Hello, everyone. I'm Dara Mohsenian, Morgan Stanley's household products and beverage analyst. Just before we get started, a quick disclosure: please see the Morgan Stanley research website at www.morganstanley.com for important research disclosures and contact your Morgan Stanley representative if you have any questions. With that out of the way, I'm very pleased to welcome Clorox back to our conference. With us here today is Kevin Jacobsen, Clorox's Executive Vice President and CFO. Thanks so much for being here today. So maybe we can start just with the fact that it's been a really tough U.S. consumer environment in the household product space. Probably appropriate to start more short-term here. Just what are you seeing from a category growth standpoint, particularly in the U.S. and in terms of consumer behavior? Yeah. Well, yeah, it's clearly a very challenging environment for the consumer. We see a consumer under stress, and we've been seeing, and I think they're reacting a lot to the volatility and uncertainty in the environment, and we've seen typically value-seeking behavior for just the past few quarters. That means stretching usage, also changing their shopping behavior to favor either low opening price points or just shifting and moving to channels like e-comm and club and purchasing larger-sized products, so we've been seeing this behavior for a while now, and we expect it to continue for most of the fiscal year. Now, what does it mean from a category standpoint? Typically, our categories historically have been growing 2%-2.5%, and in periods when the consumer has been stressed, like for example, the last recessions, we've seen the contractions of a couple of points. And category, on average, for the portfolio, growing 0%- 1%. Now, that varies by business, but that's a good average. And that's the U.S. retail business. Our international and pro-business tend to grow a little faster than that. And so that's what we assume for the year. And so far, it's been playing out in line with those assumptions. We were close to flat in the first quarter. This quarter, we're a little more on the higher end of that range, and we expect it to continue to move between that range. But we think it's a good assumption for now for the remaining of the year. Now, like everyone else, we're staying very close to the consumer, but so far, we think it's a good assumption. Okay. Great. And then maybe we can shift to the competitive front. We've seen promotion pick up in the U.S. in a number of categories. As you look at your key categories, how intense is that activity? Anything surprising from your perspective? Yeah. I would say on aggregates, the promotional environment has been fairly rational from competitors. Now, there are pockets and businesses where it's been a little heightened, and we talked about this in the past. Some of our business, like Glad Trash or litter, have seen a heightened competitive activity. And we expect this to continue, and we feel like we have the right plan to address it. But in aggregate, it's been fairly rational, and the level of spend that we're seeing is in line with what we would expect. Now, our first quarter, which we just wrapped up, tends to be the highest quarter from a merchandising event. So it was a little higher than what we had in the fourth quarter, but that's just driven by the merchandising we're doing related to back-to-school, which is maybe important to remind that we really see promotion less as a price level but more as a strategic level. So a lot of our promotion tends not to be price in nature but more high-quality feature and display that we use either for peak period on the merch side. That could be back-to-school. There could be the holiday season for Burt's and the Kingsford Grill season, and then bringing back people in the category. And of course, for innovation, right, to drive awareness and trial. But again, to date, fairly rational. We'll stay close to it as well and see if it evolves. Okay. And as you look forward, now that we're moving past the ERP transition, what are the key strategies in place to try to reinvigorate organic sales growth in your portfolio? And as you think about doing that, is it more about executing the playbook you have in place? Is it more about tweaking the playbook and some of the different strategies? Might it require a higher level of spend? How do you think about that? Yeah. I think it's maybe both of what you just mentioned. For sure, it is about executing the integrated demand plans that we have and the strategy. And of course, you want to be thoughtful and balanced as you think about demand investments. You want to balance the urgency of defending your market share with the discipline of growing the category and profitability over time. But on the playbook, I think, I guess now that we're finally past the implementation of the ERP and past the stabilizations, I think we're in a good place to. We have a strong playbook in the back half of the year, and then our outlook contemplates some improvement in the back half of the year. And so it's just a matter of really executing those. And I think the playbook is pretty rich. We feel like we have a broad slate of innovations across categories and also type of innovations. Some are like expansion on existing innovation platform. Others are like new platform and adjacencies. And also a lot of, I would say, good work from an RGM standpoint and price-pack architecture, which is important, getting really sharp on price point in this environment. So it's really just about executing that playbook. And I think the other thing is to continue doing the great work we've been doing on margin. We feel good about the holistic margin management efforts that we have. We feel like we have a strong pipeline, and it's important because, one, it protects the margin and profitability, but also gives us capacity to invest if needed. Right. Okay. And as we look at your market share, we've seen a lot of volatility in recent years. Generally, there's been some share loss if you look at versus pre-COVID periods. It's been different by category, obviously. Just as you look at underlying brand equity strength, whatever tracking metrics you use, surveys, etc., what are consumers telling you about the strength of your brands as we try and parse through some of this volatility? Yeah. So I guess first thing is, yes, we're certainly not satisfied where we are from a market share standpoint. And we talked about our plans to improve it in the back half of the year. But if you look at the fundamentals of the brand, they're actually quite strong. Household penetration has been. Our Clorox brand has been really stable. And some brands, like the Clorox mega brand, it's actually growing. If you look at different equity metrics, including value metrics, we're generally at or above where we were pre-COVID. So what it tells us is that the brands are healthy. They resonate with the consumer. And so it's really about taking advantage of that and putting the right demand creation plans behind it. And that's what we intend to do in the back half of the year. Okay. And can you talk specifically about strategies from a market share standpoint? It's probably similar to what you outlined in the back half of the year. But just looking out long-term, as we look out over the next few years, what do you think are the key levers you're looking to pull internally to drive improved market share performance? Yeah. I mean, the goal has always been, first and foremost, to drive superior value for the consumer. And we define, we have frameworks around five vectors: which is product, package, place, which is really being at where the customers shop virtually and physically, proposition, which is really the brand-building exercise, and then price. And so as we look at driving, the goal is to drive superiority across those five vectors. We expect this would drive not only the category growth but also allows us to grow slightly above that from a market share standpoint. And then the levers to impact those are the ones we've been talking about. First and foremost, it's always been about innovation. This is what really has been growing profitably the categories for a long time. The new capabilities we're ramping up around RGM certainly are going to be a driver over the next year or two. I think there's a lot of opportunity and low-hanging fruits, and then the brand building is also very important. I think we launched a new campaign in cleaning, which has been about shifting the view of cleaning being a chore to something that makes you feel good. There's a lot of humor in it, and it's just leveraging neuroscience. It's really resonating with consumers and especially with new consumers. It's important to remember that it's not always about the innovations but the brand building. That idea of bringing a little joy in cleaning is now showing up in some of our products. We're launching a new scent in wipes that's much more fresh and very different than the old scent because the old scent tended to remind people of the pandemic. I was bringing them down as an example. Or we start imprinting on the substrate of wipes some fun words like "hoo hoo" and "joy." And this is just the integration of the brand building and the innovation that can make a difference. So those are the levers. It's always been about innovations, brand building, and of course, leveraging capabilities like RGM. Right. Right. And the Five Vectors you mentioned, what do you think you're executing best? Where do you think you need more work? Obviously, you're looking to have all five hit at once, and that's where you really get the benefits from. Give us a report card on those Five Vectors. Yeah. I think it really depends by businesses. And just so you know, each business is actually measured themselves across all five vectors, and the goal is to be clearly superior on at least the majority of them. I'll take two examples. One where I think we're actually doing very well across five vectors, and cleaning business is one of those. And it's been really resilient. If you look at market share, it's above where we were pre-cyber. We actually see good momentum even within the challenging environments. Category and share have been growing, and we feel good about what's coming in the next few years. And I mentioned it. This is one place where the product superiority is really making a difference. Both the placement, I think we're growing with winning retailers, and the proposition and the brand building is very strong. There's still some work I think we can do on price-pack architectures. If you kind of look at the cleaning portfolio, it's still relatively simple. You have the same bottle sprays in most channels and then same kind of wipes. So I think there's some structural benefit that we can do there. On the other end, one business where we mentioned that we clearly weren't superior has been the Lidl business, right? It went through. It's probably the one that was the most impacted by cyber. We had supply issues. It took us a while to get back to full service and let alone full distribution. And during this time, competition didn't stand still. They kept improving. And so I think this is one where we feel we have a really good plan across the five P's to actually improve. Some of it is innovation and really on the product, but there's a lot of great work being done on packaging, claims, something on brand and campaign and positioning. So the plan we have in the back half is actually fairly holistic, and we have a phase plan. There will be a first phase that's happening in the back half of this fiscal year, and then we have another phase coming in next fiscal year. Okay. And how do you think about the recovery phase for the cat litter over time? Is it more big bang innovation? Does it play out gradually over time? No. I think it would be what we'll have in the back half would be a series of, I would say, singles that together will make a difference, and then I think we have more significant and more aggressive innovations after that. Okay. That's helpful. Maybe we could touch on Glad. We've seen a bit more promotional environment there from a category standpoint. Just can you touch on your competitiveness within the segment, category trends, and your plans to drive that business from here? Yeah. So yeah, we saw heightened competitive activity now for a couple of quarters. And for background, this is a category where we've seen competitive activity ebb and flow. We're being very balanced and disciplined as how we're dealing with it. As context, there's limited expendable consumption in this category. So you have to be careful to not over-promote because you could really drive a lot of dollars out of the category. So it's a balance. There's places where we made surgical investment on some SKUs, and that's making a difference. And there's others where we're willing to be patient and take a little bit of share loss until we actually just address this with more meaningful innovations and improvement. And we have some coming in the pipeline. In the meantime, we also completely revamped our marketing communication, and we have a new campaign coming that seems to be very resonating with consumers, and that should also help. Okay. Charcoal with a better summer peak season this year after prior pressure. How sustainable is the improvement you saw in that business? You've made some changes in terms of the way you manage the brand in the last couple of years. So give us an update on the outlook there as we head into next summer. Yeah. We actually feel quite good about next summer plans. A lot of it has to do with merchandising plans. Some have been optimized based on some of the learning from last summer, so we'll have to lap that. And there's also some incremental merchandising that we're doing, taking advantage of big events like the World Cup or just even the 250th anniversaries of the U.S. And so there's a lot of opportunities to take advantage of this. We have a little bit of innovation as well. So right now, it looks it's gearing up to be a good and solid season for us. Okay. And we've spent a lot of time so far discussing the difficult industry environment we're in. Just ask the CFO, I'd love to hear how you think about balancing trying to reinvest to drive sales, but also in a difficult environment, maybe the ROI isn't as strong and it's not breaking through as much with consumers. How do you think about that balance in the context of this CPG environment? Yeah. I think we kind of touched on it as we were talking about some of those businesses. Maybe stepping back and seeing what's always true, whether it's in this environment or not. I mean, again, the way we create value is by driving superior proposition for the consumer. And that's how we can strengthen our brand over time. That's going to strengthen our competitive advantage and really grow the categories. And the way we do that is taking brands people love and then just adding and leveraging them through capabilities. So in a way, a lot of the investment that we made over the past few years were intended to really strengthen those capabilities and then strengthen the work that we do with the brands. In an environment like this one, if anything, the bar goes higher in terms of superiority. And we've seen it, right? We just talked about a business like Lidl that kind of fell behind a little bit, and you're already feeling it a lot more. And so I think what's changed is what's a little different is, and Linda alluded to this, I think, in one of our last earnings calls. I think the speed and agility to which we need to make adjustments is higher in an environment like this. And so on one end, as we had to deal with the ERP transition and implementation, that adds to the things that we have to juggle. On the other end is now that we passed this, the modernized capability that we're ramping up actually helps us just do that. And I think we pointed to the example of charcoal where we didn't adjust our plans fast enough, and we felt it in Q4. But we were able to just recover and do it in Q1. So I think what we do remains the same, and it's all about, and we talked about those drivers around innovation, brand building, and it's more critical than ever. I think the intensity, agility to which you sharpen and adjust your plan needs to be elevated in a period like this. Okay. And have you guys considered, I mean, if we go back to the fiscal Q4 call, Linda talked about wanting to sharpen focus in a number of areas. Have you sort of considered a broader type of reset where you put a significant amount of investment behind the business? I know we've talked about there's some ways you can do it without spending a lot, but I'm just curious if we think about sort of a broader reset within this environment. And we've seen a lot of restructuring throughout the group, so just how are you thinking about managing the business within this environment? Yeah. I mean, right now, I think what we said is we made a lot of investment over the past few years, and they start bearing fruit, but there's still a lot more work to do. And so I think that's where our focus is, is really just ramping up those capabilities and getting both the value, the growth accelerations, and then the benefit from those investments as soon as possible. And so that's really the focus. And of course, delivering with excellence the plan that we have in place. Right. And the benefits from the work you've done in recent years, spending on IT, restructuring, how do you think about those benefits layering in over the next few years here? Yeah. We We started our digital transformation about four years ago, and essentially, there were three pillars, right? One was to fundamentally rebuild the data infrastructure of the company, which can be very important as you think about leveraging technology like AI and so on. Second was making an investment in a suite of technology. And marketing personalization is one of the things we really invested in, created a pretty sophisticated database to collect information about consumers as well as a database to manage a lot of content. And so some of those investments, like marketing personalization, have already yielded a lot of benefits, both on the top and the bottom. And then the last part of the digital transformation was really the ERP, right, because the most complex and then the riskiest. So this would just finish the implementation. We're still very much in stabilization, right? So when you turn it on, right now, we're not seeing just value yet. You have to actually fundamentally optimize and reinvent some of your processes, and so what we said is it will take us to we're going to stabilize in 2026, and in 2027 and 2028, we'll start getting the benefits of the ERP investments, both on the top and bottom line. How significant are those benefits? How should we think about it? Does it give you more flexibility to reinvest? Does it drop to the bottom line? How do you think about it? Yeah. I think the way we think about it is one more significant contributor to, I think, our margin management efforts. And I think it and they will be fairly material over the next few years, and I think it just strengthened the pipeline and then strengthened our level of confidence in our ability to deliver our margin goal, which is expanding 25-50 basis points on an annual basis. Okay. And you've had strong productivity over a long period of time. So just as you think about productivity going forward, A, base business, can you keep up the level of productivity savings? B, what are the key buckets from here? And C, how does AI play into that and give you more opportunities from a cost standpoint? Well, I think the headline is, again, our goal is we intend to grow with margin 25-50 basis points, and generally, we feel confident in our ability to do that. And that would be net of any reinvestment that we make in the business. I think you mentioned some of the levers. One is our cost savings program, which has organically evolved to what we call holistic margin management. We always had a really robust and disciplined cost savings program, but we brought new we made some investment, brought external talents, and bring capabilities like design to value, RGM, and all those have actually expanded the contribution. And it's working for us. We had record-level cost savings in the past two years, and we probably have one of the strongest pipelines I've seen. So that's the base. Then there's the ERP. We just started that adds and contributes to this. As you can imagine, having an ERP that was 20-25 years old, it created a lot of operational inefficiencies. You had a lot of silo processes. And so now you have the ability to see data real-time across the supply chain. So that creates a lot of benefit in the supply chain from plant scheduling to waste management to logistics optimizations and inventory management. And so we'll see this over the next couple of years. It also creates some opportunity from an automation standpoint, and so we'll see some benefit in the SG&A from there. And then there are other drivers that are now starting to open up. And one that we mentioned in the past is Global Business Services. This is another place where we probably were behind our peers and didn't leverage it as much. Part of it is because we had a fairly old data and technology infrastructure. It was hard to just take advantage of those Global Business Services, but we're now going to accelerate the path to take advantage of this. And so that creates more benefit, especially on the SG&A line. So we kind of look at those three levers together. That gives you a good roadmap. And so we feel good about the pipeline. And just right now, we'll have to see what happened with the cost environment, but in general, over the next few years, we feel a high degree of confidence in our ability to deliver the margin goals. Okay. And maybe we can shift to fiscal 2026 guidance. Your guidance does imply a return to low single-digit organic sales growth in the second half of the fiscal year. We talked about earlier some of the drivers behind that. What's your level of confidence there, just given it's been a difficult industry environment in recent periods? Scanner data has kind of lingered a bit weaker here. Some of that's related to ERP over the last few months and the transition there. So just give us an update on sort of level of visibility for the back half. And then also, you mentioned some of the margin drivers and productivity and holistic margin management. So do you think you have some margin flex to sort of cover top-line volatility? You've pointed to the low end of the full-year earnings range, but do you think you have a pretty good visibility there with some of the margin drivers? Yeah. Yeah. So if you look at our guidance and outlook, except for the current quarter, expectation was organic growth to decline in low single digits. And then as we look at the back half, we expect organic growth to grow in the low single digits, excluding the ERP transitions. From a category standpoint, we talked about it. We still expect category to be below historical, but stable around flat to 1%. And so that means that we expect on average, U.S. retail business to grow slightly ahead of that. And so it's implying modest share gains as you look at the back half on aggregate. The levers are the ones we talked about. We feel really good about our innovation plans. We also have a series we talked about places where we've been sharpening execution, like charcoal merchandising. There's also some good change and gain that we're doing on distribution and assortment, and also some innovations on revenue LGMs. And we talked about how it all comes together in a business like Lidl. So there's just a lot of drivers coming together. They all contribute. The other thing is we will be lapping a period of the headwinds that we had from competitive activity. So right now, the plans are progressing as expected. Sales and conversations with the customers are progressing as expected. So continue to feel good about our plans. Of course, that's U.S. retail. We still expect the professional business and international business to continue being outsized growth drivers in the back half. And then from a margin standpoint, on what we can control, which is the holistic margin management efforts, we feel good about the progress in the pipeline. We're obviously staying very close to the cost environment, which has and especially what may or might not happen from a tariff standpoint. And so that will remain to be seen. But on what we can control, I think we're making good progress. Okay. And then innovation, you've talked a lot about innovation. That's part of driving this reacceleration in the back half of the year and obviously an important part of the long-term strategy. Can you talk about how your innovation process has changed in recent years and what's driving this greater pipeline of activity? And as we look at the back half and maybe out to fiscal 2027, is it the amount of innovation? Is it the big bang nature of innovation? What's actually driving this acceleration? Yeah. I think over the past few years, the intent was always to accelerate the contribution of innovations, and some of it had been just doing a bigger focus on platforms, a bigger focus on unmet needs, so that has been in place for a few years. Of course, we've had to deal with the disruptions associated with cyber and the ERP transitions, but beyond that, we've really been also focusing on accelerating what we call our discovery process and our early pipeline. And this is where some of the investment we made on the digital front have been really helping. You were talking about AI, but that's one place where actually AI has been meaningful in terms of increasing the contributions of bringing better ideas faster. If you think about what AI can do, and we've been leveraging AI to analyze a lot of data, whether it's on social, a lot of data on consumer review, on feedback, it's actually really great in identifying patterns, finding unmet needs, or potential improvements. And so that has been a real contributor. If we look right now at what I call our discovery pipeline, which is like the emerging project, it's probably the strongest it's been in a really long time. So we feel good about the innovation that we are launching in the back half, but we also feel good about the pipeline that's supporting potential future years. Right. Great, and you've completed a lot of hard work in recent years in terms of the investment in technology, restructuring ERP. As you look going forward out longer term, what are you most excited about from a growth standpoint as you think about top-line growth for the portfolio, whether it be brands, categories, geographies, however you think about it? Yeah. I mean, a few things. First, you mentioned we completed a lot of work. And so looking forward to reaping the benefits of those capabilities. Some of it is new ways of working that we just talked about, better leveraging technologies, right? We talked about, and especially with the advent of AI, getting all the hard work we've done on creating a really robust data infrastructure will be really helpful. I'll give you an example. We've been on the journey on personalization, made great progress. 60% of our marketing is now personalized. And we've done that by really investing in technology, but investing in new process and new teams. And then generative AI come. And so over the last few years, you kind of move from doing one national campaign day to maybe targeting 10, 20 different customer groups. Now you can leverage the same data and the same process because you have the infrastructure and able to just do hyper-personalizations to the point where we think in a couple of years, we'll be able to really do one-to-one marketing. That's exciting because we basically achieved what we wanted to do with personalization. Because we built that infrastructure, we're able to fully leverage it beyond what we expected. I think the same will happen on some of the investment we made on supply chain and so on. That's one. Two, continue to feel really good about some businesses like cleaning. I think this is a place where we continue to see that it's performing very well, and we continue to see a lot of opportunities to grow. And keep in mind, the cleaning growth is also fueling what we're seeing in Pro and international because it's a big part of the portfolio. And then there's businesses that we're more in turnaround mode, that we actually feel really good about the future. Lidl is a good example of them. Can you give us an update on professional and international and the growth opportunities in those businesses? Yeah. So international, for context, was a drag to the top line just the prior strategy period, and what was happening is we had a pretty significant part of our portfolio that was in Latin America. In-country business performance was quite good, but you had to deal with a lot of headwinds from a currency and others, and so we had a very deliberate strategy to reduce the volatility and then strengthen the growth rate of international, and we did this through many different moves. One was the divestiture of Argentina. Another was the acquisitions for majority stake in the Middle East, and we placed also very targeted bets, including business like Premium Litter in Europe and in Asia. That and then really take advantage of the pipeline and the great work we're doing on cleaning. I was talking about the Clean Feels Good campaign that's in the U.S. We're able to reap and reapply that in international. So net, over the strategy period, international has been an outsized contributor to growth, kind of growing mid-single digits. And as I look at the opportunity for the future, we expect this to continue. Pro was an outsized contributor to growth. There was always plenty of opportunity. And a lot of it is really driving leveraging all these effective capabilities. This is a lot of technical sales that we're doing in healthcare setting and others. Then went boom and bust during COVID and after COVID. And so now that things settled down a little bit, we start seeing really steady growth and great and promising plans as we look at the future. Great. That's helpful. Looking at the M&A environment, clearly there have been some challenges from an industry standpoint. There may be more assets out there available in theory. How important is M&A in your strategic lens as you look out over the next few years? And on the other side of that also, are you comfortable that the brands you have in your portfolio are a good fit, or is there room maybe for some pairing of the portfolio over time? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe on the M&A front, I mean, first, job one, two, and three is managing and driving the cost. That's always going to be the priority, but M&A is a strategic lever. And the only thing is you have to find the right asset at the right price, right? And so just to be clear, while we haven't done transactions, we have been continuing to evaluate assets, and we're very active in doing so. We're obviously not having anything to share today, but just this is something we've been very active. The problem is, not the problem, it's just you end up saying no a lot because you have to find, again, finding the right asset at the right valuation can be challenging, so the good news is we have financial flexibility. We have strong balance sheets, and we'll continue to evaluate opportunities, but we're also going to continue to be disciplined and only move if we can find the right asset at the right price. On divestitures, of course, at this point, we like our portfolio as it is. We have a pretty disciplined process where we reevaluate our portfolio on an annual basis, and we work with our board, and this is the process that kind of led to the divestiture of both VMS and Argentina, but right now, again, we like our portfolio as it is. Okay. And on the M&A front, some more bolt-on opportunities you're generally looking at, or are you thinking about larger opportunities? And what's most important in terms of strategic and financial criteria as you look at potential? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, right now, mainly we've been looking at bolt-on. I think the way we've articulated, we'd love to bring a new growth runway within the portfolio. Our criteria have been pretty consistent. So we would want something that's accretive from a growth and margin standpoint, generally leading brands in mid-size categories, and of course, something that can leverage our capabilities. So it would be either an existing category, adjacent categories, or categories that meet similar criteria. Geographically, we're open, but given that we have a lot of scale to leverage in the U.S., it's likely that there would be a pretty big U.S. presence. So that's how we think about it. Okay. And we've seen multiples compress in the CPG industry. So maybe let's take a step back and talk about capital allocation in general and just are share repurchases something that's becoming a greater priority? Do you look more at stock price and ROI, or is it more a consistent sort of balance sheet strategy, and you're not as opportune necessarily on that front? How do you tie share repurchases into the broader capital allocation? Yeah, so maybe two things. First, from a capital allocations, our priorities have always been pretty consistent. One, we want to invest in the core business, both organically and inorganically. Second, continue to support our dividend. We have a long track record of doing so. Of course, third, we want to manage our debt leverage, and we have a pretty healthy balance sheet right now. We've been on the low end of our debt leverage goal, which is 2-2.5 times EBITDA, and we think it's the right place to be right now, given the environment, and also gives us flexibility if we wanted to make an investment, and then after that, return any excess cash to the shareholders. Now, we've been pretty active. We returned about $300 million last year. For perspective, my dividend is about $600 million. So we're about half as much as what we've done in dividends. And we returned about another $30 million in the first quarter, and then we'll continue to be active in the market. So I think we're very principled, but we might be a little opportunistic in the timing and the executions, but it's always going to be a fourth priority. Okay. Great. Well, with that, we're out of time. So we appreciate very much you being here. Thanks for coming again. Thank you, Dara. Thanks everyone.