Operator
Operator
And welcome to Procter & Gamble's Quarter End Conference Call. P&G would like to remind you that today's discussion will include a number of forward looking statements. If you will refer to P&G's most recent 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K reports, you will see a discussion of factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these projections. Also, as required by Regulation G, Proctor & Gamble needs to make you aware that during the discussion the company will make a number of references to non-GAAP and other financial measures. Proctor & Gamble believes these measures provide investors with useful perspective on the underlying growth trends of the business and has posted on its Investor Relations website, www.pginvestor.com, a full reconciliation of non-GAAP and other financial measures. Now I will turn the call over to P&G's Chief Financial Officer, Jon Moeller. Jon R. Moeller - Procter & Gamble Co.: Good morning. With three quarters of the fiscal year complete, we remain on track with our going-in plans for the top and bottom lines against a backdrop of difficult market conditions. We're maintaining top line guidance, we're reconfirming bottom line guidance and we're increasing our outlook for adjusted free cash flow productivity to approximately 95% for the year. In the January to March quarter, organic sales were up 1%. Core earnings per share were up 12%, up 15% excluding foreign exchange. We generated $2.3 billion in adjusted free cash flow. We increased our dividend by 3%, the 61st consecutive annual increase and the 127th consecutive year P&G has paid a dividend, every year since our incorporation in 1890. The quarter did present challenging macro dynamics. As we and other companies indicated at the CAGNY conference in late February, and as you've seen in the track channel data, growth in our categories decelerated significantly in the quarter. The categories we compete in were growing on a value basis at a global average of nearly 3% in the first half of the fiscal year. Growth slowed to below 2% in the third quarter. In the U.S., our largest and most profitable market, categories in which we compete, grew roughly 2% in the first half but were up less than a point in the March quarter. Several factors contributed to this dynamic including delayed tax returns, higher gas prices, bad weather, and what appears to be a drawdown of at-home inventory during the quarter. Developing markets were up about 5% in the first half but slowed to about 4% in the third quarter. India de-monetization continued to impact consumption in that market. In Saudi Arabia, one of our 15 largest markets, a prototypical household has endured a 20% income reduction, while utility prices have doubled and will more than double again by July as government subsidies are reduced. Economic crises in Egypt and Nigeria are dramatically impacting category size and markets in Russia, Argentina and Brazil are also contracting. Retail inventory levels, primarily in the U.S., also contracted. Retail inventory reductions had nearly a full point impact on third quarter organic sales growth. In addition to these market dynamics, P&G organic sales growth continues to be impacted by our work to strengthen and streamline product forms and SKUs in our ongoing 10 product categories. This activity created about a half a point drag on organic sales in the quarter. With these challenges as background, we again grew organic sales 1% in the quarter, which was about what we expected when we give our update on the markets at CAGNY and communicated that it would be our weakest quarter of the fiscal year. For the third straight quarter, sales growth continued to be fueled by volume growth. Organic volume grew 1% on the quarter. Pricing and mix were essentially neutral to organic sales growth. Organic sales were – sorry, online organic sales were up 30% for the quarter, significantly outpacing offline sales. Online sales now represent 5% of our total business. Moving to the bottom line, core earnings per share were $0.96, up 12% versus the prior year. Foreign exchange created a three point headwind on third quarter earnings growth, so on a constant currency basis, core earnings per share were up 15%. On a year-to-date basis, constant currency core earnings per share growth is up double digits, on track to extend our streak of high single or double-digit constant currency core earnings per share growth to five straight fiscal years. Constant currency core gross margin decreased 20 basis points. Productivity savings of 210 basis points were more than offset by headwinds from mix, commodities and product reinvestments. Including foreign exchange, core gross margin was down 40 basis points. Core SG&A costs as a percentage of sales decreased 30 basis points. Productivity savings of 50 basis points and benefits from nonrecurring other operating gains were partially offset by investments in advertising, sales and R&D. Constant currency core operating margin increased 10 basis points. Productivity improvements contributed 260 basis points of operating margin benefit. Including foreign exchange, core operating margin was down 10 basis points versus the prior year. The core effective tax rate was 23.4%. This included several discrete tax reserve adjustments and the impact of share-based compensation transactions. The core effective tax rate has been in the range of 23% to 24% in six of the last seven quarters and we're now expecting to finish this fiscal year near the middle of this range. All-in GAAP earnings were $0.93 for the quarter including $0.03 per share of non-core restructuring costs. We generated $2.3 billion of adjusted free cash flow, returning $3.8 billion to shareholders, $1.8 billion in dividends and $2 billion in share repurchase. Earlier this month, we increased our dividend 3% as I said earlier. Fiscal 2017 is a year of significant value return to shareowners. We expect to pay dividends of over $7 billion. We reduced outstanding shares by $9.4 billion in the Beauty transaction and we expect to purchase over $5 billion of our stock. In total, about $22 billion of value returned to shareowners. In summary, despite some significant unforeseen challenges and macroeconomic headwinds, from market growth to currencies to commodities, we currently expect to deliver our going-in forecast for the year and are maintaining our organic sales and core earnings per share guidance ranges. We're holding our organic sales growth range of 2% to 3%. After three quarters, we're obviously at the low end of this range. We expect fiscal 2017 all-in sales growth to be down a point to in line with the prior year. This includes a two- to three-point headwind from the combined impacts of foreign exchange and divestitures. We're maintaining our outlook for core earnings per share growth of mid-single digits. As I've said, we continue to deal with an unprecedented amount of geopolitical disruption and uncertainty which is affecting market growth, currencies and commodities and we're not immune from these macro dynamics. We're aggressively driving cost savings to mitigate these impacts, but as we said last quarter and at CAGNY, we're protecting investments in the business to maintain and accelerate organic sales growth in a sustainable, market constructive, and value accretive way, even if this causes results to ultimately end up below the current core earnings per share guidance range. All-in GAAP earnings per share are forecast to increase by 48% to 50% including the one-time gain from the Beauty transaction that we booked in the second quarter. We continue to make good progress on cash and as a result are raising our expectations for adjusted free cash flow productivity from 90% or better to approximately 95% for the year. Now looking forward, the external challenges we face: slow market growth, geopolitical and economic instability, foreign exchange impacts from a stronger U.S. dollar, rising commodity costs and retail trade transformation are all very real and aren't likely to do meaningfully better in the near-term. With this as a reality, we're putting even more emphasis on several strategic moves: on product and package superiority, executional excellence, cost and cash productivity and organization design, culture and accountability. We're meaningfully raising the bar by establishing an even higher standard of excellence, that of irresistible superiority, for our products and packages coupled with superior execution of communication, in-store fundamentals and consumer value. This is what will be required in the slow growth environment to grow markets and market share. It's what is required to present commoditization of our categories and minimize deflationary impacts. It reduces promotion needs and creates strong relevance for retail partners in all classes of trade. To achieve the outcome we desire, category growth, increased household penetration, strong share positions and winning sales and profit growth in this difficult environment, we must combine a foundation of irresistibly superior product and packaging experiences with superior execution in advertising, sampling and in-store fundamentals with winning value equations broadly defined. What do we mean by irresistible superiority, and how will we measure it? When a consumer has an irresistibly superior experience with our products and packages, it raises their expectations for performance in the category and makes it hard to go back to what they were using before. To assess irresistible product superiority, we're moving from a single metric: weighted purchase intent, to a body of evidence approach. This provides a holistic and transparent evaluation of the product at the second moment of truth and integrates technical tests, line tests, context aided tests, household panel data and in-market product reviews. It ads behavioral data, which is more reliable than the attitudinal data we've historically collected. One element of this, for example, is depravation testing. In deprivation testing, we ask consumers to score the product they currently use, say out of 100 points. We replace the product they're currently using, typically a competitive product, with the product we're testing and have consumers use it for several weeks. Then we give them back their original product and ask them to score it again. If their score of the original product has not changed appreciably after use of the new product, we've not made a significant difference in expectation or delight and therefore wouldn't rate the new product as irresistibly superior. If they rate their old product significantly lower after use of the new product, we know the new product has elevated the level of performance they expect in the category. Tide PODS and Downy Unstopables scent beads are great examples of products that deliver irresistible superiority. After using PODS and scent beads for a four-week test period, consumers consistently lowered their assessment of their current product by more than 10 points, a meaningful move. Using these products changed consumers' views of what's possible in the Fabric Care category. These products have been on the market for five years and are still driving category growth and are growing market share. Our unit dose detergents, Tide PODS and Gain Flings! have accounted for 90% of laundry detergent category growth. Unit dose products account for about 15% of U.S. category sales with P&G holding nearly an 80% share of the form. We expect this form to continue leading category growth. In 2016, just 16% of U.S. households had tried unit dose detergents. The forecast for 2017 is 23% household penetration, a 40% increase in just one year. We're driving the growth of PODS with increased washing machine sampling. We'll distribute 30 million samples of our best performing detergents in fiscal 2017, a 75% increase over fiscal 2016. Fabric enhancers are the fastest-growing segment in the overall Fabric Care category, growing 7% to 8%. And scent beads are the fastest-growing form, growing in a 20% rate. P&G's scent bead offerings are growing over 30%, and there's tremendous upside. Scent beads household penetration is only 14%, and beads are currently used in only 4% of laundry loads. We're going to continue driving consumer awareness and trial through advertising campaigns and sampling programs to grow the category and grow our share. Irresistibly superior products are ideally delivered in irresistibly superior packages. Irresistibly superior packaging attracts the consumer at the first moment of truth, provides integrity and protects the quality of the product and delights consumers during use and in its responsible disposable. Irresistible packaging also creates recognizable brand blocks at shelf, aides the consumer in selecting the best product for their needs, and reinforces the equity of our brands. We're developing a body-of-evidence approach, like we now have with products, to test packaging superiority. Superior products and superior packages drive market growth. They prevent commoditization. Market growth has been an incredibly important part of the journey of our brands. U.S. Fabric Care is a good example. Over the last 40 years, P&G sales have grown five times, or 500%. P&G share has only increased five points. Market growth, driven by P&G, has been the main source of growth. Irresistibly superior product and packaging benefits need to be communicated to consumers with superior brand messaging. Superior brand communication is advertising that makes you think, talk, laugh, cry, smile, act, and, of course, buy; advertising that drives growth for brands in the categories in which they compete, and is a voice for good by expressing points of views on issues that matter and where the brand matters; advertising that clears the highest bar for creative brilliance, sparking conversations, affecting attitudes, changing behavior, and sometimes even defining popular culture. We're raising the bar in advertising quality with a focus on superior brand performance claims that communicate the brand's benefit superiority to create awareness and trial. We're improving the quality of consumer insights, agency creative talent and production. We're applying a body-of-evidence assessment to advertising quality. To be assessed as proven effective, our highest bar, a campaign must drive awareness, household penetration, and share growth for at least one full year, and be determined by a panel of objective experts to be effective advertising. Brands currently achieving the standard of quality include Always, Like A Girl; Tide, If It's Got To Be Clean, It's Got To Be Tide; Dawn, A Drop of Dawn and Grease Is Gone; and SK-II, Change Destiny. We're improving media execution, increasing consumer reach by 10 points, and ensuring year-round continuity across top markets. We're increasing point-of-market entry trial coverage by 10 points, or more, on our top brands. We're working to lead the effort on media transparency, eliminating costs in the media supply chain created by poor standards adoption, too many players grading their own homework, too many hidden touches, too many holes, where criminals can rip us off, and unsafe places for our brands to have ads. We're letting our spending talk, buying media from those that comply with the new standards we're setting, so that we know our ads are experienced by consumers in the most productive and efficient way. In-store execution is another area, where we're raising the bar, redefining excellence to a higher standard. We're determined to make our go-to-market activities a consistent source of competitive advantage to grow categories in our brands. This requires having the right trade coverage with the right product forms, sizes, and price points, and the right in-store shelving and merchandising execution that requires getting the key business drivers right for each category and brand in every store across all channels every day. In Brazil, we've revamped our trade spending programs to reward these specific activities by brand and by channel that are proven to drive sales. On Pampers, for example, it's ensuring we have a full range of sizes available in each store, plus a secondary point of sale. On Gillette, it's ensuring we have the right shelf space, open sales on MACH3, distribution of our three-bladed Prestobarba disposable and Venus razors for women, and increasing the number of distribution points and visibility at checkouts. We're working to make sure our brands stand out in-store. We're demonstrating the value of long-term displays of our leading brands to top retailers. These displays are high quality and clearly communicate our brand equities and product benefits. They replace in-and-out promotional displays that were often low quality and inefficient, both operationally and financially for P&G and for our retail partners. We're tracking compliance versus category-specific key business drivers in over 7,000 individual stores. When we get it right, category growth accelerates. Our growth accelerates, and we deliver trade spending efficiencies that enable us to reinvest and improve sales coverage to achieve excellence in even more stores. Just as important, we're tracking results against these key measures for our salespeople, ranking and internally publishing these results. The team has embraced this transparency and accountability, and it's driving better performance. We're piloting new approaches and technologies including crowdsourcing, image recognition, and machine learning to obtain granular real-time data on store conditions to optimize our performance and coverage. This ensures we get a transparent, accurate and unbiased view of in-store execution to hold our own salespeople and our distributors accountable for execution. The last element of superior execution, but certainly not least, is winning consumer and customer value equations. Price is one element of a winning consumer value equation, but what we're really looking at is the superior value of the total proposition. A product that meets a need in a noticeable and irresistibly superior way with a package that's convenient to use, with compelling communication presented in a clear and shoppable way in-store. Margin is one element of the customer value equation, but so is penny profit, trip generation, basket size and category growth. Where do we stand against these new, higher standards of irresistibly superior product and packaging and superior execution? Where a win on each element is required for a passing grade, we currently earn a passing grade versus this new, much higher benchmark about 30% of the time. Achieving this higher standard of excellence more consistently will require investment in improved product formulations, packaging, sales coverage, advertising sampling, upstream R&D and consumer and customer value. This need for investment, the external realities we're facing, our historical productivity progress and future productivity opportunities all inform our plans to save up to another $10 billion this fiscal year through fiscal 2021. We've continued to refine our plans and want to bring them to a more granular level for you today. We've identified $7 billion of saving opportunities in cost of goods sold. This comes on top of the $7.3 billion of cost of goods savings we delivered over the previous five years, exceeding our previous goal of $6 billion. We aim to fully synchronize our supply network and replenishment strategy from our customers to our suppliers, leveraging our supply network transformation in North America and Europe. This holistic transformation will ensure that we have a supply network that will continue to be a demonstrable and sustainable competitive advantage for P&G. This will require continued investment over the next two to three years but provide an attractive payout in ongoing lower costs, lower inventories, better customer service and lower out of stock levels. Within this strategy, the largest opportunity, about $4.5 billion of the $7 billion, is raw packaging materials. These savings will come from strategic supplier partnerships, supplier consolidation and through an overarching simplification of our SKU lineups and manufacturing platforms. We've established joint business plans with our top suppliers focused on end to end supply network synchronization with a goal of reducing product cost year-on-year. To enable integrative thinking, we're co-locating suppliers at our sites with our product supply and R&D professionals to deliver upstream co-innovation that can improve both product performance and drive savings. For example, we already have 55 suppliers collocated at our planning centers, with an objective to expand this further. In the pursuit of consolidating our supplier base, we expect to reduce the number of suppliers by about 20% over the next two years. We have several innovations aimed at delivering better-looking, better-performing and lower-cost packaging. Better and cheaper not just cheaper. One example is Air Assist, our fit-to-delight new packaging designed for e-commerce. Air Assist was originally intended to fix the mess that can sometimes result from shipping liquids, like Dawn dishwashing detergent, as single units to consumers. We did much more than fix a distribution problem. Air Assist packaging delivers a significantly better shelf impression, improves consumer in-use experience and reduces plastic usage by 50%. Better and cheaper packaging that delights consumers and a CFO. We're driving savings in packaging using Imflux, a proprietary injection molding innovation. Imflux enhances existing injection molds and presses and builds new molds that increase throughput up to 100%, resulting in higher quality injected molded parts, improved speed to market, fewer presses and molds and significantly lower costs. So that's raw and packaging materials. Manufacturing is our second largest spend pool, and we're aiming for about $1.5 billion of savings from reduced manufacturing expense. We're on a continuous manufacturing productivity improvement journey. Over the previous five years we've delivered a cumulative 26% manufacturing productivity improvement defined as the change in head count per cases produced. We've established an objective to deliver an additional 30% of improvement over the next five years. Much is driven by five major pillars comprising a renewal of a proprietary manufacturing productivity methodology of integrated work systems or IWS, synchronization of our production to demand signals, leveraging our supply network redesign with multi-category production sites in North America and Europe, and reducing the number of manufacturing platforms from 275 to 150. We're digitizing our manufacturing operations and automating with robotics using, for example, collaborative robots to automate activities like palletizing, and autonomous vehicles to move materials and pallets within our operations. We see an opportunity for additional $1 billion of savings from transportation, warehousing and other cost of goods sold. These savings will come from work to improve warehouse productivity by as much as 25%, digitized algorithmic planning that reduces inventory and optimizes vehicle fill rates and rebidding regional transportation lanes based on our optimized manufacturing site and mixing center locations. Our North America mixing centers have driven customer service to an all-time high with on-time deliveries moving from 84% to 94% and the ability to resupply 80% of our sales within 24 hours. We're on track to deliver over $1.5 billion in cost of goods sold savings this fiscal year, ahead of the pace needed to reach the five-year, $7 billion savings goal. We see over $2 billion of savings opportunity in marketing spending with half or more coming from media rates and eliminating media supply chain waste. We're targeting up to $0.5 billion more in savings from reduced agency fees and ad production costs and we see about $0.5 billion of opportunity in spending for in-store materials, direct-to-consumer programs and improved efficiency in trial building and sampling programs, all of this while strengthening our overall program, increasing reach, increasing continuity and improving effectiveness. We're targeting about $1.5 billion of savings in trade spend. This is a $15 billion spend pool, so just a 10% efficiency improvement basically gets us there. These savings will come from improved execution against category and brand key business drivers like the example I shared earlier from Brazil. This will be enabled by new trade spending analytics tools including by SKU gross profit contribution metrics that will be available to each of our salespeople as they manage distribution and merchandising programs with our retail partners. And we'll better optimize investments by category as we implement the end-to-end management model with dedicated sales forces in more large markets. We're estimating we can achieve between $1 billion and $2 billion of additional overhead cost reduction. This will require a particular focus on reducing the cost of activities that are furthest away from consumers or customers and increasing end-to-end business accountability. It will also include further digitization and automation of work processes. So in total, we've identified $12 billion to $13 billion of savings opportunity across all cost elements. We've risk-adjusted this down to up to $10 billion to account for the uncertainty that exists in each piece of this work, especially when projecting out several years. We're making good progress this fiscal year through three quarters. We're averaging 220 basis points of gross margin savings and 50 basis points of savings in SG&A. Just as a reminder, where there's much still to do, we start in a fairly good place. We have the second highest after-tax profit margin in the industry. Only Reckitt is higher, largely due to category mix. We've improved core gross margin by about two points over the last three years. What matters more than aggregate margin is the competitive comparison for each category. As we compare P&G versus competitors on a weighted average basis, we're in line or ahead in nine out of 10 categories. P&G's category gross margins are higher than competition by an average of about five points and up to as many as 14 points. We hold similar advantages in overhead. When we compare P&G's SG&A overhead costs to a competitive average weighted by P&G's business mix by sector, our costs are more than 100 basis points lower. Over the last four years we've reduced P&G's overhead costs as a percentage of sales by 50 basis points. This has allowed us to grow our aggregate 22% top quintile operating margin by more than two points over the last three fiscal years despite three points of cumulative FX headwind over that same time. We have further advantages in below the line costs, we borrow at some of the most favorable rates in the industry, and we have a tax rate that is among the lowest in the industry. While we're currently competitive, we have significant opportunity ahead of us. Over the next five years, with the plans I just outlined, we'll make further advances in our cost and margin structure. In addition to establishing a new standard of excellence for product performance and packaging and commercial execution, and continuing to drive significant cost savings, we're further strengthening our organization, design, culture and accountability; deeper mastery, closer to consumers and customers, more agile, more accountable, more efficient and more effective. We're changing talent development and career planning to drive more mastery and depth in each of our product categories. The objective is simple: improve business results by getting and keeping the right people in the right places to develop and apply deep category mastery to win. P&G is fortunate to consistently source and develop very strong talent, but we recognize that there are times when the best talent for a role may not be with inside our organization. Going forward, we will supplement internal development with hiring from the outside to add the skill and experience needed to win and field the best team possible. This fits with the broad theme of connecting with external sources of value and ideas. Innovation, connect and develop external advisory boards and partners, technical experts, agency creatives. External hiring has roughly quadrupled across five different levels of management, including senior line management. And last week a new president level Chief Information Officer to help our very important digital efforts. We've invested in selling resources and category dedication. In the U.S. over the last two years, we've added approximately 140 salespeople, including experienced external hires and now have over 90% of our sales covered by dedicated, category-dedicated, profit aligned category experts. In large markets like the U.S. and China, we're moving to and end-to-end ownership and accountability approach. This approach focuses on category specialization in the markets. We previously focused too much on scale by managing the sales force for a country across all categories limiting the ability to focus on the unique needs of each category. We're moving to a model where decision-making authority for the number of salespeople serving a category in a particular country and which channels those salespeople cover is the responsibility of the regional category leader. Category is a point of competition. It's the point at which consumers engage with our brands. Category leaders can choose to add sales resources in a given market and channel and they have the responsibility to pay for them since they're the P&L owners for that business. There's no one-size-fits-all approach. The goal is to drive fast and agile decision making with each category leader focused on what it takes to win in their business through the lens of consumers, shoppers and retail partners. We first implemented this end-to-end approach, giving category leaders responsibility from the front end of innovation all the way through to the store in the United States last fiscal year. We brought four more markets into the model this fiscal year, and we plan to add five more markets next year. In total, these markets currently generate over 70% of company sales. In smaller countries where we don't have the scale to organize in a dedicated end-to-end model, we're implementing a new freedom within a framework approach. The objective is to enable these smaller markets to be faster and more agile, within a framework, to be accountable to execute and achieve financial goals. Regional leadership will establish a strategy, product plan and top and bottom line objectives. As long as the market is executing within the predefined strategies and are delivering the financial target set by the region, they have freedom, within pre-established executional boundaries, to make real-time changes, adjusting pricing, marketing levels and in-store merchandising programs as the situation on the ground dictates without the need for engagement with regional resources. In the markets where we've tested this approach, it's enabled us to cut the number of internal review meetings in half, reduce the number of people participating in meetings and it's importantly enhanced agility in market responsiveness. We're expanding this freedom within a framework approach globally starting July 1. We're aligning incentives at a lower level of granularity to better match responsibilities and to increase accountability. Salespeople in some of our largest markets who are now dedicated to selling one product category now have the majority of their incentive comp tied to the performance that category, versus what was previously a region average across all categories. Category leaders for a region now have their incentive comp tied to the performance of their category in their region versus a global average for that category. Bottom line, we're committed to getting, keeping, and growing the right people in the right places, dedicated to categories to drive better business results. We're putting more granular incentives in place to match the increased end-to-end responsibility we're giving leaders. We believe that by continuing to strengthen the plays I've just talked about, irresistible product and packaging superiority coupled with superior commercial execution, strong cost savings and continued strengthening of our organization, design, culture, and accountability, we will be able to further accelerate our progress even in the challenging market conditions we face. So to wrap up our comments this morning, we're striving to achieve a higher level of excellence in all areas that support the growth of our categories and brands. We're hopeful this work, enabled by strong cost savings and improvements to our organization, design, culture, and accountability will get us back to the levels of balanced growth that delivers our shareowner value-creation objectives. Also, in summary, as I mentioned earlier, for this fiscal year, we're maintaining organic sales and core earnings per share guidance despite the unforeseen and significant setbacks from FX and slowing market growth. We're just now starting our detailed forecasting for next fiscal year. We won't be sharing specific guidance for fiscal 2018 until our next earnings call currently planned for August 2, but our intent is clearly to deliver another year of sequential improvement on both the top and bottom lines. With that, I'd be happy to take your questions.