Kimberly-Clark Corporation (KMB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. I'm Mike Hsu, Chairman and CEO of Kimberly-Clark. Joining me today will be Alison Lewis, our Chief Growth Officer; Russ Torres, Group President of our North American Consumer business; and our CFO, Maria Henry. Today, we're going to talk about K-C Strategy 2022 and how we're driving balanced and sustainable growth by winning with iconic brands and terrific growth categories, accelerating growth by building and deploying superior commercial capability and fulfilling our purpose of better care for a better world. Much of our discussion today will highlight our strategies to accelerate growth and how our investments in our brands and innovation are working hard for us. While we expect to continue operating in an elevated cost environment in 2022, we're confident in our ability to recover margins and expect to make solid progress this year. This year, Kimberly-Clark celebrates 150 years of category-defining innovation and global market development. These strengths are reflected in our portfolio of iconic and trusted brands, including Huggies, Kleenex, Kotex and Scott. We compete in healthy categories and are focused on developing innovative products that enhance the value we provide our consumers. Our largest segment, personal care, represents half our sales. In 2022, we intend to further accelerate organic growth in this segment, which is still in the early stages of development across developing and emerging markets. There remains tremendous potential to expand category penetration, frequency and value. Alison and Russ will illustrate how we're executing our growth playbook, delivering breakthrough innovation with superior local market execution. This is driving the strong share gains we continue to see in our key markets. Accelerating growth will continue to be a top priority. We're doing this by elevating our categories and expanding our markets. As we'll share today, we're delivering on our growth strategy and we see a long runway of growth opportunity. Elevating our categories means driving premiumization, especially through innovation that delivers enhanced consumer benefits. Expanding our markets is making our products available to more consumers by accelerating the development of our markets. To enable these strategies, we're investing more behind our brands and in strengthening our commercial capabilities. We're unlocking growth by building a commercial powerhouse. We're leveraging our global scale to improve how we innovate, market and sell our products. We're building superior commercial capability in innovation, digital, market execution and revenue growth management. These areas are highly correlated on growth and market share and a key driver of our global acceleration in personal care. We remain confident in the potential of our brands and categories and in our ability to create meaningful shareholder value while we work to achieve our purpose of Better Care for a Better World. We have the power to positively impact billions of lives through the products we make, the workplaces we create and the communities we serve. Our trusted brands care for 1/4 of the world's population every day. But we also know there are billions more around the world who need our care, and for those people, better care can't wait. We aspire to advance the well-being of 1 billion people through our social impact programs. Alison will share a great example of how this is coming to life through our Kotex brand. We also know that caring for our planet is essential to helping people live a better life. We're focused on areas where we can make a difference, climate, forests, water and plastics. We're committed to sustainability and have ambitious goals. We're executing our strategy with purpose-led brands that create a win for Kimberly-Clark, a win for consumers and a win for the planet. It's how we'll deliver Better Care for a Better World. Next, Alison is going to tell you about our winning growth playbook.

Thanks, Mike. As Mike mentioned, our growth strategy is delivering. We have seen 2 years of share growth. As we attend market review after-market review, we see a consistent growth playbook in action. From the U.S. to Brazil to Russia to China, we see better commercial capabilities applied against consumer growth opportunities, inspiring choice of our brands more often, which unlocks more sales and ultimately grows market share. It's not complicated but it is more consistent. We have improved the things that drive sales, identifying the growth spaces and leveraging commercial capabilities to execute better. The commercial capabilities are focused against being the best at how we innovate, market and sell our products. These areas of focus are innovation, digital-first, in-market execution and revenue growth management. When you execute well against these, there is a higher correlation to growth. Let me share a few of the highlights of this acceleration of commercial capabilities. We are scaling more innovation from region to region with over 88% of our top innovation scaled in all 4 regions with year-over-year growth from innovation increasing at 10% in 2021. The majority of our marketing investment is digital at over 70% globally. This drives return on investment and importantly, allows personalization to better recruit and drive frequency. For example, 80% of the data we acquire in baby and child care is new moms, allowing us to really unlock lifetime value. Our end market execution work is moving us towards perfect store and e-shelf. We have seen a 2-year momentum of growing distribution of our core SKUs in nearly 60% of our key measured market share cohorts. And finally, we continue to make faster, smarter and more profitable revenue management decisions with balance across price, mix and volume. In fact, we've delivered positive net price and positive mix in the past 3 years. This elevated commercial capability becomes a multiplier effect for growth. For today, I thought it might be helpful to take a deeper dive against innovation. Our innovation model is all about product obsession multiplied by advantaged technology and then married to winning ideas. It starts with a clear and consistent benefit space across each sector globally. For example, in baby and child care, the benefit spaces range from leak protection all the way through to skin health. We then marry benefit spaces with advantaged technology. While I won't share the future technology road map, you can see how in the past few years against each benefit space, we apply technology that helps us continue to drive diaper evolution. Moms and dads care a lot about meeting the needs of their babies. If we can deliver something better, they want it and are willing to pay, so that is where we invest and involve our technology. All of this is tough to describe in words so let's take a look at a video that brings it all to life. [Presentation]

This product obsession delivered with technology advantage is then multiplied by winning ideas. Whether it's Kotex DreamWear in over 20 markets around the world for the ultimate overnight period protection, which is the ultimate torture test, or Huggies Super Deluxe, the softest diaper in China with a melting soft 3D liner made with real cotton, we show that we can continue to trade up consumers with added benefits, or Kleenex Allergy Comfort, recognizing the unique needs of allergy sufferers, providing facial tissue and wipes that are hypoallergenic with 0 added fragrances, inks or dyes and produced with a patented technology that reduces lint and dust. This product obsession married with winning ideas delivers incrementality and scaling around the world. Advantaged technology is also allowing us to bring more sustainable products to market across benefit spaces. Whether it's 100% biodegradable wipes made with plant-derived fibers with no added nasties for superior clean or Kleenex Eco made with 100% bamboo fiber and wrapped in recycled paper packaging with softness you don't expect from bamboo, or reusable swim pants with superior fabric that absorbs and holds it in the pant but allows for reuse. We have important work going on here and you can expect to see more. So I delved a little deeper into innovation as one of our commercial capabilities, as it is center plate to the growth playbook against which we apply personalized digital marketing, excellent in-market execution and margin unlock via revenue growth management. All this strengthens our portfolio of winning brands as you can see with some of the standout share growth, quite frankly, more than I have seen in my career. All of this is driving towards more leadership around the world. We are #1 or #2 in 85% of key markets and now #1 share in 55% of key markets, an increase of 10 points over the past 2 years. As we think about future growth, we see a long runway of opportunities, whether it's elevating and bringing more premium solutions in high-growth areas like health and wellness, sustainability and occasions and regimens, or expanding via new channels of business, developing and emerging markets and new markets, I remain confident in the growth trajectory of our business. Digging a little deeper into Elevate, you can see how premiumization is driving the growth from China to the U.S. and everywhere in between. In just 2 years, we've seen 7 points of diaper mix change, with premium/super-premium representing almost 83% of the mix with a 12% compound annual growth rate. And then as we look at that category dollars per baby born, we see about 10% growth in the U.S., South Korea, Russia and Australia, with a whopping 35% in China from 2019 to 2021. People are willing to spend more on their babies if the brands drive solutions that surprise and delight. As we look to the out years based on projected category growth and diaper dollars per baby, we do not see this slowing down. In markets like South Korea, where birth rates are declining 3x faster than the global average in the last 5 years, we continue to grow diapers and pants and beyond. The Korean baby and child care portfolio is really a model for premiumization, not only bringing added diaper and pant benefits and tiering up but also innovation around natural behaviors in regimen with brands like Green Finger, which looks at total skin care for baby. It's become the second largest brand in the market for baby skin care and the #1 brand for sun care. And then, of course, expanding and developing and emerging markets. This is our single largest growth opportunity. And today, D&E accounts for about 30% of our sales. Although birth rates are declining globally, there will be 1.3 billion babies born over the next 10 years and over 90% of those are in D&E markets. And yet the average spending per baby in D&E was only about 15% of the U.S. level. The growth upside is massive. We have made very good progress in the last 3 years with growth in the 6% to 8% range. As we look to accelerate growth by continuing to scale our winning approach in new future growth engines like Nigeria and India, we focus on understanding the shopper and the role of our category in their lives so we can cater to the local consumer. The final area of expand that I will talk today about is looking to new category adjacencies. The reusable period panty category will continue to experience significant growth over the next 3 years as consumers use period panties in combination with other period solutions, and Thinx is a leader in the industry in both the U.S. and globally. Based on our investment in Thinx over the past couple of years, we've begun to expand reusable period panties into food, drug and mass. Our first launch was in Australia and we have achieved the #2 market share in the category after just 7 months of launch. So we're excited to continue to build on this partnership and capitalize on the growth in this category. And we do all of this work while growing for good with purposeful brands. So simply put, the more we grow, the more good we can do as our brands really do allow people to live better. Before I hand it off to Russ to share how we are bringing the strategy to life in North America, let's take a look at how our Kotex brand is leading with purpose. [Presentation]

Thanks, Alison. I'm really excited to share more about the progress we're making in our North American business. For background, North America is our largest and most profitable market. We compete primarily in 2 operating segments: personal care, which makes up about 60% of our portfolio by revenue; and consumer tissue, which makes up the balance. While consumer tissues faced significant volatility over the past couple of years due to COVID, as you can see from the chart, we've been steadily building mid-single-digit growth momentum in personal care. And that is being driven by the growth playbook Alison took you through. So I'm going to bring this to life by digging a level deeper in the key drivers of our personal care success, and that's our baby and child care business. Our baby and child care business is made up of our Huggies, Pull-Ups and GoodNites brands. It makes up about 70% of our personal care business by revenue, so it's really one of our most important businesses in North America. Our baby and child care business is driven by a simple but powerful purpose: happy, healthy kids, which we know then leads to happy parents and happy families, and our people are passionate about this mission. We spend every day trying to understand the health and development needs of kids and how we can help make things just a little bit better. The foundation for growth, of course, is compelling consumer insights. For example, we've been growing our core diapers business by focusing on one of the biggest unmet needs in the category and that is skin health. The insight is that no parent wants to see their baby crying and uncomfortable with red irritated skin. If you're a parent and your baby has ever had a diaper rash, you know parents are very willing to trade up for products that help their baby feel better. So we've been focusing that product obsession and those winning ideas that Alison talked about on skin health to power our growth in core diapers. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples of that in a moment. GoodNites is a great example of developing new occasions. And if you're not familiar with GoodNites, we launched the brand in 1994. And the insight there was bedwetting amongst older kids was still a major issue with no real good solutions. GoodNites provides a solution for these kids by catering to older children and the bedwetting occasion. With the launch of GoodNites, we created a new highly incremental growth segment, which is now over $400 million and continues to grow at double-digit rates. So it's a great example of using insights to develop new occasions. And our baby and child care business also has the commercial capabilities Alison mentioned all working together and firing on all cylinders. And I'm going to bring this to life for you with a few examples, starting with innovation. Here are 2 recent examples of driving growth in our core by addressing that skin health insight that I mentioned just a moment ago. Some of you may recall that 2 years ago, we launched a product called Special Delivery in diapers. Special Delivery brings softness and being gentle on skin to a whole new level. It's hypoallergenic and it features the use of plant-based materials like sugarcane. And Special Delivery, as a result, has been gaining share. In fact, it's grown to 15% of the highest-tier open diaper segment, and we see more runway ahead. In training pants, we're also using similar material technology in our Pull-Ups New Leaf product. New Leaf launched last year and we've seen very strong consumer demand. In only its first year, New Leaf drove 30% of the growth in the entire training pants category, and we have an exciting pipeline ahead to keep it going. In the area of digital, we've made investments in performance marketing, content and one-to-one consumer marketing. And this is giving us new levels of insight and intimacy. In fact, we now have a direct one-to-one digital permission to communicate with over 80% of diapering households in the U.S. We're able to engage with them at key moments like pregnancy, childbirth, transitions to potty training or around specific acute needs like diaper rashes or bedwetting. This is incredibly powerful and opens up a whole new world. We're continuing to invest here. In the second quarter, we will open the Chicago Commercial Center, which will be based on the red-hot Fulton Market district, and this is going to be a state-of-the-art, digitally-enabled hub in the heart of the action. It's going to position us for even better access to talent, technology and capabilities for the future. And all these investments are increasing our ROIs. As you can see, our returns on advertising have more than tripled in the last 10 years. And they keep getting better as we get better. So let me bring all this to life using GoodNites XL as a recent example, where we leveraged our capabilities to uncover insights that drove through to profitable growth. [Presentation]

Our strategy has also driven positive price/mix over time. In fact, our sales of super-premium diapers have gone from about 40% of our portfolio in 2011 to over 80% in 2021. We've increased that number 9 points since 2019, and this has increased our value per diaper significantly and allowed us to grow despite flat birth rates. So as a result of all of this, we've grown the category in the mid-single digits since 2019, and our brands have driven 50% of that category growth in the top 3 retailers over that time period. And that's well over our fair share. Our brands overall have been gaining market share. From 2019 to Q4 2021, we've gained about 2 points of share across the full baby and child care segment so our strategies are working in baby and child care. And we believe there's a lot of runway left to grow. We're applying the same playbook to all of our other categories. For example, adult care is a very attractive growing segment where we have the #1 brands and the leading market share. We've been applying our growth playbook to Depend with some early positive results. In 2021, we saw accelerating category growth and positive movement in Depend shares. In our consumer tissue business, it's been quite a rollercoaster ride over the past couple of years primarily due to COVID. But in the background, we've been focusing on those same playbook elements, deepening our consumer insights, innovating in growth spaces like flushable wipes, expanding distribution and sharpening our focus on revenue growth management. We've had some early success here as well. For example, Cottonelle has recently started to see some positive sequential share trends towards the end of 2021. And at flushable wipes, where we're the #1 brand, our work to increase awareness over the superior experience offered by flushable wipes has driven about 6% annual category growth since 2018. We believe we have a lot of runway growth ahead of us. We have great opportunities to drive household penetration in areas like adult care and flushable wipes. We have a lot of opportunity left in premiumization beyond just baby and child care with exciting vectors like health and wellness, natural and organic and sustainability all ahead of us. We have opportunities to develop new occasions in many categories. And we're going to continue to grow by leveraging our strengthening digital capabilities in areas like marketing and e-commerce. And finally, we continue to look for category adjacencies to broaden the shoulders of our business. So our strategy is working and we see a very bright future in Kimberly-Clark North America.

Thanks, Russ, and good morning. As we move into the financials, I'll begin by stating our strong belief that Kimberly-Clark is an attractive long-term investment. We introduced K-C Strategy 2022 when Mike assumed the CEO role in 2019. This medium-term plan is about driving balanced and sustainable growth and creating shareholder value through 3 pillars: growing our portfolio of iconic brands, leveraging our cost and financial discipline and allocating capital in value-creating ways. I'm pleased to say that we are delivering on all 3 pillars and I'll walk you through the highlights. Starting with the top line growth, you can see that we have grown our company by almost $1 billion since 2019. Our organic growth drivers have been balanced with delivery from volume, price and mix. We augmented organic sales with the acquisition of Softex in Indonesia in the fourth quarter of 2020, adding about $400 million to our top line sales. Over the last 3 years, our organic sales CAGR was 3%, at the high end of our K-C Strategy 2022 range of 1% to 3%. Geographically, we grew nicely across all 3 regions with continued strength in developing and emerging markets. Our K-C Professional growth has been challenged by COVID dynamics as away-from-home washroom product usage has declined as more people work from home and mobility overall has been soft through the pandemic. Within our overall growth, our personal care business is very strong. This is a $10 billion business that has grown at 5% to 6% organically in each of the last 3 years. Including the Softex acquisition, this business grew over 9% in 2021. Turning to our recent financial performance. After several years of improvement, our profit and margins have been disrupted by the global COVID pandemic. These disruptions include volatility in our tissue categories, record levels of inflation and global inefficiencies in the supply chain. In 2021, we experienced commodity inflation of $1.5 billion. Also compressing near-term margins, our KCP washroom business declined significantly in the second half of 2020 and is now about 85% of what it was prior to the pandemic. While our near-term margins are challenged, our categories are profitable and our long-term profit expectations for our segments have not changed. Our business strategies have delivered operating margins well in line with those expectations, and you can see our 2019 pre-pandemic margins on the slide. We're committed to recovering margins to pre-pandemic levels and we're taking actions to do so. How will we get there? We are taking broad-based multiple rounds of pricing and leveraging all of our revenue growth management levers. On costs, we recently completed our 2018 global restructuring program, which delivered about $560 million of annual savings. Over the past 4 years, we have delivered cumulative FORCE savings of $1.5 billion. Moving forward, we have a robust pipeline of supply chain savings opportunities, and we expect to continue to deliver strong annual productivity through our FORCE program. We will also remain disciplined with our between-the-lines spending. Our investments in advertising, commercial capabilities and digital are working and supporting our top line growth. Turning to our outlook for this year. This chart shows our financial performance since we launched K-C Strategy 2022. You can clearly see the COVID-related dynamics on our top line in 2020 and in 2021 as well as the unprecedented cost inflation last year. As we get underway in 2022, we're anticipating good organic sales growth while profitability continues to be suppressed by a second year of inflationary pressure and higher supply chain costs to service our customers and consumers. Looking beyond 2022, we expect continued strong top line growth and margin recovery over time. On capital allocation, dividends are an important part of our investment proposition, and we have a long record of returning cash to shareholders. We paid a dividend 88 years in a row and have increased the dividend for 50 consecutive years. So let me close our presentation with a few key messages. We're growing and there's a long runway for more growth. We're improving our top line and strengthening our brands, market positions and our company for the long term. Near-term headwinds are significant and we're taking actions to offset the profit impact over time. And finally, we are confident in our ability to deliver balanced and sustainable growth and create meaningful shareholder value. Thank you for your time today. We appreciate your interest in Kimberly-Clark.