The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (NYSE:SMG) Q3 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 2, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Aimee DeLuca - Senior Vice President of Investor Relations

James Hagedorn - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Matthew Garth - Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Michael Lukemire - President and Chief Operating Officer

Chris Hagedorn - Division President of Hawthorne

Patti Ziegler - Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications

Conference Call Participants

Joseph Altobello - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.

Christopher Carey - Wells Fargo Securities

Peter Grom - UBS

Eric Bosshard - Cleveland Research Company LLC

Jon Andersen - William Blair & Co.

Andrew Carter - Stifel, Nicolaus & Company

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Q3 2023 Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised today’s conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Aimee DeLuca, lead Investor Relations, Scotts Miracle-Gro. Please go ahead.

Aimee DeLuca

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for Scotts Miracle-Gro’s third quarter earnings call.

With me this morning are, Chairman and CEO, Jim Hagedorn; President and Chief Operating Officer, Mike Lukemire; Matt Garth, our Chief Financial Officer, and Chris Hagedorn, Group President of Hawthorne.

In a moment, Jim and Matt will share some prepared remarks, and then the operator will open the call to your questions.

As always, we expect to make forward-looking statements, so please be aware that our actual results could differ materially from what we share today. Please refer to our Form 10-K, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission to familiarize yourself with the full range of risk factors that could impact our results.

For further discussion, after the call, you are invited to e-mail or call me directly at 937-578-5621 and we’ll work to set up some time as quickly as possible.

Lastly, please note that today’s call is being recorded and an archived version of the call will be published on our website at investor.scotts.com.

With that, let’s get started. I’ll turn the call over to Jim Hagedorn to begin. Jim?

James Hagedorn

Thanks, Aimee, and good morning, everyone. We have three things to discuss. One, the state of the consumer and the performance of our lawn and garden business; two, the moves we are making to strengthen Scotts Miracle-Gro; and three, the opportunities we are pursuing for shareholder value creation. I'll get to the point, the first half was great. It met our expectations. The execution by our teams and support of our retailers on load-in could not have gone better. It's a challenging time in retail and we are navigating it with our retail partners.