Newell Brands (NWL) Q2 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending June 30, 2022

July 29, 2022 11:30 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Good morning and welcome to Newell Brands’ Second Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today’s conference is being recorded. A live webcast of this call is available at ir.newellbrands.com.

I will now turn the call over to Sofya Tsinis, VP of Investor Relations. Ms. Tsinis, you may begin.

Sofya Tsinis

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Newell Brands’ second quarter earnings call. On the call with me today are Ravi Saligram, our CEO and Chris Peterson, our President and CFO.

Before we begin, I’d like to inform you that during the course of today’s call, we will be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially and we undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements. I refer you to the cautionary language and risk factors available in our earnings release, our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q and other SEC filings available on our Investor Relations website for a further discussion of the factors affecting forward-looking statements.

Please also recognize that today’s remarks will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, including those we refer to as normalized measures. We believe these non-GAAP measures are useful to investors, although they should not be considered superior to the measures presented in accordance with GAAP. Explanations of these non-GAAP measures and available reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in today’s earnings release and tables as well as in other materials on Newell’s Investor Relations website.

Thank you. And now I will turn the call over to Ravi.

Ravi Saligram

Thank you, Sofya. Good morning, everyone and welcome to our second quarter call. We are pleased with our second quarter results, which demonstrate the power of our diverse all-weather portfolio and another quarter of terrific execution by our team. We delivered balanced performance across core sales and normalized operating margin in a difficult environment as we remain laser focused on driving sustainable and profitable growth and operational excellence. For the quarter, core sales increased 1.7%, while normalized operating margin improved 100 basis points versus last year. For the first half, this puts us at 4% core sales growth and 70 basis points expansion in normalized operating margins, which is excellent performance.

Q2 was the eighth consecutive quarter of core sales growth for Newell Brands. This is a significant achievement, particularly given the difficult comparison of 25.4% from the prior year period, which reflected double-digit growth across nearly each business unit. We saw a shift of some customer orders from Q3 into Q2, although this was less meaningful than we initially anticipated given retailers increased focus on rightsizing their inventory levels.