 2015 filed with the SEC. If you have not seen the press release, a copy is posted on our corporate website in the Investor Relations section. Included in the press release is a consolidated balance sheet and a summary of consolidated statements of income prepared in accordance within GAAP. Within the Note section of the press release, we have provided adjusted or pro forma reconciliations of select income statement line items quantitatively reconciled to GAAP. The company uses these non-GAAP measures as key metrics for evaluating performance internally. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to replace the presentation of financial results in accordance with GAAP. Rather, the company believes the presentation of earnings, excluding certain items, provides additional information to investors to facilitate the comparison of past and present operations. As a result, we will discuss first quarter results excluding net pre-tax charges of $27.8 million, or $0.04 per share-diluted, which are primarily related to derivative mark-to-market losses and business realignment charges. Both of these are defined in the Appendix of this morning's earnings release, which is available on our website at www.hersheycompany.com. Our discussion of any future projections will also exclude the…

Operator

Operator

Our first question comes from Andrew Lazar with Barclays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Andrew Lazar - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Good morning, everybody. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Andrew.

Andrew Lazar - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Good morning, everybody. Thank you. Yeah, just one question from me, I think based on the full-year guidance change on sales that you've talked about, most of which seems to be in North America, I guess based on just some admittedly back-of-the-envelope math, I guess, it seems like North America would need to show, call it, 3% to 3.5% constant currency sales growth from here on out versus the minus sort of 4% plus in the first quarter. So I guess the question is just sort of how do we get from here to there, particularly if, I guess, as the press release seems to suggest – I could have it wrong – that North America takeaway is expected to be sort of flattish moving forward? Thanks. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yes. So I think, Andrew, you're in the right ballpark on the April to December take to make. If you look at North America, it'd be probably a little over 3% to get there. So I think you've got that right. If you look at our plans in North America, they really do accelerate in the second half of the year, so a number of the investments that we've made really against a combination of innovation and advertising should begin to show up there, lots of solid in-store merchandising. So I think that's why we're optimistic on the second half of the year.

Andrew Lazar - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Jonathan Feeney with Athlos Research. Please go ahead. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Jon.

Jonathan P. Feeney - Athlos Research

Analyst

Good morning, guys. Thanks very much. I'm trying to understand how the advertising and consumer marketing expense changes this quarter effect of the quarter maybe the rest of the year. Am I right just going through some disclosures for last year, that for the full year, I see you disclosed advertising and then it gives us some rates of change that that advertising and consumer marketing together is about 13.5% of sales? Does that sound about right?

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Yeah, Jon. I think you only see advertising in the 10-K, so there's other consumer marketing-related stuff that we include in the disclosures in the release this morning related to consumer promotion and some other in-store activities. So, I don't have that number off the top of my head, but I'll try and help you out later on.

Jonathan P. Feeney - Athlos Research

Analyst

Okay. I guess then just one clarification. Is all of that advertising and consumer marketing expense – and you're talking about year-over-year change – all of that actually expense or is some of those like net revenue items, like some of the in-store promotion costs, that would be recognized as offsets to revenue? Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: No. This is Patricia. That would be in the trade as a reduction between gross and net sales. The comments that we were making this morning are the pieces that are in the SM&A line.

Jonathan P. Feeney - Athlos Research

Analyst

Okay. So separately, when you made the comment that a little bit more trade spending, it looked like because of some change from quarter-to-quarter, some products that were initially expected to ship in the second quarter in the first, that wouldn't be reflected in that decline because that would be trade spending? Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: That's right. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: That would be correct.

Jonathan P. Feeney - Athlos Research

Analyst

Great. Okay, that helps me out a lot. Thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Eric Katzman with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Eric.

Eric Richard Katzman - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hey, good morning. I have actually two kind of specific, I guess, accounting questions. Maybe it's for you, Patricia, but I'm a little bit surprised that, unless there's some kind of patent or large foodservice component, why would the non-cash amortization expense be so high on this acquisition? And then the second, the change in the accounting, I guess, from comprehensive other income to what you're now doing, which is the exclusion of the volatility on the mark-to-market, so the $0.10 loss that you've excluded, was there a similar type of loss a year ago or how do we kind of treat that relative to how you've been billing it in the past? Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, happy to answer that. Let me start with that one. So up until last year, we used and met all the requirements to use GAAP hedge accounting. That allowed us to put the volatility related to mark-to-market into our other comprehensive income, or essentially on the balance sheet. It didn't flow through the P&L. We proactively decided to go off of hedge accounting. You may or may not know this, but it's a very onerous FASB requirement to make. A lot of our peers have done this. And when we looked at the cost benefit of doing this, we just didn't feel that it was worth it, especially since the standard kept getting tougher and tougher to meet. So what we decided to do – and we talked about this, I think, in the third and the fourth quarter – is we would stay off of hedge accounting and allow that volatility to flow through the P&L, but we also want to call that out for you so that you can see that because it's volatility that's not consistent with the earnings that we use internally as well as prior periods. So that's why we adjusted it out in our adjusted earnings. So when you look at the impact in the first quarter, there was no comparable piece of it to be adjusted out last time. However, on an adjusted basis, the two numbers are comparable. We got there by different means. Going forward, as we lap all those quarters, you'll continue to see it coming out of the adjustment in both periods.

Eric Richard Katzman - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

So you're going to exclude it from quarter-to-quarter and then in the fourth quarter, just have one big number, I guess, that adjusts for the year or something like that? Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: No, every quarter is different and they net out. You can have a quarter where it's positive. You can have a quarter where it's negative. What we want to do is match the ultimate mark-to-market that we have on the hedging contract with the period that we actually buy the underlying commodity. So, for example, if we buy cocoa forward and in one quarter it might be positive, in the next quarter it might be negative, by the time we buy the cocoa, that's when we want to recognize the net impact of that volatility, so that it ties to the time that we're actually buying the cocoa and we get the net overall hedged price for the cocoa. And that's the most common approach now in CPG in terms of the complexity related to commodity hedging.

Eric Richard Katzman - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay, and then, on the second piece, on the bark... Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Oh yeah, the barkTHINS, sorry. So yeah, we called out the fact that there are some very specific tax things related to the barkTHINS acquisition. If you net that out, you would find that we're paying really in the same kind of multiple for a high-growth CPG asset that we, as well as others, have paid in the past. Typically, that's a three to four times. And that, of course, since what you're buying in all of these companies essentially is a brand, creates the amortization of intangibles going forward, as well as other costs related to integration. But it's primarily the intangibles which get amortized over the period that the accounting requires them to, and that's what leads to the dilution.

Eric Richard Katzman - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. All right. Thanks for taking the time. I'll pass it on. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Chris Growe with Stifel. Please go ahead. Christopher Growe - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Hi, good morning. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning. Christopher Growe - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: I just had a question for you, if I could just talk about the new or incremental cost saving programs. The level of incremental savings coming through, is that meant to offset inflation? And I should say, are the overall savings meant to offset inflation, with the remainder then sort of reinvested back in the business? I'm trying to get a sense of how much of this can flow to the bottom line and how much of this should can sort of be available for you to reinvest? And maybe if I could ask, just related to that, you talked about, I think, $10 million to $15 million of incremental savings in 2016. Again, is that sort of earmarked for reinvestment? I'm just trying to understand how those incremental savings are going to be used this year. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. It's Patricia again. So the way I think about it is this, we've always had about $50 million to $70 million of productivity that's come through, primarily in the supply chain arena. And those guys have done a terrific job of offsetting underlying COGS inflation, so we end up with flat or good margin expansion based on their efforts. What we've done, starting in June of last year, is we also had a productivity program that we announced, and have been executing on here more in our corporate functions. And we got some benefit of that last year, and we're going to get another $40 million of benefit…

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Well, no. It's, actually – we get $50 million to $70 million... Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Normal productivity, Chris. Christopher Growe - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Yeah.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

So it puts us at the high end of that $70 million. There's $10 million to $15 million on top of that, plus the $40 million, $35 million, or whatever it is, from last year's June initiative as well. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: So think of it... Christopher Growe - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: As totaling $120 million to $125 million, but also pointing out that the $70 million is at the high end of what we've typically gotten every year, whereas the other two are specific to this year, and less comparable to prior years' activities. Christopher Growe - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you for your time.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Bryan Spillane with Bank of America. Please go ahead. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Bryan.

Bryan D. Spillane - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Hey, good morning, everyone. Just a question, follow-up on the cost savings initiative, or the expansion of it that you announced this morning; think in the press release, or maybe in the prepared remarks, you talked a little bit about how maybe some of that might be related to China, but I guess it just seems like, given how different the sale, the revenues are in that business now versus the original expectations, that maybe there might be a bigger opportunity on cost savings. So can you just talk about, I guess, how much of the expansion of the savings program is related to China? And I guess, is there a potential that there'd be something even above and beyond, as we kind of look out into the future? John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: So let's – both Patricia and I'll take that. First of all, as we continue to look at our China business, you heard in my remarks that we want to balance our investments there with what we see as the opportunities. We know that the market right now is certainly challenged, but, at the same time, we're in the midst of working through our integration. We want to make sure that we make good decisions there for the long-term. And as we continue to get familiar with our overall go-to-market strategy and how we brought the two businesses together, we just want to be prudent, in terms of making sure we're making good decisions. At the same time, we do believe that there is opportunities, within our China business, to go further than we have at the current point in time. So I'll let Patricia, if she wants, to add any additional perspective. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: The one thing I'd add to that is really pointing out the progress that's been made in bringing the two organizations together. While there were clearly some disappointments in our acquisition of Golden Monkey, the fundamentals of why we bought it are still there. We really like the access (39:09) to the traditional trade. We really like the two brands that they bring to us as Golden and Munching Monkey. And we think that's a very good complement to our strength in the three brands that we have in the chocolate business in China and our focus there on the modern trade, a little bit over-indexed to hypermarket, which we can certainly see in our results. So the team there has done a nice job of bringing that together. While that's generated some cost savings and, frankly, we're still looking and I think we'll find some more, I think the really important thing is bringing the two businesses together to exploit the strengths that they each individually have. And that's what I would add to J.P.s remarks about balance. That's the part that we're balancing.

Bryan D. Spillane - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Robert Moskow with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead. Your line is open. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, Rob. Robert Moskow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Good morning. Hey, J.P., the article in The Wall Street Journal today and also your comments in your acquisition point to a lot of strategic efforts to expand snacks, but the comments on the call are about slowing category growth in candy, mint and gum. And I'm just wondering. This seems like a pretty critical time for the category. You say that you need to re-accelerate the growth. Can you give us a little more color on this meaningful launch that you talked about in the back half of the year? What's the marketing objective of that launch? What's the risk that you're taking, the investment you're meaning to make, and are you worried that your core operations might take their eye off the ball a little bit if all of the efforts are on snacking? Thanks. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: So, first of all, thank you for the question. And I'll try to add as much perspective as I can. On some level, I'm not going to go into as much detail as you'd like, just for competitive reasons, but let me put it in perspective that snacks today, if you look at the pure snacking type stuff outside of confectionery, and outside of our grocery business, is really only 2% of our total business. If you put in those other pantry-type businesses, spreads, et cetera, it's about 9% of the business. So confectionery is at the core of who we are and what we do. What we've seen as we've continued to do…

Michele G. Buck - President-North America

Analyst

I think you covered it pretty well. Robert Moskow - Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC (Broker): Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from David Driscoll with Citigroup. Please go ahead. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Morning, David.

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thank you and good morning. I had a couple of follow-ups and then a question. So just to be clear to Chris Growe's question, will the incremental cost savings be reinvested back into the business in 2017 through 2019? So forget the 2016 numbers. You answered that well, but I'm not clear on the 2017 through 2019 period. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah. I guess I'd say it in this way. It's a part of our long-term EPS guidance, but at the base of that long-term EPS guidance is an investment philosophy about growth in our core and adjacent categories. That's the fundamental driver. So I would say, yes, it's absolutely part of our whole algorithm. It needs to be a balanced algorithm between sales growth and cost discipline.

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

I mean, it's not a small number. I mean, at the high end, it's 3.5 points of EPS growth, so I appreciate that, but it's a large number. Second follow-up is on China, when I just do some rough math, I mean, it feels like that business is losing like $30 million in the quarter, something like that. I mean, I think all your other businesses are profitable, so it's quite a large loss. You mentioned, J.P., that you would align the cost to the opportunity, but really simply, are the savings that you would expect to happen in the China operations, are they embedded in this new cost savings program? Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: I'll start with that and then maybe J.P. can give a little more color around China. Yes, it's part of the $10 million to $15 million incremental savings that we announced. And as I think we've also made clear, we're continuing to look at balancing the cost structure against the opportunities in the market and then that may result in further savings going forward, but that's a work in progress and not something we were going to talk about or announce today. With that, let me turn it over to J.P. to talk about how he sees the overall long-term opportunity in the market. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I think, David, there's a couple of things that I would say. First of all, China, for us, is probably an invest market for a period of time. While that profile may change, I think that we'll, for some period of time, continue to be in a brand-building type mode. Let me just take a step back and maybe clear up a couple…

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

If I could sneak one last clarification in, you mentioned in both your script and in the press release, there's the potential for upside to the outlook. J.P., it's kind of unusual when a company is reducing guidance to then mention upside to the outlook. And so I feel like you're really trying to tell us something here, but it's not that clear to me. Are you saying that Q1 trends are just kind of not representative and you really need to get into the rest of the year to understand where the sales growth is and you've taken it down because of what Q1 has done, but it's almost like you don't believe it or something with this upside to the outlook comment? Can you help me out? John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah, no, I think, David, what I would tell you is, is that as we look at the marketplace and what we see is happening in Q1, that we're being prudent in the comments that we're making. We're optimistic within our plan that we always want to grow share ahead of the market. And that's what we're going to be challenged with. And, again, if we also believe that we deliver against some of the other cost initiatives and things that we have, that we'll be able to meet the guidance that we've given you. So I don't want you to take that comment differently than what we've said with regard to our guidance, other than we have some optimism. And I'll let Michele talk a little bit about the second half and give you a sense of how she's thinking about it as well.

Michele G. Buck - President-North America

Analyst

Sure. As we look at the year to go, we have a lot of activity. As you know, DMEs were not up versus prior year in Q1, so we've really lined up a lot of our investment with what's to come. We're rapidly expanding gum behind the capacity expansion investment we made last year. And the advertising, we have a new campaign that's just going on air now. Snack Mix and Snack Bites, we've actually been constrained and not actually even able to service enough. We've had to cut off all merchandising because of how well those items have done, so we're really going to be able to get behind that in a bigger way as the year goes on. Big Kat's just launching. We're a sponsor of the Olympics, which is going to be huge from a merchandising perspective. And, as we told you guys last year when we started to see some softness in share at the end of the year, we made a decision to invest to be more competitive. And just given the timeline it takes to get those dollars in the marketplace, that really kicks in beginning in May. We have the birthday execution that's really going to expand, so just a lot of activity coming in the back part of the year that we have a lot of confidence in, and we're cautiously optimistic about some of the potential anomalies we may have seen in Q1 in February, but we want to be prudent about the marketplace and balancing that with the aggressive programming we have rest of year.

David Cristopher Driscoll - Citigroup Global Markets, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Matthew Grainger with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning. Matthew C. Grainger - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Good morning. Hi. Good morning. Thanks for the question. Patricia, I just wanted to better understand the approach toward trade spending. Over the balance of the year as you talked about direct trade that was already in place, that seems to have been a headwind to pricing, but not necessarily a material source of support on the non-seasonal side. So given that, are you comfortable with the returns you're getting on incremental promotion? And how does this play into the outlook for trade spending, specifically on promoted price points, over the balance of the year – not on the new product offerings? Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Yeah, we're comfortable. Of course, we're always looking at that. Michele and her teams do a great job of balancing out the right ways to do trade promotion, merchandising, advertising. I mean, it needs to be a holistic marketing model, and I think she's doing a good job on that. And I'll let her talk a little bit more about how she's thinking about trade promotion.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Yeah. One thing on the math, sorry. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Oh, go ahead.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Sorry, Patricia. It's Mark, Matt. One thing to think about, though, I think in the release and in the remarks, I think you could tease out, but hopefully you teased out that some of the programming that we thought was going ship in April shipped in March. So with that comes some typical promotion – not discounting, but typical promotion. And because that replaced what we thought at the time was going to be everyday or non-promoted prices, that's the negative impact you're seeing on the price mix. So it's not because there was a lot of trade because of deep discounting or anything, it was just that mix that ended up happening in the first quarter that had price being negative at the end of the day. Sorry, Michele.

Michele G. Buck - President-North America

Analyst

No. No, that's okay. And as I think we mentioned on the prior question, the incremental investments we've made to really drive against merchandising begin middle of Q2 to hit the marketplace, and a lot of big events like Olympics, et cetera, that we're investing in, the ability to merchandise Snack Mix, as I mentioned. So I think we've covered that. Matthew C. Grainger - Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Okay. Thanks, everyone.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Kenneth Zaslow with BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, good morning, everyone. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Morning, Ken. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Morning, Ken.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

I just had two follow-up questions. One is, what is the opportunity in barkTHINS in terms of, it's $65 million to $75 million? How big could it actually become, and what are you thinking about the possibility for that? And what are the avenues for growth for that? I'm just trying to figure out, is it just distribution? What is the actual outlook for that business?

Michele G. Buck - President-North America

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yeah. We think we have the opportunity. I mean, it's a very viable consumer proposition that's grounded in the very on-trend area of clean label and fully sustainable profile. It's a less sweet kind of taste profile. So yeah, we think we have the opportunity to take a great proposition and leverage our Hershey muscle and scale to expand distribution to make it more available, and also to increase brand awareness. I would liken it somewhat to Brookside, and what we did with Brookside when we purchased that. It allows us strategically to expand into mass premium, to have a product that is very well-liked by Millennials, and to capture that opportunity to just expand beyond that.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

And then, my next question just is, how do you decide on what you think is structural versus short-term issues? And what evidence do you have that says some of these issues are short-term? I'm just trying to figure out where you guys are coming from, in terms of – how your long-term growth strategy in terms of sales, but you keep on saying there's some headwinds and they're short-term. I'm just trying to figure out how you think about them as being short-term versus structural, and what evidence do you have? John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well I think that, if you look across what's happening in the total space, I think these are more cyclical versus structural issues. We continue to have a lot of enthusiasm for all the advantages of the category that we're in. I think if you look at the history of, I'll call it, snacking as well as confectionery, it's always been changing. You've seen a number of different types of trends and things in the market. I think one of the events that makes this current period of time unique is the amount of choice that there is in the market relative to what I think we've historically seen. That means that trial has moved around a lot. At the same time, you have some different things impacting retailers. And we've come out of a period of time of some uncertainty in economies. And so I think all of those things have made it a more challenging environment, but I don't think those are structural things, where major changes have taken place. Now you've heard me talk about, consumers have a changing relationship with food. So much of that is really around transparency as much as it is anything else, where people are wanting to understand ingredients better than they ever have before. And as manufacturers, we're all responding to that. Certainly we are as well. But, as I take a step back and just look at the overall industry as well as the category that we compete in, I think many of the things that are happening are far more cyclical than I would think about them as structural.

Kenneth Bryan Zaslow - BMO Capital Markets

Analyst · BMO Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Alexia Howard with Bernstein. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Alexia Jane Howard - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Good morning, everyone. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Hey, good morning, Alexia. Patricia A. Little - Chief Financial Officer & Senior Vice President: Good morning. Alexia Jane Howard - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Hi. So are you able to estimate the underlying CMG category growth in North America if you flush out all the timing shifts and so on? Are you able to get at that number? And as a quick follow-up, can you comment on how you're planning to respond to the Vermont requirement for the mandatory labeling of foods containing genetically modified ingredients that's due to come in in July? Thank you very much. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. So, I'll start with the latter and then go to the first part of your question. So, I'll speak specifically to Hershey. We have products that will need to meet the Vermont labeling requirements of, contains GMO ingredients. And then we have some products that don't need to be labeled. So appropriately, we will abide by what's happening in Vermont and label as appropriate. And then, I hope that, at the Federal level, there's clarity brought to this question, because it becomes an interstate commerce issue. If you have different states taking different approaches, it would make it very confusing for manufacturing, manufacturers. And so I do hope that there's some clarity around how labeling happens if it's a required on a broader basis. And then, as you know, we've committed to transparency. We're very big supporters of SmartLabel, which gives consumers the ability to engage with our brands and understand what are in the ingredients, et cetera. So that's how we'll deal with Vermont. And then on the category growth rate, I'll let Michele talk to that with regard to North America.

Michele G. Buck - President-North America

Analyst

Yeah, so we're estimating that the category growth rate in North America would between 2% and 2.5%, which is about where we've seen it over the past couple years, a little bit on the lighter side if we go down to the 2% range. We anticipate that our takeaway will be greater than that, such that we will gain a little bit of share. And obviously, with the Easter timing issue that occurred on a year-to-date basis and some of the softness that we saw in Q1, we are still waiting to see how that plays out, but that's our long-term estimate is 2% to 2.5% and that's what we're thinking it'll be for the year. Alexia Jane Howard - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Great. Thank you very much. I'll pass it on.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Operator, we have time for one more call and then we'll call it a morning.

Operator

Operator

And your final question comes from John Baumgartner with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead. Your line is open. John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Good morning, John.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Morning, John.

John Joseph Baumgartner - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Good morning. Thanks for the question. J.P. or Michele, just sticking with the trade promotion bigger picture, if I look at your promotion as a percentage of sales, in 2015, it wasn't much higher than the levels you were spending seven or eight years ago, yet the broader category snacking environment's much more competitive. I mean, how would you assess your current levels of trade spend and maybe your thoughts on the notion that Hershey's is going to be under-investing a bit in promo, given the impulse nature of the category? John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Well, again, we can kind of tag team this, but I do think that we are seeing a more competitive environment than we have seen for a period of time. We know that in 2015, we probably lost a little bit on quality merch versus where we'd have liked to have been. And so as we look at the opportunities and landscape in 2016, we don't want to have that happen to us again. One of the comments I would just make is, is that there's less space as retailers have clean floors, so the competitiveness to get that space is not just within our category. It's really across multiple categories. And that's put a premium on the cost of, I'll call it, doing business in some classes of trade.

John Joseph Baumgartner - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Great. Thanks, J.P. Thanks for the question John P. Bilbrey - Chairman, President & Chief Executive Officer: Hey, thank you.

Mark K. Pogharian - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you very much for joining us this morning, and the IR team will be available for any follow-up calls that you may have.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's program. You may disconnect at this time. Thank you, and have a great day.