General Mills, Inc. (NYSE:GIS) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript December 20, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Jeff Siemon - VP, IR & Treasurer

Jeff Harmening - Chairman and CEO

Kofi Bruce - CFO

Conference Call Participants

David Palmer - Evercore ISI

Andrew Lazar - Barclays

Ken Goldman - JPMorgan

Nik Modi - RBC Capital Markets

Pamela Kaufman - Morgan Stanley

Matthew Smith - Stifel

Michael Lavery - Piper Sandler

Chris Carey - Wells Fargo Securities

Operator

Greetings and welcome to the General Mills Second Quarter F ‘24 Earnings Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, December 20th, 2023.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Jeff Siemon, Vice President for Investor Relations and Treasurer. Please go ahead.

Jeff Siemon

Thank you, Dina, and good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning for our Q&A session on our second quarter fiscal 2024 results. I hope everyone had time to review our press release, listen to the prepared remarks and view our presentation materials, which were made available this morning on our Investor Relations website.

Please note that in our Q&A session this morning, 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, and Kofi Bruce, our CFO. So let's go ahead and get to the first question. Dina, can you please get us started?

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

Of course. [Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from the line of David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Please go ahead.

David Palmer

Thank you. A question on North America Retail margins. They've been impressive in spite of the volume declines we've been seeing. Do you think that the segment margin can hold near these levels given what's going on with volume trends? And, I guess, a couple of factors I'm thinking about is, some of your high margin categories, like dough, might be a negative mix effect, but then again, you're talking about accelerating productivity gains. So, curious about the margins for that segment?

Kofi Bruce

Yeah. David, thanks for the question. Just to rewind a bit, we've seen the margin improvement, to your point, largely on the backs of really strong HMM delivery. So, one of the features of this environment has been sort of the stabilization of the supply chain environment, which has allowed us to step up HMM more acutely on this business than our other segments, and also to get at some of those disruption related costs. We've made really strong margin progression gains on this business on the backs of those two things. I expect that to abate a bit here as we move forward, just as a result of having already gotten at a good chunk of those disruption related costs. So, on balance, I see this business poised for more stability in aggregate.