Kimberly-Clark Q1 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
April 22, 2025
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Operator

Good morning, and welcome to the Kimberly Clark First Quarter twenty twenty five Earnings Call Question and Answer Session. I will now hand it over to Chris Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Christopher Jakubik
Christopher Jakubik
Head Of Investor Relations at Kimberly-Clark

Thank you and good morning everyone. This is Chris Jkubik, Head of Investor Relations at Kimberly Clark and thank you for joining us. I would like to remind everyone that during our comments today, we will make some forward looking statements that are based on how we see things today. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties and these are discussed in our earnings release and our filings with the SEC. We will also discuss some non GAAP financial measures during these remarks.

Christopher Jakubik
Christopher Jakubik
Head Of Investor Relations at Kimberly-Clark

These non GAAP financial measures should not be considered replacement for and should be read together with GAAP results. And you can find the GAAP to non GAAP reconciliations within our earnings release and the supplemental materials posted at investor.kimberlyclark.com. With that, I will turn it over to Mike for a few opening comments.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Okay. Thank you, Chris. In the first quarter, we continue to make solid progress across the three pillars of our Powering Care strategy, building on the strong foundation we established in 2024. While our top line was somewhat softer than our expectation, the first quarter overall was consistent with our full year plan. Our results demonstrate that our cascade of innovation across the good, better, best value spectrum is winning with consumers.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

We held global weighted share while navigating a dynamic environment. Volume plus mix was solid, demonstrating that demand in our categories remains resilient. We made strong progress optimizing our margins and continued to deliver world class gross productivity enabled by our integrated margin management approach. Our freshly wired enterprise matrix organization is playing a key role scaling initiatives in 2025, and this is enabling us to bring the best of Kimberly Clark to all markets faster and better than before. In addition, we're on track to generate approximately $200,000,000 of SG and A savings in the next few years.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

We remain confident in our ability to execute the plan we outlined for this year, even as we navigate a rapidly evolving external environment. In fact, Powering Care gives us a running start. In this evolving environment, we see three keys to winning. We will deliver stronger differentiation at every rung of the good, better, best ladder. We will deliver industry leading productivity to generate funds to reinvest in the business, drive profitable growth and address external headwinds.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And we'll continue to enable a faster, more agile organization. We're continuing to perform while transforming or scaling our transformation and reshaping our portfolio for stronger, more profitable growth over the long term. As we move forward, we will stay true to our purpose and values to deliver better care for a better world. And we remain confident in our ability to unlock our long term potential for our consumers, our company and our shareholders. And with that, I'd like to open up the line for questions.

Operator

Certainly. Everyone at this time will be conducting a question and answer session. If you have any questions or comments, please press 1 on your phone at this time. We do ask that while posing your question, please pick up your handset if you're listening on speakerphone to provide optimum sound quality. Your first question is coming from Lauren Lieberman from Barclays.

Operator

Your line is live.

Lauren Lieberman
Lauren Lieberman
Managing Director at Barclays

Great, thanks. Good morning. Know there's a lot to cover today, but I was hoping we could start with organic growth. Results in North America significantly trailed what we'd seen in scanner, which was pretty strong actually, and we didn't see in scanner the kind of deceleration a lot of other companies and categories saw during the quarter. And I know in the prepared remarks, you mentioned there was no retail destocking.

Lauren Lieberman
Lauren Lieberman
Managing Director at Barclays

So it'd be great if you could just help articulate what drove the gap in North America performance reported versus what we saw in scanner. And then secondly, just to get to something north of 1.5% to two percent organic sales growth for the year, so better than category growth, implies a significant ramp after the first quarter results globally. So hoping you could just talk a little bit about why we should expect to see that acceleration? Thanks.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Sure. Thanks, Lauren. And let me I'll get started with bridging the first quarter and how we expect the balance of the year to evolve, the acceleration that we are foreseeing in volume and mix, especially as we go into the second quarter. And then I'll ask Mike if he can jump in, in terms of some of the key initiatives that are being taken across the globe as we speak. So firstly, as Mike said, in our organic sales were slightly below our expectations for the first quarter, while profitability was in line with what we expected, supported by strong productivity delivery, both in costs and overheads.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

As a reminder, we're lapping the strongest quarter in 2024, in which we grew 5.6% organically last year. There were four factors at play in the first quarter when we unpack organic sales growth, which help bridge scanner data consumption to what our organic sales came in. Firstly, as we stated, weighted average category growth was it, we had expected to be around 2% coming into the year. That's what we had seen at the end of twenty twenty four. Whereas for the first quarter, we're in the 1.5% to 2% range.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

So that's the first factor. The second is this year has one less day of shipments in the first quarter, as well as in the full year, whereas scanner data is apples to apples in terms of days and weeks versus the prior year. And this is what we're about a 100 basis point impact to organic sales in the quarter. Thirdly, we're facing lower year on year North America private label shipments outside of the private label diaper business exit we've been highlighting. And this as a whole represents about 40 basis points to total company organic sales and in the case of North America, which you asked, it's about two times that about 80 basis points of a head.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And then lastly, we had planned strategic pricing investments in price, the architecture across several markets and categories, including US consumer, which started happening at the very end of twenty twenty four. US professional, where we've been maneuvering through a highly competitive environment in certain segments within professional as well as some of our emerging markets. Now going into the full year, and our expectations in the year to go. First, consistent with our long term algorithm, we continue to target a volume and mix based organic growth for the year that's ahead of the categories in our markets. We have a strong slate of new product and go to market activations that are happening as we speak.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

They're being ramped up. We started at the March, and that's happening through Q2, parts of Q3 and investing heavily behind it. And that's one of the pieces that should accelerate volume and mix in Q2 and on. The other bit is when we do the comparison against the prior year, assuming shipments are in line with consumption, we should see just less than 40 basis points of a tailwind in 2025 versus 2024 from the retail destocks that we experienced last year. And that's all built into our outlook for 2025.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

So as we get into the quarterly perspective, it's really going to be basically on the year to go a comparison of quarter over quarter. And that's the progression that we're seeing. And Q2 in particular should be one of the easiest comps that we have because of the destock level that we saw in North America, which overall would represent a tailwind of around 80 basis points for the company. And again, that's primarily in North America. So overall, we are expecting to see volume and mix to accelerate in the balance of the quarters for the year.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And I'll turn it over to Mike for some further perspective on the initiatives.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yes. Lauren, I'd say one, we have a strong pipeline to improve our consumer value propositions around the world. And that's why we felt like it was very important despite some of the external headwinds we're seeing to preserve the fundamentals of our plan and execute it. And so overall, I'm going to say a couple of things. Growing faster than our categories and markets depends on how well we provide better care for our consumers.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

We expect to deliver healthy volume and mix driven organic growth. And as Nelson points out, we do believe that will accelerate in Q2. What's behind that is a slate of innovation that we've launched. I mentioned in my prepared remarks, Huggies Snug and Dry North America, that's only recently started shipping and it's barely started shipping and it's a great product. If you look at the reviews, it compares very favorably to the premium tier, even though it's targeted against the mainstream value shopper.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And so, we feel great about the innovation. We also have a broad slate of improvements that have yet to start shipping in international, including Latin America, where we have seen a little bit more softness recently. And we're going to make some significant product improvements internationally along the same lines, improve product quality. And so that's really the basis. Our whole strategy is predicated on we're going to make better products at a lower cost and we're going to innovate to do so.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And we're going to pull on the matrix to work faster to bring the best of what we have to markets around the world.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Nick Modi from RBC Capital Markets. Your line is live.

Nik Modi
Nik Modi
Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets

Yeah, thank you.

Nik Modi
Nik Modi
Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets

Good morning. Hey.

Nik Modi
Nik Modi
Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets

Well, good job. So, I guess, Mike, the question is just given the value seeking pressures that we're seeing pretty broadly that I think we can all agree will probably persist for at least the next few quarters. You talked about innovating at different tiers and but how do you manage that along with the price mix and kind of your margin cadence, right? So just trying to get an understanding like, is the revision just a tariff related thing or are you also baking in some kind of mix weight as you kind of innovate more on the more of the value end of the market?

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yes, Nick, I would say the revision of the outlook is primarily headwind cost related, And I'll say strategically, I think as we're implementing our innovation strategy and our marketing strategy, I think we've accounted for some of the mix differences. But I want to say a couple of things. One is that our categories continue to exhibit very resilient demand. I mean, the category growth, as Nelson pointed out, has decelerated but still remains healthy. It's 1.5% to 2% versus two ish at the start of the year.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

That reflects a little bit less pricing, as we had highlighted in international. And then there is some frequency and softness across Latin America, which is under the gun economically as well. I will say, though, in our categories, are daily use categories and consumers remain interested in the product performance. And they're interested in better performing products. I think Nick increasingly affordability has become paramount.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

More than kind of it's been in my dozen plus years here at KC. And so we're very focused on that. We recognize that situation and we understand the burden that I would say the middle income to lower income households are dealing with. And so our strategy is to cascade our innovation from premium throughout the tiers. And again, I think the slug and dry example that we pointed out.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

I think one of the analysts sent us yesterday the reviews, they compare very favorably to our tier five product, and we're okay with that. Part of that is how manage the mix and the margin structure. But also, I'd say, we're going to prioritize winning the consumer and winning the share. Then part of management's job is to figure out how to solve the mix issues and our teams are doing that. So what we want to do is put the best product in front of the consumer and get them into the Huggies brand or the Kotex brand or the Depend brand and that's our job, job one.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And then secondarily, we'll be able to manage the mix over time we think.

Nik Modi
Nik Modi
Managing Director at RBC Capital Markets

Thanks, Mike.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Okay. Thanks, Nick.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Dara Mohsenian from Morgan Stanley. Your line is live.

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

Hey, good morning.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Hey, Dara.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Hey, Dara.

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

So

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

just wanted to get a bit more detail on the incremental 300,000,000 in tariffs. I get the dynamics are rapidly changing on the tariff front. It did sound like previously you felt the tariff impact will be more manageable. So really two questions. Just first short term, Nelson, why is the situation more burdensome than previously believed?

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

Can you give us some detail on where specifically the incremental $300,000,000 is coming from? Is it pulp? Is it China? How much are other buckets, etcetera? And how much you're assuming you can offset through both price and productivity when you look at the full year guidance?

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

And then the second, maybe a similar question just from a longer term perspective. Mike or Nelson back at Analyst Day thirteen months ago, there was a lot of time spent on how you're able to potentially price quicker, more precisely, drive mix to offset cost issues, etcetera. Just where you stand as an organization thirteen months later, should we think of this just as more of a discrete external issue, the tariffs that are one time and hard to sort of plan or manage for? Or has something changed in your ability to sort of use agility and flexibility to manage through the cost environment as you outlined down at Analyst Day as we move sort of past the tariff impacts we're talking about today? Thanks.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yes. Let me start. I'll ask Nelson to provide the details on kind of what changed. But I will say the whole underlying strategy and why we're rewiring our organization for growth is we want more agility. And so all the things you talked about, Dara, with, hey, can we move fast, whether it's on revenue management or on cost management, we're able to move faster now than we were just one year ago.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

So that's kind of one of the key points. I would say, just a comment on what changed, I would say what changes, I think the breadth and degree of tariffs and also the countries involved, I think has changed significantly since maybe where we were at the end of the last quarter. And so I think that there has been a, as everybody knows, a very volatile kind of environment and there's been a lot of change back and forth and continues to have change. And so this is kind of represents our best view of what we see today, which I'll let Nelson talk

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

a bit more about.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Sure, and a few things. So back in December, Darrell, when Chris and I were at your conference, I mean, chatted, we shared at the time that the majority of what we sell in The US is sourced and made locally here in The US and that in terms of raw materials and finished goods, our combined exposure to three specific countries, China, Mexico and Canada was just less or around 10% of our total cost of goods. If we factor in all of our raw materials and finished goods imports for our U. S.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Business, 80% of our total costs in The U. S. Are U. S. Based.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

So only 20% of our U. S. Costs are exposed to tariffs. As Mike indicated, in the last twenty days, we've had to reflect cost impacts of actions on three fronts, which also include the depth of the actions. First is the aggregate U.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

S. Tariffs on China of 145%. This is driving about two thirds of the $300,000,000 gross impact that we have shared today. That's largely on finished goods per your ask of the breakdown. The other element is US reciprocal tariffs to Mike's point about breadth and reach.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And that's about 10% that have been put in place on other countries, which we source from. And this is representing about 10% of the 300,000,000 impact. And then lastly, is the set of retaliatory tariffs that have been announced by other countries on The US. And this is representing around 25% of that 300,000,000. We're working fast through actions to mitigate these costs.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And frankly, the learnings that we had in the twenty one, twenty two, twenty three cycle have come in pretty handy. And the other bit is that we're one year into our power and care transformation. We recently hosted many of you at our Beach Island facility to showcase some of that transformation and inaction and what we're doing about it. And frankly, at this moment, we're much better positioned to handle through many of these headwinds. Now it takes a little bit of time, you can't solve that overnight, because we're having to re accommodate some of the elements of our supply chain and we intend to already be able to address about a third of the impact this year.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Now, it'll take us through 2026 to pretty much be able to address the whole element in a consistent manner based on what's been enacted today. As always, we will keep our consumers at the center of any course of action that we take to make sure that we're having the right value props in place.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

All right, Dara, we're going to give it to you like a fire hose, because I'm sorry, we've a lot to say on this. But I will say, the big thing I want to emphasize is and there may be some semantics here, but you mentioned is it a discrete item. And at this point, I am treating it as a discrete item, right? There's an externality that we don't think will continue to recur over time. And so what we want to do is run the play, run our plan as intended, right?

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And give the innovation and the marketing and all the productivity plans room to breathe. And so we want to execute those. So our global network, I really feel strongly positions us to navigate this volatility in the environment very, very well. And so as I mentioned, power and care, the strategy that outlined, I think we continue to be very committed to that strategy. We want to differentiate our brands through superior innovation and activation.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

We want to deliver world class levels of productivity. We want the organization to work faster. And so those are all, I would say, evergreen things that would be good in any economic environment, but especially in this environment. And then the other thing I wanna point out is that this change in the tariff environment, while it presents a near term challenge that we just kind of went through, it also presents some opportunity. And so, we feel like the best approach to mitigate the headwinds is to reoptimize the network.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And so what this has done is change kind of like the cost of different nodes of our network and change some of the operating constraints. And so we just have to rerun the model, in my words, kind of reoptimize what our flows are. And so that's part of what we all signed up for. I think the other thing is, over the last couple of years, we've really enhanced our ability to deliver better products at lower cost. Huggies, Sun and Dry is a great example, with The U.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

S, China and the rest of the world working together to deliver a superior proposition. And so we also think that there is going to be more value oriented volume to be earned and we're confident in our ability. So we're going to maintain brand and product support that we anticipate at the start of the year. And then we are working hard to accelerate savings so that we can drive durable solutions.

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

Yes, that's very helpful and a lot of detail. The value conscious consumer that you've talked about in the prepared remarks and so far in Q and A, How much of that have you seen so far versus it's more of a forward expectation? It sounds like that's more expected from here. And you obviously talked about the broader product offering, the innovation winning with consumers. But just can you talk about the need for maybe investing in affordability and the pricing side of things, particularly given the pricing result that we saw in the quarter here in Q1?

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

That'd be helpful. Thanks.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah, I mean, think it's a subtext in our whole discussion, is we've been seeing it, Dara, and you probably have been seeing it, in our categories over the past year. Think there's been a migration to opening price point, that typically has meant more affordable price package sizes that consumers could get into. And that's primarily for lower income households. I think on the higher income households, they're even seeking value by, I would say, larger accounts at lower price per unit. And so we've seen both ends of it.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And I think if you and this was in the prepared remarks, you look at kind of the impacts on costs that are going be hitting the average consumer in The U. S, I think budgets are going to be tight. And so affordability for us is core to our strategy here. It's why we highlighted what we're doing on Snug and Dry, which is our mainstream value play here on diapers in The US. We have that same strategy around the world and also across our categories.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Want to offer a great product offering at the premium end and that is going to continue to be a big growth driver for us. But we want to cascade the product innovation that we have at the premium end throughout the tiers that we offer. And then we'll let the consumer decide about which products they want.

Dara Mohsenian
Dara Mohsenian
Managing Director - US Beverage/Household Products Sectors at Morgan Stanley

Thanks. I'll get back in queue.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Okay. Thank you, Dara.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Thanks, Dara.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Anna Lazul from Bank of America. Your line is live.

Anna Lizzul
Anna Lizzul
Vice President, Equity Research at Bank of America

Hi. Good morning, and thank you so much for the question. First, I did touch on costs as well. You know, the cost environment is certainly creating more pressure, and it is a very fluid environment. Or just related to marketing, you know, is this impacting your ability here to invest?

Anna Lizzul
Anna Lizzul
Vice President, Equity Research at Bank of America

Or are you considering different means of where and how you're reaching different consumers now just given they are more pressured? And then related to innovation, of course, that plans have been made for this year, consumers are expecting to be more value conscious. Does this impact your longer term strategy at all and thoughts around a more premium portfolio?

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Yes, so a few things. I'll start with the cost environment and what we're facing. So I'd like to separate it into two elements, and I'll build on the discussion we just had on the $300,000,000 linked to the tariffs. Coming into the year, we expected costs to be largely in line in terms of inflation versus what we experienced in 2024. And that was around $200,000,000 That remains about the same, that has not changed.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

So costs excluding the impact from tariffs have remained largely in line with what we expected at the beginning of the year. So that's one. What we're having to address is the $300,000,000 of incremental gross impact from the tariffs. And as Mike said, this is something that we see as more discrete, we're rapidly moving to address at least a third this year and the balance of it going into next year. The reason why we are calling or changing our guidance for the year to about flat and operating profit and EPS has to do with the fact that we do not intend to cut investments behind our innovation and our plans.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

For the first quarter of the year, we invested at around a 6% level of advertising behind our marketing initiatives and our new products and existing platforms, which was largely in line with prior year. And we intend to continue doing that as the year progresses, because we've got significant innovation that's been put into the marketplace and it's going in into the market. There are pockets of initiatives that will be taken as well in terms of investments beyond just brands and it has to do with our supply chain. We intend to maintain our investments in the business in terms of capital expense. For the year, we call it the beginning of the year around one billion to $1,200,000,000 It largely has to do with the transformation of the supply chain as we're into the second year of powering care.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And we are maintaining that level of investment despite the headwinds that we just talked about. So overall, I would say there's no impact to the long term strategy. And we remain steadfast on progressing our power and care strategies and ensuring that we can drive sustainable profitable growth with solutions to unmet consumer needs for years to come. But Mike?

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah, and at the risk of providing too much transparency, here's what I'll say, which is, look, we recognize that there's this discrete cost headwind. We believe we can generally offset that over time by reflowing our network, right? By resourcing kind of where we're making product and where we're shipping it from. And as you take that into account, they're mostly supply chain moves that are the solution. So if we believe that, Anna, then what we're trying to avoid doing is reducing quality in our product that's working or cutting marketing that's working and giving our plan a chance to breathe and perform as we're seeing year to date.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And so that's really the kind of the underlying thesis that we have and we feel like it's the right play for us.

Anna Lizzul
Anna Lizzul
Vice President, Equity Research at Bank of America

That's very helpful. Thank you so much.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Javier Escalante from Evercore. Your line is live.

Javier Escalante
Analyst at Evercore

Good morning, Mike, Nelson, Chris. Question has to do Javier. Hey, how are you guys? My question has to do with the use of pricing to drive mix. And if you can split the discussion between emerging markets and North America.

Javier Escalante
Analyst at Evercore

Right? Particularly emerging markets, see currency headwinds, and you are making price investments. I know that this is a financial reporting issue that where you are making, you know, the price investments not necessarily correlate with what you are taking pricing to do the so called PNOC. So that one aspect, but particularly also in North America, as you look to drive mix, are you increasing promotions in the high end? What exactly if you can talk strategically about how you're using pricing to reconfigure the portfolio in The US and internationally, that would be very helpful.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah, maybe I'll start with a headline, Javier, that kind of says, hey, we're focused on driving volume and mix growth while maintaining PNOC or pricing net of commodity discipline. So we're trying to be disciplined on price. And maybe there's more embedded in that than may appear. The strategy is we're going to make our products better. And I just kind of mentioned that there every rung of the good, better, best ladder.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And then we'll let the consumers vote as to what the mix ends up being. Our job is to make sure that whatever mix flows based on how the consumer votes, that it's acceptable to us. And that's part of management's job. But the other part of what's implied in that statement, focused on volume and mix growth while maintaining PNOC discipline, is that the categories have seen a significant wave of pricing over the last several years. We just kind of are maybe two years removed from what I would call it an inflation super cycle.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And so what we've been a little more focused in our current strategy is really anchored on, hey, improving the product quality, driving positive mix through premiumization by making premium products of the consumers desire, right? And then over time cascading that innovation throughout our value tiers. And so that's really what we're driving. There's no really significantly different strategy on a country by country or category by category basis to kind of optimize based on pulling different pricing levers. I mean, again, the directions of the teams is they have to have pricing net of commodity impact discipline.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And and but we wanna drive the volume plus the mix growth. I don't know if that that answers kinda what you're looking for, Javier.

Javier Escalante
Analyst at Evercore

Yeah. Sure. But let me let me drill down a little bit on North America specifically. Right? If you can comment on the promotional environment as you see it or you saw it in q one and what we we should expect for the balance of the year given that you have more innovation coming in.

Javier Escalante
Analyst at Evercore

And I suppose that you want people to try that out. At the same time, coincides with the tariff. Right? And so help us understand how you see the balance of the year use of pricing relative to your innovation.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah. Well, I think maybe it starts with the philosophy that we don't really see promotion as a sustainable driver of growth. We do see it as a useful trial vehicle for innovation. And so that's kind of the focus. Why do we have that attitude?

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

We offer daily essentials that have, as you know, low substitution. So really, if you think about our categories, promotion overall for the category doesn't grow consumption. Just because I promote bath tissue doesn't mean you're to go more often. So thus far what we're seeing is sorry, what happened there. The category demand remains resilient, but we do see promotion as an important tool to support trial.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Kleenex is a great example. I think we were up over 400 basis points on share last year. We did promote Kleenex and merchandise it, and we think merchandising has been an important strategy or important driver of that growth. In the quarter, we were up another 150 or so basis points on Kleenex. So that's a good one.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

With Huggies Slug and Dry and Huggies Skin Essentials, they're great new products, we want them in consumers' hands. We are going to spend some time promoting them. But that's not a promotion driven strategy, but it is part of the overall plan to drive trial of the products that we want consumers in the consumers' hands. So that's kind of what we're doing. And I would say we're operating consistently around the world on that.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

The big thing for us is, and this is beyond North America, we want to cascade great innovation. We want to drive it in

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

the premium tiers and we want to cascade it throughout our tiers around the world.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And just to build one more point, Javier, mean, you're always going to see some elements of moves across channels in price park architectures. And that's something that again, we activated at the end of last year as part of our re accommodation of the channel strategy. But that's more of adjusting to the realities of the marketplace and where we see the growth coming, but that's not in it for us to be promoting, as Mike said, so it's very different. And the other bit is remember, integrated margin management, including our productivity plans allow us to be able to flex when needed to make sure that we remain competitive, not just in The U.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

S, but across the globe.

Javier Escalante
Analyst at Evercore

Okay, thank you guys.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Okay, thanks, Javier.

Operator

Thank you. Your next question is coming from Bonnie Herzog from Goldman Sachs. Your line is live.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

All right. Thank you. Good morning. I a question on I guess I'm trying to bridge the gap between your new EPS guidance versus prior. So hoping you could maybe walk through the different puts and takes.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

You're now guiding currency neutral EPS growth of 50 bps at the midpoint versus roughly 6.5% prior. You certainly highlighted the negative impact from tariffs of $300,000,000 So could you walk through some of the other assumptions or puts and takes to your new EPS growth guidance? I guess hoping you could help quantify the impact you expect from stepped up productivity savings as well as what sounds like your expectation for greater price investments this year as you've kind of mentioned, Mike, to really improve your competitiveness and affordability. And I guess in the context of that, how big of a risk is there that you're going to need to maybe increase investments further to improve your competitiveness, especially if private label pressures intensify in an economic slowdown? Ultimately, I'm just trying to understand what's factored into your guidance, your new guidance.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Thank you.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Sure, Bonnie. So in a nutshell, the real big change in terms of our guidance is the new news on the cost front and $300,000,000 gross, which on a net basis is around $200,000,000 That's the real move and that's what brings us to about flat on the year give or take on both operating profit and EPS. There are slight moves on the currency, but there are also moves elsewhere that's not really driving it. It boils down to the $200,000,000 net headwind that we see for the year. That's really what's in it.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And it is reflected in terms of our expectations of gross margin. And that's what we're building inherently in the outlook that we're providing today. Because what's going to happen and what we foresee is Q2 will be the biggest impact from a headwind related to the tariffs. They're in full swing right now. And again, we've only reflected in this outlook what's been enacted both domestically here in The U.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

S. And outside of The U. S. And as such, thinking about the quarters, we would expect a headwind of around 200 basis points for Q2 versus prior year that as we progress through the year that would be mitigated as we enact all the differences and different changes we're doing in terms of our supply chain and the mitigation plans are being enacted and implemented. The other bit is, does it impact our ability to invest?

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

No, as we stated at the beginning, we intend to keep investing behind the innovation and the marketing plans that are in place and in play today. And we're not going to stop any of the investments in our supply chain. If anything, we'll have to accelerate some of them as part of the mitigation plans that are being implemented.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

The other thing I'll add Bonnie, and I think part of your question was on the stretch consumer and what do we do about that. Think one is this is not a new trend. So we all kind of saw where the puck was going last year. And one of the hallmarks of the plan for this year is what we're doing with I mentioned on snug and dry or our mainstream value, which is we want to improve our mainstream value offering. Our approach would be let's improve the product and give that a chance for the consumers to touch and feel that and get that in the house.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Apparently, I was just looking at the online reviews yesterday at some retailers and the new Sug and Dry is almost five stars out of five, right? And so it's a great product. We feel great about that and that approach. It compares favorably with the tier five or the premium products, but that's okay. I think our philosophy internally would be, hey, let's make a great tier four product and the tier five team can figure out how to beat that.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And that's kind of how we're approaching things. I do recognize that promotion has picked up just, I would say, a touch in personal care in North America, not significantly. At this point, we're still running our play. Had a plan for promotion. It's more focused on trial of the new products.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And so that's kind of the play that we're running for now. But we recognize we're gonna have to continue to be agile.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Bonnie, I would like to add, sorry, go ahead.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

No, no, please go ahead.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah, I would just like to add one other thing in terms of, as you think about the margin progression and some of the elements that are in play, we're already seeing some of the $200,000,000 in SG and A savings that we had committed to starting in 2025 through 2026 coming through in Q1. So those savings, I mean, just to give you a perspective on overheads, SG and A alone, we were at around 13% for the quarter versus a 13.2% prior year. So those savings are giving us some leverage in terms of offsetting and maneuvering through some of the headwinds, but also delivering the fuel to be able to continue reinvesting. But I think you had something else you want to bring up?

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

No, no, that was honestly exactly where I was going with this. So it sounds like you do have the flex you know, if the environment deteriorates further so you can remain competitive. It sounds like, yes. Exactly what you just said. You you have some of this fewer leverage to kind of reinvest in the business, etcetera.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

So

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

that's helpful.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah. I mean, we we have it. We have it. And the whole thing is that, again, it's not immediate. And that's why we're saying that it takes a little bit of time for things to work through.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

But midterm, long term, we do see the solves.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

All right, thanks so much. I'll pass it on.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah, just one note, Bonnie, I would say, and that's kind of why we made the change to the outlook we did. It's given us the opportunity to preserve the plan that we believe in and that we believe is working.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

So.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

All right.

Bonnie Herzog
Bonnie Herzog
Managing Director at Goldman Sachs

Thanks again.

Christopher Jakubik
Christopher Jakubik
Head Of Investor Relations at Kimberly-Clark

Great. If we could take one more question, that'd be great.

Operator

Certainly. Your last question is coming from Chris Carey from Wells Fargo Securities. Your line is live.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Hey, Chris.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

Hey, Chris.

Christopher Carey
Christopher Carey
Equity Analyst - Head of Consumer Staples Research at Wells Fargo

Hey. Hey, everyone. So one kind of around COGS and then a separate question, the bigger picture.

Christopher Carey
Christopher Carey
Equity Analyst - Head of Consumer Staples Research at Wells Fargo

The savings program, so you're going to be a bit higher this year than your going expectations. This is going to be the second year running, it would appear that you're running ahead of the multiyear plan on gross productivity savings. So are you pulling forward future savings? Are you now thinking that the savings program will be bigger over time than your prior expectations? So if you can just expand on that.

Christopher Carey
Christopher Carey
Equity Analyst - Head of Consumer Staples Research at Wells Fargo

And then if I could just secondly, I'm struck by the conversation during this earnings call where clearly a number of analysts are trying to figure out in a way we have more inflation and yet continued strategic pricing decisions. And I understand tariffs are discrete. But nevertheless, it interesting in the context of your Analyst Day when it was you're kind of making the case that you can manage through these cost environments maybe a bit more with a bit more agility. And so is this your decision to basically take a little bit of a hit on tariffs to keep the plan in place? Or are we perhaps talking about a retail environment where you're unable to pass through higher costs for tariffs as retailers themselves are dealing with a lot of incremental tariffs on gen merchant and other such categories.

Christopher Carey
Christopher Carey
Equity Analyst - Head of Consumer Staples Research at Wells Fargo

So, I wonder if you could just comment on maybe like why you're sticking to this pricing program outside of just, well, we want to stick to the plan. Wonder if there are other things going on. Thanks for those two items.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Yeah, at the risk of oversharing, I'll try to illustrate a little bit, Chris. It's a complex the tariff situation creates unusual complexity because companies have different positions and different, I would say, sourcing strategies for different markets. And so it's not as simple as well, tariffs are in, so you price it all away. Because, and in our case, why wouldn't we do that? Well, because we believe we can mitigate most of the cost by switching sourcing.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

So, in some cases we have competitors that don't have to switch sourcing, cause they're sourcing locally. And so you would price yourself to be uncompetitive, and risk kind of eroding that business or taking it out while you could have solved it by switching your sourcing solution. The problem with the sourcing is it takes longer because we don't have everything where we need exactly where we need it now, right? And so because the world changed. And so that's why there's a hit to this year, which we think we will mitigate into next year or the year after is because we can mitigate it over time with supply chain moves, but that they take some time to manifest.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

And so really that's kind of why you're getting the guide that you're getting. It's not an external kind of set of factors. It's more about us wanting to preserve kind of the plan that we have that we think is the right plan and working. And then also recognizing that we have a solution, but that solution is going to take a little time.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And then on the savings program and the progress that we're making against our stated target of 3,000,000,000 in five years, Chris, as you rightly mentioned, I mean, we had a very good year in 2024, our first year of the program, in which we delivered 5.9% of gross productivity, about $745,000,000 of savings. And for this year, we've had a good start. Q1 was about 5.2 and we've stated that our aim is to be in the high in the upper end of the range of the 5% to 6%. So we are projecting another strong year in terms of gross productivity. The approach on integrated margin management that we started working on a couple of years ago is paying dividends.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

And really, it's being embedded in our culture and it's given us enterprise wide visibility and accountability to be able to drive over time margin enhancement across all of our businesses and be in line to deliver in our stated target of at least 40% gross margin by the end of the decade and at least 18% to 20% operating profit margin as we exit this decade. It's not going to be linear, as we said, I mean, we look at it more on a year over year basis and in a sustained period of time. In terms of, are we prepared to take up the $3,000,000,000 for the five year at this moment, we want things to kind of play out over time. We're very encouraged by the opportunities that we see ahead of us. We were very encouraged by the second year that's in front of us, but we're only in a year anniversary since we launched the Powering Care program.

Nelson Urdaneta
Nelson Urdaneta
Senior VP & CFO at Kimberly-Clark

So excited about the future on this end and the opportunities that this will create for us.

Christopher Carey
Christopher Carey
Equity Analyst - Head of Consumer Staples Research at Wells Fargo

Thanks, guys. It's a complicated world. Appreciate the candor. Thank you.

Michael Hsu
Michael Hsu
Chairman & CEO at Kimberly-Clark

Okay. Thank you, Chris.

Christopher Jakubik
Christopher Jakubik
Head Of Investor Relations at Kimberly-Clark

All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us. And for the analysts who have follow-up questions after the call here, we'll be available. So appreciate the time.

Operator

Thank you. Everyone, this concludes today's event. You may disconnect at this time, and have a wonderful day. Thank you for your participation.

Executives
    • Christopher Jakubik
      Christopher Jakubik
      Head Of Investor Relations
    • Michael Hsu
      Michael Hsu
      Chairman & CEO
    • Nelson Urdaneta
      Nelson Urdaneta
      Senior VP & CFO
Analysts
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Earnings Conference Call
Kimberly-Clark Q1 2025
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