Operator
Operator
At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the IFF Second Quarter 2020 Earnings Conference Call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode until the formal question-and-answer portion of the call. I would now like to introduce Michael DeVeau, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin. Michael DeVeau - International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.: Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, everyone. Welcome to IFF's second quarter 2020 conference call. Yesterday evening, we distributed a press release announcing our financial results. A copy of the release can be found on our IR website at ir.iff.com. Please note that this call is being recorded live and will be available for replay. Please take a moment to review our forward-looking statements. During the call, we'll be making forward-looking statements about the company's performance, particularly with regard to our outlook for the third quarter and full year 2020. These statements are based on how we see things today and contain elements of uncertainty. For additional information concerning the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from our forward-looking statements, please refer to our cautionary statement and risk factors contained in our 10-K filed on March 3, 2020 and in our press release, all of which are on our website. Today's presentation will include non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude those items that we believe affect comparability. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their respective GAAP measures is set forth in our press release that we issued yesterday and which is posted on our website. With me on the call is our Chairman and CEO, Andreas Fibig; and our Executive Vice President and CFO, Rustom Jilla. We will begin with prepared remarks and then take any questions that you may have. With that, I would now like to introduce Andreas. Andreas Fibig - International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.: Thank you, Mike. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Before I get into some of the highlights and key accomplishments for the first half of 2020, I would like to take a moment to recognize essential workers around the world, including some of our IFFers who continue to fuel our global supply chain and keep our economy moving forward. Your strength and dedication are truly commendable and I thank you for your efforts. While we continue to operate in challenging times, I'm proud to say that our employees have continued to meet and exceed the needs and expectations of our customers around the world. Today, I will focus my remarks on a review of the highlights from the first half of 2020, as well as an update of business dynamics with regards to COVID-19. Rustom will then provide a more detailed review of our Q2 financial performance. Lastly, we will provide an update on our progress towards completing the previously announced transaction with DuPont N&B. There is no question that over the last several months, our business has been operating in a very difficult environment. Nevertheless, we have acted quickly to maintain continuity across our global operations in 44 countries, while simultaneously integrating the Frutarom business and establishing the foundation for our pending combination with DuPont N&B. I'm extremely proud of what our teams around the world has accomplished as we continue to move our business forward and tirelessly serve our customers. In this uncertain environment, our business has proven to be resilient. Fortunately, approximately 85% of our portfolio serves end markets that remain in high demands for COVID-19, including food, beverage, hygiene and disinfection. Our strong performance and growth in these areas, which in the first half of 2020 was approximately 5% on a currency neutral basis, helped to partially offset expected weakness in our segments that have been most affected by the pandemic. These markets, including Fine Fragrance and Food Service, have been particularly sensitive to the downward pressure of the pandemic and have seen a double-digit decline over the first half of 2020. The challenges of 2020 also affirms to us that IFF plays a vital role in the global CPG supply chain, especially for the world's most import manufacturers in food and beverage, as well as essential home, personal care and sanitation supplies. IFF's broad-based exposure across regions, categories and customer positions us to remain resilient through the ongoing challenges brought about by the pandemic. Amid these challenges, we remain on track with our Frutarom integration efforts, with only modest delays due to COVID-19, achieving very good cost synergies. We continue to expect to have majority of the integration completed by the end of this year. Similarly, we continue to make significant progress with our efforts to complete our merger with N&B. We have now achieved regulatory clearance in the United States, China, Colombia and Serbia. We have filed our definitive proxy statement and look forward to the shareholder award on August 27. We continue to make significant strides in our integration planning, which is very exciting when you consider the long-term potential of the combined businesses. As we shared in our business update in June 8, 2020, we remain cautiously optimistic in our outlook for the remainder of the year. The pandemic continues to be significant and a volatile factor in our lives. It creates uncertainty around the world, with rapidly changing operating environment and economic impacts. We are fortunate that a majority of our end markets continue to operate with relative strengths, but, as we have discussed before, our business is not totally immune from disruption of the pandemic. Turning to slide 7 and an overview of our financial performance in the first half of 2020, the first two quarters, we achieved $2.5 billion in sales, with currency neutral sales growth of 1%, which is largely attributed to the strong growth we saw in the Consumer Fragrances, which grew double digits and Savory Solutions, which was up mid-single digits. We also generated an adjusted operating profit of $478 million and adjusted EPS of $2.99, both excluding amortization. While this performance is moderately down year-over-year, these metrics reflect pressure from lower sales volume and adverse mix, as well as higher costs as a result of COVID-19. Through the prioritization of CapEx and improving our core working capital, I am pleased to report that we are able to generate significant free cash flow. For the first half of 2020, cash flow improved double digits, with operating cash flow increased 12% and free cash flow growing a very strong 94%. I'm encouraged by the resilience of our business through incredible challenging environment of the second quarter, where we saw the global peak to-date of regulatory restrictions. Moving to slide 8, I would like to walk you through IFF's effort and approach to managing through the pandemic, while ensuring the safety of our employees and our continued uninterrupted partnership with our customers around the globe. As our teams have led a truly admirable performance to deliver through the challenging period, we have also begun to look ahead to our operations in this new normal. Like I've said before, ensuring the health and safety of our employees has and always will be our utmost concern and is number one priority at IFF. As many countries and cities have begun to reopen and are moving out of complete lockdown, we are keeping a close eye on the recommendations of local and global public health officials, especially as it relates to implementing our return to work protocols. With each region recovering along varying timelines, our approach is to evaluate each of our facilities and offices on a case-by-case basis. While all of our manufacturing sites are open and operating fully, most remain limited to essential employees only. As for our corporate offices, all of our non-essential employees continue to work from home as of right now. Logistics remain an operating challenge, with lead times still higher than they would be on a normal basis, but we have been able to adapt fairly quickly to new local policies with minimal incremental expense. On the procurement side, costs remained elevated, as there are still some challenges in obtaining various raw materials. We are proactively addressing the situation to secure these necessary materials going forward and evaluating opportunities to mend processes of our supply chain for the future. Finally, when it comes to our creative centers, I am proud to say that even amid a global pandemic, in typical IFF fashion, we are creating innovative solutions to support our customers, whether in person or remotely. As restrictions and closures ease, we have already seen significant improvement in our pipeline. With that, I will turn the call over to Rustom, who will discuss the Q2 results in greater detail. Rustom F. Jilla - International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.: Thank you, Andreas. Good morning and good afternoon, everybody. On slide 9, we've outlined a more detailed look at our financial performance in the last quarter. On a currency neutral basis, IFF generated $1.2 billion in sales, down 4% when compared to Q2 2019 and primarily driven by weakness in Fine Fragrance and Food Service, which represents approximately 15% of our portfolio. The remainder of our portfolio, which includes food, beverage, hygiene and disinfection products, collectively grew 2% in the quarter on a currency neutral basis, though offset by a 38% decline on a currency neutral basis in Fine Fragrance and Food Service combined. In addition to lower sales volume, we were impacted by an adverse sales mix and unfavorable price to raw material costs in the quarter, which pressured our operating profit excluding amortization and offset operational expense savings in the quarter. Despite a lower effective tax rate and more favorable other income, therefore, our adjusted earnings per share, excluding amortization, was similarly impacted in Q2, driven by the decline in operating profit. Before moving into the details, I want to take a moment to remind those that are new to the IFF story about the currency neutral sales growth methodology difference between the way we report our growth and our competitors report. For a variety of reasons, many of our sales transactions in the emerging markets occur either in US dollars or other hard currencies, or are indexed to hard currencies when we have to invoice in local market currencies. When reporting our currency neutral sales growth, we exclude these foreign exchange-related prices in emerging markets. But this is different from our peers. We believe our reporting standard provides investors with a truer assessment of underlying currency neutral growth, especially when there are large emerging market devaluations relative to the US dollar or euro. However, it's important to have all of you understand our performance relative to competition. During the second quarter of 2020, the stronger USD environment, plus significant emerging market devaluations year-over-year in several key markets, had approximately a 2 percentage point currency impact on growth, if we include emerging market pricing. Factoring in this comparability adjustment, our second quarter sales decline would have been 2% rather than 4%. Turning to slide 10, it's important to take a closer look at the underlying dynamics of our various business segments. In our first quarter 2020 conference call, I presented this slide in the outlook section as I believed it provided a good summary of the many moving parts we saw at that point in time. As we now see, much of what we expected and communicated came to fruition. As we've said before, we remain fortunate that most of IFF's business serves end markets and categories with relative strength. The categories most exposed to temporary disruption of customer access to retail markets, such as Fine Fragrance and the away-from-home channel, such as Food Service suffered. And yet, increased demand for products used in packaged food, beverage, hygiene and disinfection categories has led to strong results in Taste, excluding Food Service and in Consumer Fragrances. In our Fragrance Ingredients business, demand is strong. Yet, the pandemic created a raw materials headwind as we prioritize the use of our Fragrance Ingredients to support our Fragrance Compounds business forgoing external sales. I'm happy to report that in the month of July, as restrictions have eased, we have seen that the business has returned to growth, a trend that we expect to continue in the third quarter. As we approach the new normal in many regions across the world, we expect that the supply chain complications will ease and demand for away-from-home products will slowly return. Looking at slide 11, I'd like to review the underlying drivers impacting our profitability in the quarter. COVID-19 has clearly had an impact on profitability, significantly influencing volume, mix, and costs. The year-over-year change in profitability is mainly a result of a significant drop in volume, representing approximately half of our adjusted operating profit decline. Unfavorable price to raw material costs also impacted profitability, primarily in Fragrance Ingredients where prices were reduced to reflect future commodity cost reduction and where we are working through higher cost inventory. Unfortunately, with the steep decline in Fine Fragrance, sales mix was unfavorable and we also saw incremental COVID-19 manufacturing and procurement costs. To minimize these impacts, we were focused on disciplined cost management and continued productivity, both helping to protect profitability during this difficult time. We were encouraged by the realization of cost synergies from the Frutarom deal and expect this will remain core to our profitability story as we see revenues return in the coming quarters. Now, looking at our Scent division on slide 12, currency neutral sales declined 4% in the quarter. I'm happy to share that for the third quarter in a row, we achieved double-digit sales growth in Consumer Fragrance, which can be attributed to robust growth in fabric, home, hair care, and personal wash. And while we did benefit from COVID-19 in some areas through higher volume, our commercial performance, or new wins was very strong, nearly 50% higher than our previous five-year average for the second quarter. Also the new core lists (16:34) where we recently gained access, core to our 2021 strategy, grew more than 85% in the second quarter and represented nearly 20% of our Consumer Fragrance growth. At the BU level, this was offset largely by the 40% sales decline in Fine Fragrance due to the disruption of our consumers' ability to reach retail markets and reduced travel needs. This had an adverse impact on volume in the existing business, which was down double digits, as well as new wins which traditionally are very strong but were also down as a result of COVID-19. We also saw lower Fragrance Ingredients external sales as we prioritized our Fragrance Compounds business due to supply restrictions in India. This has now improved, and we expect performance will continue to improve going forward. Cumulatively, the Scent business had sales of $450 million, down 4%; and a segment profit of $70 million, down roughly 25% at a 15.6% profit margin. Now, moving to Taste on slide 13, we saw currency neutral sales decline 5% in the quarter. From a category perspective, as COVID-19 restrictions kept consumers from eating outside their homes, away-from-home channels, such as Food Service, saw a significant 36% decline in the quarter. To put this in context, the decline in Food Service represented about 5 percentage points of the sales decline, meaning the business would have grown, excluding Food Service. From a regional perspective, North America showed resilience, yet emerging markets underperformed, given significant COVID-19 driven regulatory restriction in places like India and Latin America. India alone, which represents about 4% of total Taste sales, saw sales drop by almost 30%. From a customer perspective, we saw weakness across smaller local and regional customers, mainly Food Service. This was most evident in Frutarom, where standalone sales declined high-single digits in the second quarter. Discontinued Frutarom businesses, which will not be in the comparative periods going forward, remained headwind in Q2. So, for Taste overall, the business had $748 million in sales, down 5%; and segment profit of $107 million, down 15% for a 14.3% profit margin. Now, turning to slide 14, I'd like to provide an overview of IFF's cash flow performance and it's probably more useful to look at this year-to-date. The chart on the left is designed to show the reconciliation from reported net income to free cash flow, inclusive of all the drivers. Operating cash flow was up 12% in the first half, which was primarily due to improvements in core working capital levels in Q2. Within core working capital, the improvement was largely driven by days payable outstanding, while days sales outstanding ended better than expected. We will continue to effectively manage our balance sheet by taking actions to generate strong cash flow and to maintain ample liquidity even during a prolonged global downturn. We also continue to invest in the business, especially as we work towards completing the Frutarom integration. Our capital expenditure as a percentage of sales was roughly 3.1% compared to 4.6% the previous year. The improvements in core working capital levels combined with the prioritized CapEx structure has led to strong free cash flow of $128 million, up 94% from the year ago period. Reflecting our confidence in our future cash flow generation, we are pleased to announce that we are raising our quarterly dividend by 3% to $0.77 per share. This marks 11 years of consecutive dividend increases and underscores our confidence in our business, our long-term strategy, and strong cash flow generation. Moving forward, we will continue to take a thoughtful approach to managing cash flow, continuing to prioritize the focus on core working capital and CapEx. Before passing back to Andreas, I want to take a moment to provide an update through the first month of the third quarter. On slide 15, you can see our sales trajectory during the first half of 2020 and the marked rebound we have seen unfold in the third quarter so far. We started the year strong in January with mid-single digit currency neutral sales growth. And although the emergence of COVID-19 impacted sales from mid-March, we are starting to see a notable performance in – improvement in performance in July. As global mobility is gradually improving and restrictions and closures are eased, the categories and markets impacted in Q2 are showing promising signs of improvement. Should the environment continue to improve, we're quite hopeful that we can regain a more normalized level of growth. And with that, let me turn back to Andreas. Andreas Fibig - International Flavors & Fragrances, Inc.: Thank you, Rustom. Now, as we consider what the remainder of 2020 will look like for IFF, we're doing our best to anticipate performance in a global environment that remains quite volatile and unpredictable. We are actively evaluating evolving global market dynamics and regulatory conditions to understand and anticipate how these factors will impact our business performance, our people, and our customers. We are proud to supply solutions and ingredients for essential products in the food, beverage, hygiene and disinfection product categories, especially as these drive 85% of our current portfolio. As Rustom has stated earlier, our July sales performance has improved, growing in low-single digits. Consumer Fragrance continues to grow double digits and we are seeing a double-digit trend in Cosmetic Actives. Fragrance Ingredients had also improved as restriction eased, growing mid-single digits in July. In Taste, growth in Flavors in North America led by Tastepoint is more than offsetting pressure in Latin America. And we are seeing robust double-digit growth in health-oriented products, as well as an improvement in natural colors. We do, however, anticipate that Fine Fragrances and Food Services will remain impacted by market pressures in the second half of the year, but expect improving trends versus what we experienced in Q2. A good example of this is that our gelato ingredients, a category severely impacted by COVID-19 in the second quarter is now up low-single digits to-date in the third quarter. As we enter the second half of 2020, we will continue to effectively manage our business by taking actions to generate strong cash flow by targeting reductions in operational and capital expenses. With the positive signs of improvement in our performance that we are beginning to see in the third quarter, we remain cautiously optimistic that we will see further market improvements in the quarter and beyond. Turn to slide 17, I'm very pleased to share with you now an update on where we stand with the integration planning of our previously announced merger agreement with DuPont N&B. We made a lot of headway in the first half of 2020, reaching key milestones like clearance in the US, China, Colombia, Ukraine, and Serbia, regulatory processes and announcing our combined company's progress vision, operating model, and leadership team. We are well on our way to establishing the foundation and framework that will be essential to achieving the potential of this exciting combination. More recently, in July, we filed definitive proxy and set the date for our special shareholders' meeting in connection with the merger which will occur later this month on August 27. We expect to earn our shareholder support for this exciting combination in the coming weeks, and remain on track to completing our transaction and uniting our organization in the first quarter of 2021. In summary, I'm proud to say that IFF has stayed resilient through the first half of 2020 amid the unprecedented circumstances of COVID-19. We have achieved solid financial performance, while delivering for our 30,000-plus customers globally and executing on the integration processes for Frutarom and N&B. As we have said before, IFF plays a central role in the global CPG supply chain as a vital partner to world renowned brands, regional leaders and new innovators alike. Our position across end markets, customers with our global reach has created a real resiliency in our business that shines through these difficult times. With Frutarom, we are realizing the significant potential that our enhanced capabilities and expanded customer base will have for the IFF's long-term growth. Similarly, we look forward to joining forces with DuPont N&B and have made significant advancements in our integration planning and paths to regulatory and shareholder approval. I am deeply grateful to our employees across the globe, whose commitment and dedication to IFF and our customers has been unwavering. We have started to see improvements in our performance in July and remain cautiously optimistic about how this may translate into financial performance in the second half of 2020. IFF and our balanced portfolio remain well equipped to adapt and succeed in this unpredictable global environment. With that, I would now like to open the call for questions.