Coty Inc. ($COTY)

Okay. Good morning. Our next presenting company is Coty Inc., trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol COTY. Their first time at the IDEAS conference, so we're very glad to have them here today. Presenting on behalf of the company is Olga Levinzon, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Head of M&A. Olga?

Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. So it's my pleasure to be here today to introduce you to Coty. And we are one of the leading global beauty companies. My name is Olga Levinzon, and I lead Investor Relations and M&A at Coty, and I've been at the company for 13 years. So I want to start with a fascinating statistic. Did you know that the majority of Gen Z consumers in the U.S. have a repertoire of over 4 different fragrances or perfumes that they rotate on a weekly basis and on a regular basis. And these same Gen Z consumers use fragrances at least 3 times per week. Maybe some of you have also noticed your own fragrance wardrobe at home also expanding in recent years. This is a drastic change from prior decades when the average consumer had one favorite or signature scent that they return to again and again and only use periodically. Today's consumers have embraced what we call a fragrance wardrobe, buying fragrances that fit different occasions during their week and tapping into new scenting trends as they emerge. This drastic change in consumer behavior is what has driven the U.S. prestige fragrance market to more than double in the last 6 years and it now surpasses over $10 billion. And as one of the top fragrance makers in the world who has been driving this category for over 120 years, Coty is squarely in the middle of this consumer trend and we will continue to benefit from this fragrance growth going forward. So if you take one thing away from this presentation, it is this. Coty has the heritage, the brands and the capabilities to churn our 120 years of beauty leadership into long-term shareholder value. What makes Coty an attractive investment opportunity? I would summarize it in 3 points. First, we have a scaled platform in a very resilient global beauty market. If you look at the data over the last several decades, the global beauty market has consistently grown approximately 3% to 5%, almost every single year. And this continues in the current environment as well. Even with the current macro uncertainty and pressured consumer sentiment, the beauty categories where we play are still growing 4% to 5% year-to-date. Second, Coty has a portfolio of highly desirable brands. Our brands all have distinct brand equities and positioning. We own many of our brands. But for the ones that we operate under a licensing structure, these licenses carry a long-term duration. And we operate this portfolio with a strong vertically integrated business model, which is a point of differentiation from many of our competitors who outsource much of their operations. Third, we've recently unveiled a new strategic framework called Coty Curated, which aims to improve our business performance and execution. Coty Curated is all about sharpening our priorities, being more targeted with our investments, and establishing multiple levers for long-term profit growth. Let me share our beautiful portfolio of brands to give you a sense of who Coty is. How many of you have heard of Burberry or Hugo Boss? Well, we are the beauty partners of these iconic brands, taking their brand story and legacy and translating it into beautiful fragrances and makeup collections. We also own many of our own brands who are equally iconic in story such as CoverGirl makeup, Sally Hansen nail polish and Philosophy skin care. The great thing about our portfolio is that it covers the full range of price points from $5 nail polishes to $300 ultra-premium fragrances. In the K-shaped economy like we have today, this pricing diversification gives us a true competitive edge versus many of our consumers. And just as importantly, we are not overly reliant on any single brand. Here, you can see a snapshot of Coty by the numbers. We are the #2 player globally in both fragrances and in mass cosmetics based on a portfolio of over 60 brands. In the last 12 months, we've generated $5.8 billion in sales and $880 million in EBITDA. We have an employee base of over 11,000 employees and we have local operations in approximately 30 countries even as our products are sold in over 120 countries, and we produce the majority of our products ourselves with 7 manufacturing plants around the globe. All of this reaffirms the Coty has the legacy, the brands and the capabilities to turn 120 years of beauty leadership into long-term shareholder value. Beauty is a very unique category, operating at the crossroads of being a staple, a discretionary category and the luxury and aspirational category. This is why it is critical that our executives have extensive beauty expertise. Nearly all of the leaders that you see on this slide, starting with our Chairman and CEO, have a deep knowledge of beauty from both Coty or other global beauty companies. And our 5 new independent Board members who recently joined our Board also come with many years of beauty experience. As you can see here, we play in many parts of the beauty market, including fragrances, cosmetics, skin care and body care. However, we operated the business in 2 divisions. Our Prestige division accounts for 2/3 of our sales, and is primarily composed of our prestige fragrances, which sell in more premium channels like Sephora, Macy's and Bloomingdale's at price points which are often $100 or more. Our Consumer Beauty division accounts for 1/3 of our business with product selling of more accessible retailers like Walmart and Target and Amazon at price points often under $20. Our business is diversified geographically as well. As you can see here, North America and Western Europe are our biggest regions and each of them are under 30% of our sales. We also have a strong footprint in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Latin America and the global travel retail channel of duty-free stores. We have premier infrastructure and a very strong distribution network across channels. Our global manufacturing capabilities are a key differentiator for us with 7 manufacturing facilities across 3 continents producing over 1 billion products annually. Our manufacturing capabilities are a crucial competitive advantage in today's complex supply chain and tariff backdrop. We also have extensive commercial and distribution reach with directly run operations in 30 countries. Our brands are sold across many channels, including luxury department stores, perfumeries, mass retailers and e-commerce retailers. And we distribute over several million orders annually, reaching over 400,000 retail doors around the globe. There are a few players who rival our commercial scale and reach in beauty. In the last 7 years, we have been premiumizing our portfolio. With our higher-margin Prestige business of premium brands consistently outpacing our Consumer Beauty business of more accessible brands. Fiscal year-to-date, our Prestige business accounted for 2/3 of our sales and over 90% of our profit. Looking forward, there are 2 key things we are focused on with regards to this divisional mix. First, we are laser-focused on continuing to overdrive our Prestige business, which is the growth and profit engine of the company. And second, we are focused on improving the performance and profitability of our Consumer Beauty division. While in parallel, our executive team and Board continue a strategic review of this business. Coty has leading fragrance brands, innovation and capabilities. Our unwavering focus on fragrances and grounded in both scale and strategic capabilities. In the highly attractive $50 billion Prestige fragrance market, Coty is a top 3 player with 12% market share, right in line with LVMH. And we're also one of the few fragrance makers who operate licensing models, which is a critical part of our business. What this means in practice is that when desirable luxury brands like Burberry and Marc Jacobs, want to enter beauty, they almost always choose to partner with a specialized beauty player like Coty to develop, manufacture and market their beauty products. Such licensing arrangements are beneficial for both sides. The luxury brands benefit from our global scale, vertically integrated business model and extensive beauty expertise while receiving a risk-free royalty stream. At the same time, we built strong beauty brands, which benefit from the awareness and desirability of the luxury houses. Amongst the top 5 global fragrance players, only Coty and L'Oreal operate licensing models, meaning luxury brands have a limited set of partners who can build scale, global and multi-category beauty businesses for them. With this backdrop, we continue to attract new and desirable licenses, most recently adding Swarovski, Etro and Marni to our portfolio, reinforcing Coty's position as a preferred partner for luxury brands. Key to operating a successful licensing business is diversification of the portfolio and reducing the license duration risk. In the last couple of years, we've proactively renewed and significantly extended many key licenses, including Hugo Boss, Marc Jacobs, adidas and Davidoff for an additional 15-plus years. Crucially, 85% of our portfolio is either an owned brand, our perpetual license, which we view like an own brand or a license with a very long-term remaining duration of 6 years or more. Looking at our Prestige division specifically, our business remains very long term in nature with approximately 80% of our brands being either owned or long-term license. This underscores the strong foundations of our portfolio. We've also established a track record of building and scaling prestige beauty brands. Here, you can see some of the biggest brands in our portfolio, including Burberry, Hugo Boss, Chloe and Marc Jacobs. In the last 6 years, we've grown Burberry Beauty by a fantastic 140%, Hugo Boss by over 30%, Chloe lowly by close to 70% and Marc Jacobs by almost 50%. We are true brand builders, underpinned by our extensive beauty expertise and vertically integrated model. On the Consumer Beauty side of the business, we sell into mass retailers like Walmart and e-com players like Amazon. And color cosmetics is our largest category, accounting for 20% of our sales. We remain the #2 player in mass cosmetics globally with 12% market share. Underpinning our #2 position in mass cosmetics globally are several key brands with each one, maintaining a strong position in a few core markets. CoverGirl is our beloved North American icon representing easy breezy beauty and ranking #4 in both the U.S. and Canada, with 5% global market share. Rimmel, which embodies cool and edgy London beauty, ranks #2 in the U.K. and top 5 in Poland and Germany, fueling 4% global market share. Sally Hansen remains the undisputed leader in the nail category, ranked #1 in the U.S., Canada and Australia, and they are complemented by our smaller brands [ max Factor and Boujois]. Within our Consumer Beauty division, we also have a sizable business in mass fragrances, which are fragrances sold in mass retailers usually priced under $30. Key brands in the business include adidas Fragrances, Vera Wang and regional brands like Bruno Banani. Together, they drive our 11% market share in developed markets, putting COI at #1 within this fragmented category. Let me shift now to CODI's financial trajectory. In the 4 years between fiscal '21 and fiscal '24, we delivered significant revenue, margin and profit expansion. Our sales on a like-for-like basis expanded by over 10% in fiscal '22, fiscal '23 and fiscal '24. However, in fiscal '25 and in the last 12 months, we have seen more challenged business dynamics, reflecting both the normalization of growth in the category, some retailer destocking and our own executional challenges. The lower sales volume, coupled with the impact from tariffs, have also pressured our gross margins. We expanded our gross margins by close to 500 basis points between fiscal '21 and fiscal '25 to approximately 65%, fueled by a multipronged work stream on procurement, revenue management and SKU rationalization. However, with the recent challenges, our gross margins in the last 12 months ended at 63.3%. The sales and gross margin dynamic translated to our EBITDA margin and to our EPS. Between fiscal '21 and fiscal '25, we steadily expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin by close to 200 basis points, reaching 18.4% last year. In parallel, our profit expansion and reduced interest expense fueled a significant increase in our EPS from $0.05 in fiscal '21 to $0.50 in fiscal '25. However, in the last 12 months, the more challenging business dynamics drove a reduction in both the EBITDA margin and EPS. Our strong profit and margin projections -- progression through fiscal '25 was fueled in part by a strong cost savings program. The organization has been actively identifying both fixed cost savings and ongoing productivity savings, contributing over $850 million over a 5-year period. These savings were critical in funding reinvestment in the business to accelerate our growth while in parallel, strengthening our profit and our cash flow. We are on track to deliver an additional $200 million or more in savings this year with additional savings identified for next year and beyond. One of the true performance highlights in the last 5 years has been our significantly improved balance sheet. In fiscal '21, our leverage was very elevated at almost 7 times. We made clear at that point that our #1 capital allocation priority would be to steadily reduce our leverage towards more normalized levels, targeting 2x over time. And through the combination of strong organic free cash flow, strong EBITDA expansion and certain asset monetization, we have reduced our leverage by over 4 turns in the last 5 years. As a result, we exited calendar '25 with leverage at 2.7x, the lowest level in almost a decade. The strong execution in deleveraging and strengthening our operational and financial performance has also been recognized by the debt rating agencies. Since fiscal '20, we've been upgraded 6 times by Moody's and 5 times by S&P. We are now one notch below investment grade at all 3 rating agencies. With a dynamic external environment and our recent more challenged performance, we announced at the start of the calendar year, a new Chairman and Interim CEO, Markus Strobel. Prior to Coty, Markus spent his career at P&G, primarily in their beauty and personal care business. After an initial assessment of Coty's business, Markus concluded that many of the challenges Coty has faced in the last year stem from trying to do too many things at the same time, resulting in organizational focus, and our resources being spread too thin. We therefore unveiled in February a new strategic framework called Coty Curated. Coty Curated is all about setting sharper priorities and deliberate choices focusing our investments behind our core brands and core markets; and finally, ensuring that all new initiatives and launches are there to support the core business as that is the only way to build sustainable growth in the long term. We have already begun implementing Coty Curated framework in recent months. The organization is already focusing on the biggest brands and markets, strengthening our plans for the upcoming fall 2026 holiday season to ensure we win with the winners and where it matters. Our resources will be concentrated behind our biggest bets while we have cut smaller launches, which won't move the needle. With consumers increasingly engaging with brands, and discovering new innovation online and over social media, we are reallocating more of our marketing spend from content production to consumer and influencer engagement and advocacy. And culturally, we are refocusing the full organization and improving our market share rather than short-term financial delivery. These changes will take time to drive results and the path will not be linear. But we are confident that this focused approach will return Coty to a path of sustained top line and bottom line growth over the long term. So in sum, this is a really dynamic time in the world. Consumers are craving the small items that boost their mood and boost their self-confidence and beauty is at the epicenter of this trend. I hope you come away from this presentation with the following points: Coty has a scaled platform in a resilient global beauty market. We have a portfolio of highly desirable brands with distinct equities, long-term duration licenses and the differentiated vertically integrated business model. And the Coty Curated strategic framework is setting in motion sharper priorities targeted investments and multiple levers for long-term profit growth. And the one thing I want to leave you with is this: Coty has the heritage, the brands and the capabilities to turn our 120 years of beauty leadership into long-term shareholder value. Thank you, and I'll be happy to take any questions now.

So first, thank you for showing up. I mean I think it must be very hard for somebody to bring over the last 10 years and 75% over the last year. [indiscernible] basically. I mean if you look at the [indiscernible] it's trading at 2x EBITDA. Is that basically what -- you said you have EBITDA of $880 million and the market cap is about 1.7.

Yes. I mean on an enterprise value, it's more like 5 or 6. But yes, it's obviously down a lot.

And you compare yourself with a number of other brands, companies and you come to [indiscernible] from the of all those. So I wanted to hear more like a reflection of what exactly went wrong and what exactly is changing because as recently [indiscernible] few months [indiscernible] class action lawsuit filed against Coty for telling stories that weren't true. So can you talk a little bit about what have you learned and what is it that you guys do different in a significant way to turn this thing around [indiscernible]?

Sure. I mean I think it's always helpful to kind of set the challenges of the last 12 months versus a track record in the last -- in the prior 4 years, where there was actually very strong momentum. So I don't want to discount the progress that the company and the leadership team executed in fiscal '21, '22, '23 and '24, I mean, double digits...

[indiscernible]

It was during that period. So our stock went from about $3 in 2020 to, I think, $12 to $13 in calendar '24. So it really did translate for a long period of time or a multiyear period into share price performance. Now obviously, since that point, in the last 1.5 years, the performance has been challenged. And between that and some of the portfolio dynamics that are happening around one of our key brands, Gucci, which will exit the portfolio in the next few years. And we have to specify and share it externally exactly how to think about that in the coming years as well as some of the portfolio reviews. I think right now, the stock has pulled back a lot, and part of it also reflects our executional challenges. So on your question around what went wrong? What can we do better on a go-forward basis? As I mentioned, I think as the performance did well over a multiyear period, resources went into too many different directions. So trying to improve cosmetics, trying to fuel fragrances, trying to launch an ultra-premium fragrance line, trying to reboost our skin care presence. It was spread too thin, and I think the results of that was underperformance and market share loss over a period of time, and that is exactly what we're trying to course correct.

[indiscernible]

Yes. So JB effectively actually built Coty in the early '90s. They are effectively a holding company that's set about acquiring different consumer brands and beauty brands, that ultimately got split up on the consumer side and to what is now record bank user. And on the beauty side, what is now Coty. So they own Coty privately for about 20 years. They took it public in 2013. We've been a public company but a controlled public company, where they have consistently owned more than 50% of the shares. But they've obviously been very supportive. I mean they've been behind the company for 30 years now.

[indiscernible]

So I mean that's for him to answer, but I would say what he has shared in his conversations is that he needs to set the pace of the turnaround, really see it start delivering before -- remaining Chairman by passing kind of the baton on the CEO side. So I think it's -- for the foreseeable future, we will continue to play in both roles.

[indiscernible] So my question now is, how is [indiscernible]?

Yes. So there's a strategic review underway for our Consumer Beauty business. That's part of it. But like any company, we're also assessing the broader portfolio. There's -- obviously, we have a new Chairman, but we also have new Board members. So there needs to be a holistic discussion amongst all of them to assess and on us to come to you to the market ideally this calendar year with a framework around what is the end state portfolio.

[indiscernible] Is there anything within the industry that Coty as a company [indiscernible]?

Yes. I mean I think the -- we have beautiful brands and really strong capabilities, which we've proven. Obviously, performance in the last year has been -- has not met the mark but it means that we're starting from a strong baseline, right? So purely improving the execution behind our brands will already closing that gap to the category. If the category is growing 3% to 5%, simply taking the execution and growing in line with the category will already mean strong acceleration in top line and in the business with 60-plus percent gross margins that by necessity also benefits the bottom line quite substantially as well. And we're a very cash generator business. In the last few years, on average, we generate $300 million plus/minus in annual free cash flow. Like this is a very strong business. So when the top line is working, it really does benefit the full P&L, cash flow and balance sheet. Now in terms of adjacent opportunities. We want to do that, but we want to do that in a target way so that we're not repeating prior mistakes of trying to chase too much at the same time. So the top priority is focusing on the core but at the same time, looking at adjacencies like ultra premium fragrances, launching these beautiful collections of priced at $200, $300 plus. We've done that under Chloe. We're doing that under Burberry. There's other brands as well, Jil Sander. We've launched fragrance mist, so giving consumers who are may be priced out of the category with products that are nice, maybe not the same concentration, not the same scent profile, but you can buy a Calvin Klein mist for $20 or $30. So it's bringing in Gen Z consumers. It's bringing in consumers who may not be able to afford the more premium products. So I think we want to approach certain adjacencies but in a very targeted way.

[indiscernible] balance sheet shows [indiscernible]

So we've been very active and proactive around both extending and balancing out the maturity ladder. So we had a sizable over $1 billion of maturities due in calendar '26. We came to the markets last fall in the transaction that was significantly, significantly oversubscribed, got very attractive cost of debt on that. So now our first maturities come in calendar '28 but they're very staggered beyond that. So it's not one giant kind of tranche.

[indiscernible]

The nice thing about beauty is that there's pricing power. Now we don't want to abuse that pricing power needs to be very deliberate, very targeted on a SKU-by-SKU basis. But this is a category that is desirable for consumers. It's one of the last things that they cut. If you kind of map out price elasticity of different consumer categories, beauty is one of the least price elastic categories out there. So again, we don't want to abuse that power, but there's room to take pricing if needed.

[indiscernible] so I guess from my point of view, capital expenses [indiscernible]

When we look at -- so I think, obviously, when there are cycles, having -- if you're in a down cycle, if you have an asset-light model, there's benefits from that. But if you look over a cross-cycle period, we have one of the largest -- we are -- fragrances is our profit engine. We have, I think, the largest fragrance manufacturing plant in the world in Spain. If it's not the largest, it's one of the largest, which actually gives us objectively like some of the best cost of goods, cost per unit in the industry. I think that's a key point of differentiation. It helps us fuel the investment behind our brands. The fact that we are not relying too much on external suppliers, particularly for the fragrance business, the fact that we have our own internal R&D means that we can actually differentiate our products in a much bigger way. For many of the -- not the very established scale global players, but many of the upstart beauty brands, they're all relying on the same third-party manufacturers who come -- R&D engines, which means the differentiation between these upstart brands is really just their marketing engine. For us, we have our internal perfumers, our own internal R&D. We have IP around different parts of the fragrance composition, long-lasting scents, how it diffuses. So the core technical differentiators for our core business, it becomes very important that, that is in-house. Well, great. Thank you, everyone.