General Mills, Inc. (GIS) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending Febuary 26, 2023

March 23, 2023 9:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Greetings, and welcome to the General Mills Third Quarter Fiscal '23 Earnings Q&A Webcast. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, Thursday, March 23, 2023.

It is now my pleasure to turn the conference over to Jeff Siemon. Please go ahead.

Jeff Siemon - Vice President, Investor Relations

Thank you, Tina, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this Q&A session on our third quarter fiscal 2023 results. I hope everyone had time to review the press release, listen to our prepared remarks and view our presentation materials, which were made available this morning on our Investor Relations website.

It's important to note that in our Q&A session, we may make forward-looking statements that are based on our current views and assumptions. Please refer to this morning's press release for factors that could impact forward-looking statements and for reconciliations of non-GAAP information, which may be discussed on today's call.

I'm here with Jeff Harmening, our Chairman and CEO; Kofi Bruce, our CFO; and Jon Nudi, Group President of our North America Retail segment. Let's go ahead and get to the first question.

Tina, can you please get us started?

Questions And Answers:

Operator

First question comes from David Palme of Evercore. One moment please. First question comes from Andrew Lazar of Barclays. Please go ahead.

Andrew Lazar

In Pet, you called out high single-digit takeaway through nine months. And I'm curious what you have is takeaway in fiscal 3Q specifically. And regarding 4Q, I believe you've previously spoken to your expectation for double-digit sales guess, given where we can see consumption trends currently, trying to get a sense of what gives you confidence in that outcome, given it more inventory rebuild to go or a step-up in consumption along with better service or more of a benefit from pricing or some combination of these?

Jeff Harmening - Chairman and CEO

Andrew, this is Jeff, and thanks for the question about Pet. I would say, first, I would say our third quarter sales, was roughly in line with what we thought it would be at 15%. And it is true that we rebuilt some retail inventory. I think importantly, when you look at it, we built about as much inventory back in the third quarter as we lost in the second quarter. And for the year, our inventory and our -- I mean, our sales out and our reported net sales are about the same. So just you know, as we end the third quarter, we don't have a big retail inventory build they really are about the same.