The Clorox Company (NYSE:CLX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript November 1, 2023 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Lisah Burhan - VP, IR

Linda Rendle - CEO

Kevin Jacobsen - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Peter Grom - UBS

Filippo Falorni - Citi

Anna Lizzul - Bank of America

Lauren Lieberman - Barclays

Chris Carey - Wells Fargo

Andrea Teixeira - JPMorgan

Olivia Tong - Raymond James

Javier Escalante - Evercore ISI

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to The Clorox Company First Quarter Fiscal Year 2024 Earnings Release Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference call, Ms. Lisah Burhan, Vice-President of Investor Relations for The Clorox Company.

Ms. Burhan, you may begin your conference.

Lisah Burhan

Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. On the call today with me are Linda Rendle, our CEO, and Kevin Jacobsen, our CFO. I hope everyone has had a chance to review our earnings release and prepared remarks, both of which are available on our website. In just a moment, Linda will share a few opening comments and then we'll take your questions.

During this call, we may make forward-looking statements including about our fiscal 2024 outlook. These statements are based on management's current expectations, but may differ from actual results or outcomes. In addition, we may refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to the forward-looking statements section which identifies various factors that could affect such forward-looking statements, which has been filed with the SEC. In addition, please refer to the non-GAAP financial information section of our earnings release and the supplemental financial schedules in the Investor Relations section of our website for reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly-comparable GAAP measures.

Now, I will turn it over to Linda.

Linda Rendle

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us. We entered fiscal year 2024 with momentum, supported by strong progress on our priorities over the past several quarters to maintain top line growth while rebuilding margin. Prior to the August cyberattack, our performance was on track with our expectations with solid consumption and market share trends, including improving volume consumption as we lapped year-ago pricing actions. This is a testament to the strength and superior value of our brands and the role they play in our consumers' daily lives. In addition, we continued to realize benefits from our margin-enhancing initiatives including pricing, cost savings and supply chain optimization. However, the cyberattack caused wide-scale operational disruptions, which adversely impacted our first quarter financial performance. While we're not yet back to normal, we are now on a solid path to operational recovery, but this will take some time. We're laser-focused on our immediate priorities of rebuilding retailer inventories as quickly as possible, preserving merchandising activity and improving our distribution to return to the trajectory we were on prior to the cyberattack. We've proven that we can execute and rebuild inventories, earn back our shelf space and distribution, and regain and ultimately drive share growth over time just as we did coming out of the pandemic when we restored supply following extraordinary demand for our products.