Kimberly-Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB) Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call October 22, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Christopher Jakubik - Investor Relations
Mike Hsu - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Nelson Urdaneta - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Lauren Lieberman - Barclays
Nik Modi - RBC Capital Markets
Anna Lizzul - Bank of America
Bonnie Herzog - Goldman Sachs
Christopher Carey - Wells Fargo Securities
Kevin Grundy - BNP Paribas
Javier Escalante - Evercore ISI

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to the Kimberly-Clark's Third Quarter 2024 Question-and-Answer Session.

I will now turn the conference over to your host, Chris Jakubik, Vice President, Investor Relations.

You may begin.

Christopher Jakubik

Thank you, and hello, everyone. This is Chris Jakubik, Head of Global Investor Relations at Kimberly-Clark and welcome to our Q&A session for our third quarter 2024 business update.

During our remarks today, we will make some forward-looking statements that are based on how we see things today. Actual results may differ due to risks and uncertainties, and these are discussed in our earnings release in our filings with the SEC.

We will also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures today. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered replacements for and should be read together with GAAP results. And you can find the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations within our earnings release and the supplemental materials posted at investor.kimberly-clark.com.

Before we begin, I'm going to hand it to our Chairman and CEO, Mike Hsu, for a few quick opening comments.

Mike Hsu

Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. I want to let you know our team has made great strides advancing our Powering Care strategy, bolstering our confidence to deliver above our long-term growth algorithm in 2024. To be global category leaders, we must lead growth in our categories.

We're executing and making steady progress on our strategy to achieve this. We're driving consumption and growing our share across categories and markets driven by our acceleration in innovation and enhanced commercial execution. Our productivity is fueling our investments in innovation to support our growth initiatives while delivering our bottom line growth aspiration.

We've achieved key milestones and our transformation is on track with no disruptions. And notably, on October 1st, we successfully completed our new organizational structure to become a better, faster and stronger organization. We're rapidly transforming Kimberly-Clark to thrive in an increasingly complex and competitive global environment.

However, there are some discrete headwinds that we are that are creating pressures on growth in the near-term. And these include retail inventory reductions as our service levels improve, lower demand in private label businesses that we're exiting and weaker than anticipated demand in North American professional channels and some pockets of deceleration in Asia and Latin America.