The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company (NYSE:SMG) Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call November 1, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Aimee DeLuca - Senior Vice President of Investor Relations

James Hagedorn - Chairman, President, and CEO

Matthew Garth - Chief Financial and Administrative Officer

Nate Baxter - Chief Operating Officer

Chris Hagedorn - Group President of Hawthorne

Conference Call Participants

John Andersen - William Blair & Co.

Bill Chappell - Truist Securities

Joseph Altobello - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.

Andrew Carter - Stifel, Nicolaus & Company

William Reuter - Bank of America

Yakov Mushtov - JP Morgan

Operator

Good morning and welcome to the Q4 2023 Scotts Miracle-Gro Company Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's 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, Head of Investor Relations, Scotts Miracle-Gro. Please go ahead.

Aimee DeLuca

Good morning. With me this morning are Chairman, President, and CEO Jim Hagedorn, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer Matt Garth, Chief Operating Officer Nate Baxter, and Chris Hagedorn, Group President of Hawthorne. Jim and Matt will begin our discussion with some prepared remarks. The operator will then 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 for details of 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Lastly, please note that today’s call is being recorded and an archived version of the call will be published on our website at investor.scotts.com.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 going. I'll turn the call over to Jim Hagedorn to begin. Jim?

James Hagedorn

Thanks, Aimee. Good morning, everyone. Today you're going to hear how we closed out Fiscal '23 and the actions we've taken to continue to move forward positively in '24. I'll remind everyone there are many factors that led to our current financial situation impacting our consumer and Hawthorne businesses. Some were macro in nature brought on by post-COVID economy and un-favorable weather, but many were our own doing as we pursued growth. I know this has been a lot for our stakeholders and our associates to deal with.