The Kraft Heinz Company
Q4 2019 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 13 Feb 2020

[Operator:]

Good day. My name is Katherine, and I'll be your operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to The Kraft Heinz Company's Fourth Quarter 2019 Earnings Conference Call.I will now turn the call over to Chris Jakubik, Head of Global Investor Relations. Mr. Jakubik, you may begin.

[Chris Jakubik:]

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining our business update. We'll begin today's call with an overview of our fourth quarter and full year 2019 results as well as an update on our path forward from Miguel Patricio, our CEO; and Paulo Basilio, our CFO. And then we'll open the lines for your questions.Please note that 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 press release and our filings with the SEC.We will also discuss some non-GAAP financial measures during the call today. These non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered a replacement for and should be read together with GAAP results. And you can find the GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliations within our earnings release.Now let's turn to Slide 3, and I'll hand it over to Miguel.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Thank you, Chris, and good morning, everyone. I think it's appropriate to start today's update by recognizing that 2019 was a very difficult year for Kraft Heinz, for our employees, our Board and our stakeholders. Yet, it has also been a period of new understanding and new change, and we are confident that our journey to a stronger, more agile Kraft Heinz has already begun. We are seeing the beginning of stabilization in our second half trend bend on EBITDA performance.We believe the essential ingredients for our turnaround are now in place

[Paulo Basilio:]

Thank you, Miguel, and good morning, everyone. Beginning with the fourth quarter, our performance showed several promising early signs of stabilization. Q4 organic net sales were down 2.2% with strong positive pricing of two percentage points, more than offset by lower volume and mix versus the prior year. Pricing was positive in all reporting segments, except Canada, but the U.S. was the main contributor with a 3.1% gain versus the prior year. This was driven by several factors, including higher lease pricing announcing early this year, key commodity pass-through pricing in cheese and meats, favorable trade timing and lower promotional intensity versus the fourth quarter of 2018.Total company volume/mix declined 4.2 percentage points primarily driven by the higher U.S. pricing and to a lesser extent, lower shipments in the rest of the world markets. And these impacts more than offset volume growth in Canada and EMEA. With respect to profitability, Q4 constant currency adjusted EBITDA was down 5.3% versus last year, with divestitures accounting for 150 basis points of the decline.Excluding divestitures and currency, we saw growth in the U.S. and EMEA, as both zones benefited from improved cost visibility and supply chain cost controls. However, these gains were more than offset by a significant decline in our rest of the world segment as well as higher general corporate expenses and lower pricing in Canada. I would note here, however, that roughly three quarters of the constant currency EBITDA decline in the rest of the world segment was due to roughly $35 million of costs that we do not expect to repeat.This was from a combination of higher labor-related expenses from the impact of the Holidays Act in New Zealand as well as asset and inventory related write-offs in Australia, New Zealand and Latin America. The remainder of the rest of the world EBITDA was driven by ongoing supply chain cost inflation and lower volume/mix.In fact, our supply chain costs on a global basis still held us back year-on-year in Q4. This was driven by supply chain inflation in rest of the world markets and a combination of lower pricing and higher input costs that led to a weak performance versus the prior year in Canada. Both of these need to be fixed in 2020, and we have specific plans in place to improve performance.However, we do expect that each will remain negative in our first quarter. At adjusted EPS, the decline we saw versus prior year reflected lower adjusted EBITDA, a higher effective tax rate and a higher stock-based compensation versus the prior year period that we highlighted on our previous call. Finally, I would like to mention our strong cash flow and cash generation in 2019.With just over $6 billion in adjusted EBITDA and considering cash interest expense, taxes, patient contributions, working capital and capital expenditures, we generated roughly $2.8 billion of cash in 2019 that was available for dividend and debt reduction. This was closer to $3 billion, excluding tax repaid on divestitures. As a result, and together with divestiture proceeds, we reduced net debt by $3 billion in 2019, closing the year with nearly $2.3 billion of cash on balance sheet. These are critical variables to consider as we think about our ability to meet our commitments as we undertake our turnaround and business transformation, which brings me to our financial outlook.To begin, I think it's important to recognize that 2020 will be the first full year of what we expect will be a multiyear turnaround. For our first phase in 2020, specifically, we have set three priorities

[Miguel Patricio:]

Thank you, Paulo. While we will provide more details on our plans in May, I would like to close our prepared comments by describing how we want to see Kraft Heinz in 2020 and beyond and the type of organization we are now confident we can create. First and foremost, we want our people obsessed about the consumer, understanding and predicting the future, passionate for our brands, building a culture of creativity, being more external focused and digitally transformed. We want them obsessed with customer satisfaction and service levels, accomplishing this with excitement for perfect sales execution, continuous improvement in our factories and being disciplined against our strategy.To fund our growth, we want our people to embrace efficiency through a continuous improvement mindset and being proud, low-cost producers. We want to attract people that truly value and define ownership in terms of accountability, agility, loyalty and a focus on the collective good. And we want a team that understands that a talent pool with pride, high engagement, low turnover can serve as a school for leadership to truly be the key to winning. There is a lot of work ahead of each one of us. We know that we are interested by all of our stakeholders to turn this business around, and that is exactly what we are going to do.Now we would like to take your questions.

[Operator:]

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Andrew Lazar with Barclays. Your line is open.

[Andrew Lazar:]

Good morning, everybody.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Good morning.

[Paulo Basilio:]

Good morning.

[Andrew Lazar:]

I guess, Miguel, first off, I know you're likely to expand on a lot of this at the Analyst Day later this year. But perhaps, you can give us a sense if you anticipate being able to ramp up in 2020, specifically the continuous productivity work that you've previously highlighted rather than the deal-driven cost savings actions in the past really to help fund some of the acquired brand investment that you're talking about, and I guess, perhaps, or even maybe more importantly, if you have the people to execute on that continuous savings work even several levels down from sort of the top level. And then I just got a quick follow-up.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Hi, Andrew, good morning. Well, I share your enthusiasm about the productivity. I think, in the last two years, supply costs were the main reason why we increased our cost base in the company. And I'm very excited with what we have ahead of us and what we can accomplish together. We have a new Head of Global Ops, Flavio, that joined us after being six months as a consultant, and he has an amazing experience on continuous improvement capabilities.And that is really the base of everything that we're going to do, really thinking on how we can be better every day, how can we increase our productivity, how can we develop a team of specialists in each one of the critical areas. We know where we stand in terms of overall efficiency ratings by manufacturing line, and we are implementing continuous improvement tools and process across the world as we speak.The goal here is to work towards positive net productivity. We expect to give you more color of that in May. But the fact that we were, this last quarter in U.S., for the first time in two years, with the cost that was this year to previous year gives me a lot of confidence that we are in the right direction. I think that we are seeing – I’m seeing better engagement, much more enthusiasm in the supply area. And so we have great expectations from this area.On people, well, as I said before, talent is one of my biggest concerns and was my biggest concern when I arrived at the company. But I have to say that, today, I’m far less concerned than when I arrived, and I’ll give you a couple of reasons. The first one, we were able to attract top, top, top talent to my management team. We have three new members, and they are going to make a big contribution to us for the future.But you asked me specifically not to talk only about my management team, but the levels below, so let me tell you. One of the things we did was to identify what were the critical roles in the company globally, and we identified or we defined 60 roles – or 60 critical roles. These 60 people, I have to know them by heart and by soul, and, of course, be sure that they have the right incentives to continue in the company.But in this team of 60 people, we have a total of 21 years of experience. So it’s – on average, of course. This is very good, and it’s very important. And the people that we brought from outside also come with an average of 20 years of experience. So I’m less – much less concerned about experience to that. The positions we had opened, we were able to bring people with great experience.And finally, if we go even further on the pyramid, I will say that this year, we had the best results ever on attracting MBAs and trainees with pretty impressive results. This year, we attracted 50% more MBAs or candidates for the job with us. And with trainees, 33% more people applied for a training program. And this came as a surprise. And the main reason was that we were very transparent on what the company is today and what we needed.So we are attracting people with the transformation mindset that like that, that like and enjoy a turnaround. And these are – this is the type of people that we are bringing out to the company, then I think that it’s absolutely critical.Now with all that in mind that I said, that is less of a concern. I also said that turnaround – the turnover is still a big problem for us, especially on the lower levels of the pyramid, and we have to stop that. And I have a KPI, a target specifically on that this year, and I cascaded or shared these targets with all my management team. We are all responsible for a lower turnover rate. So in a nutshell, Andrew, this is what I would have to say about productivity and people.

[Andrew Lazar:]

Okay. Appreciate that. One very quick one. Just you talked about losing some distribution in the frozen category at select retailers. I was hoping you could just provide some context around this. Was this just retailers making moves on – to better prepare for things like click and collect? Is it just competitive innovation or something else? Thank you so much.

[Miguel Patricio:]

No. Specifically on frozen food was some of our customers increasing the amount of different brands on the shelf and reducing the shelf. It was not only for us, but for the entire category, reducing the amount of shelf for the players that were already there. This is a specific thing for frozen food. I think that the trend in other categories is the opposite. It’s reducing the number of brands and SKUs. But in frozen food, we saw that happening, yes.

[Andrew Lazar:]

Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Thank you. Thank you, Andrew.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Chris Growe with Stifel. Your line is open.

[Chris Growe:]

Hi, good morning.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Good morning.

[Paulo Basilio:]

Good morning.

[Chris Growe:]

Good morning. I just had a question for you, if I could. And just to get a sense of kind of where the company is today in terms of the stabilization and turnaround in 2020. As I think about areas of new investment, is it about offense or defense? Are you – is the company in a state where you’re working on new innovation that can start to lead the sales growth in 2020? Or is it more about stabilizing what you have and then pushing towards growth in future years? I hope you can help with that.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Okay. So I – let me give you an idea what we have seen for 2020. 2020 is a year of stabilization, yes, so it’s not a year of playing of, using your words, offense. It’s a year that we want to continue stabilizing the bottom line of the company. But the good news is that we were – we found resources in our own budget. We sweat the budget to allocate more money behind brands and categories that have higher profitability and have momentum.Overall, we are increasing media, as Paulo said, by 30%. And in top brands, we are investing even more. So concentrating on what makes the difference. In 2020 – going further on 2020, yes, we still predict a decline in EBITDA, but 70% of this EBITDA decline, as Paulo mentioned, is – comes from normalizing our cost base on things like divestitures, the bonus compensation, ForEx, et cetera.But yes, we are excited and confident that as the year progresses, our level of capabilities, our level of visibility will increase as well, and that’s the feeling that we already have right now. And it’s our expectation to finish the year in a very different way that we start.

[Chris Growe:]

Okay. Thank you for that. I had just one quick question – second question, which will be in relation to the U.S. division, there were some more exaggerated volume declines there in pricing versus what I expected. I’d just be curious how much of that would be sort of inventory changes that might occur in the quarter and if you expect that also to occur in 2020 as we go through the year.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Okay. Yes, we – no – we had, yes, share losses. So the decline in volumes reflect share losses. However, these share losses were predicted. We knew that we would lose this share in the last quarter. And the reasons are that we increased prices and – especially in commodities that we’re growing disproportionately, like the cheese category and meat category. We decreased the amount of promo. So in 2018 last quarter, there was a substantial amount of promo activity, and some of this promo activity with very low ROIs or even negative ROIs, and we stopped that.And also we started a program on SKU rationalization that on short term may reduce a little bit the volume, but long term comes with a lot of benefits of less complexity for us and for our customers and less complexity in our factories, lower levels of supply chain losses, et cetera.We have never done an SKU reduction in the company in five years. We increased the amount of SKUs big time during these five years. So it was time now to start it. We haven’t finished. We’ll continue to – through 2020. Being more precise on your question about the share – the – or the volume loss, I’m expecting to continue in the first quarter, yes, because this – the growth of the commodities will affect the first quarter. And the price, at least in the first quarter, will continue high.Specifically on inventories, we are not looking at this as either incremental or as a negative point for 2020. So last year was very negative. This year, our view is that it’s not going to be incremental or the other way around. It’s going to be neutral.

[Chris Growe:]

Okay. Thank you for that. That’s very helpful. Thank you.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

Our next question comes from Bryan Spillane with Bank of America. Your line is open.

[Bryan Spillane:]

Hey, good morning, everyone.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Good morning.

[Bryan Spillane:]

Two questions for me. First, I guess, Miguel, looking at the EBITDA bridge for – from 2019 to 2020, we’re taking a step back of $460 million. And I know part of that is divestitures, but it’s not clear that there’s a significant increase in brand or marketing support. So I guess two questions. One, is the aggregate amount of spend actually go up? And two, behind that, just what gives you the confidence that you have enough resources to kind of fully resource all your plans to drive better revenue growth?

[Miguel Patricio:]

So Bryan, answering your question, we have a slightly – a slight decrease in marketing for 2020, but we have a big increase in media for 2020. And what’s the – how will we do that? We are reducing the amount of new products in – or the amount of innovation in 2020 by 50% and concentrating on innovation that really makes the difference. We are not expecting a decrease in net sales of the innovation next year, but we are going to cut everything that is not accretive, that is cannibalistic, a lot of line extensions that we did in the past.That thing by itself helps a lot complexity, helps with our customer relationship, helps with us focusing on what really matters and putting our energy and our budget behind innovation that moves the needle. But also the other consequence is that we put more money on product development. We put more money behind agency or agency fees because we have less development and even marketing research.And putting all these savings on these lines together, we have put it back in media, which allow us literally to sweat the budget and increase media by 30% overall. I would also say that on top of the 30%, we – because we have less innovation, we are concentrating more in the bigger brands that have more momentum, better margin and that we have to grow. So that is a lot that the – a rationale behind your question.

[Bryan Spillane:]

Thanks for that. Okay. And Paulo, just one for you on the list of – on the to-do list is an improvement in gross profits over time. I guess this is more over the multiyear plan. Can you just give us a little bit more insight on like where the opportunities are to recapture some of the gross profit dollars that have kind of leaked out over the last couple of years? Is it going to be productivity? Is it restructuring? Just give us a little bit more color in terms of what leaked and how you recapture it.

[Paulo Basilio:]

Yes. So historically, in the last call, I did a walk-through to this bridge. We’ve lost a lot of – the main driver, two-thirds of our decline came from gross margin – right, gross profit. And it was historically a combination of, pretty much, supply chain inflation with low – or not enough solid initiatives in supply chain to offset this inflation, a proliferation of SKU, right, and dilutive innovation, as Miguel said.So at the end of the day, a combination of supply chain inflation with low projects, proliferation of SKU with innovation with low – not very accretive to the margin. Our plans to recover that is pretty much based in the same pillar. It is – we see that there is an opportunity for us to recover and to do a much better job going forward of – and now with our supply chain projects that Miguel was mentioning here.To get – to have a better efficiency in our cost, we also expect to be more disciplined with the SKUs, with our innovations and concentrate better. So mix and supply chain costs, I think, would be the main two drivers of this improvement in gross profit.

[Bryan Spillane:]

Okay. Thank you for that.

[Paulo Basilio:]

You’re welcome.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason English with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

[Jason English:]

Hey, good morning, folks.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Good morning.

[Paulo Basilio:]

Good morning.

[Jason English:]

I think like a lot of people were just trying to triangulate everything you’re saying and pin you down to kind of what the implicit guidance is on a lot of these things. One area that we’re getting questions on right now is on the free cash flow side. Paulo, I think you said that you’re looking to generate free cash flow at least $500 million in excess of dividend. That implies roughly $2.5 billion. Is that sort of the right number to anchor to in fiscal 2020?

[Paulo Basilio:]

That’s correct.

[Jason English:]

Okay. And then coming back to the EBITDA bridges, I appreciate the disclosure on some of the headwinds and some of the moving pieces there. As Mr. Spillane mentioned, not in there explicitly as sort of the reinvestment, but I appreciate you talking through that. Also what we don’t see in that bridge is any sort of headwind from the organic sales erosion and maybe some of the SKU rationalization, some of the other factors you’re talking about that can weigh on venue. So you gave us some disclosure on how you expect to effectively self-fund the reinvestment. What are the offsets that are going to prevent the sales loss from also flowing there into an EBITDA headwind into next year?

[Paulo Basilio:]

Yes. No, Jason. Thanks for the question. I think – yes, but we listed here the main impact that we’re seeing. And we also mentioned that beyond both impacts, we believe we’re going to hold profitability. So there will be a list of pluses and minus that we expect, some headwinds from sales, some offset from pricing and mix and some other initiatives that we are doing.So beyond those impacts here, just to get clarity about the number here and the outlook, we expect to hold profitability beyond those – this $460 million. And that’s a combination, as Miguel, we are investing more in media, investing more in marketing. We are redeploying some investments that we did in specific areas of the company, commercial investments. We have pricing initiatives, revenue management initiatives in the mix that we expect will kind of offset the headwinds that we have in some categories and some sales that are coming.

[Jason English:]

And does the elasticity effect that you’re seeing, or at least we’re seeing, in market to your pricing, does that give you pause on – in terms of how far you can push those pricing initiatives and some of those RGM initiatives?

[Miguel Patricio:]

Again, we – just repeating, Jason, what I said before. We had share losses, but we didn’t have surprises. We expected exactly in the fourth quarter and in the first quarter of this year these share losses. We thought that we had to increase prices specifically on – or especially on products that are commodities because there was a huge increase in the commodities. And as leading – as leaders in these categories, we should put the price. I also mentioned that we lost share because we reduced the amount of promotion compared with the fourth quarter of 2018.And we reduced promotion because we believe that we were doing – we had promotions in the press that were not adding really to the company with negative ROIs that we should be more careful and more disciplined about promotions. And finally, the SKU rationalization, we see this in the last quarter of 2019 and in the first quarter of 2020.

[Jason English:]

Understood. Thank you very much.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Our next question comes from David Palmer with Evercore ISI. Your line is open.

[David Palmer:]

Good morning.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Good morning.

[David Palmer:]

You talked about customer satisfaction being core. Could you talk about the specific reasons for that, that we would assume supply chain execution, but also on the list would be promotion and innovation effectiveness? Could you just talk also about where that – those satisfaction scores, so to speak, would be right now? And how are they progressing? And will they take incremental dollars to fix it? And I have a quick follow-up.

[Miguel Patricio:]

So it is a very important question and has to be an obsession. I finished my speech at the beginning saying that I see the company in the future not only obsessed with the consumer, but also obsessed with service level and because our customers are absolutely critical in the results of our company. And in the past, we had big problems on service level. We had big improvement this year, but we still have problems in service levels. I suggested to the Board to have a specific target – individual target on service level for 2020. I put this target on salespeople, on supply people and procurement people.So we revised, and we are very close to understand service levels. I have my team in supply now literally running around the country and understanding the KPIs of each one of the customers, how they measure service level because we have to be a mirror of what they are.So this is, I think, the first thing that is very important for customer satisfaction, but it’s not the only one. It’s the most important, but not the only one. I also think that we have big gaps in trade, marketing and category management that are big opportunities, these three areas to increase customer satisfaction. In U.S., you asked about ranking. We are not in the last quartile, but we are in the third quartile in terms of companies and customer satisfaction. We – and it’s our intention to move it up, of course.

[David Palmer:]

And I guess, if I – just a follow-up would be, how did you – how did this happen? Because on the supply chain side, there are stories out there about how there was a removal of muscle memory that lasted – that goes back – way back in – onto the plant level and that removal removed a lot of continuous improvement ability in terms of your productivity. But also since it’s in a highly complex business, it became critical to have those people. And as you cut costs, all of a sudden, things started going off the rails in terms of productivity.Could you talk about the people side and how fast you can get that muscle memory back? And in terms of revenue management, promotion management seems to be a big problem. What went wrong there? Some thoughts – color on those two things. Thanks.

[Miguel Patricio:]

Let me – those are important questions. I think that the first two years after the acquisition of Kraft Heinz – of Kraft, there were a lot of synergies that were on the table as possibilities, right? You had two CEOs. You had two headquarters. You have to cut. So there’s the possibility of synergies by cutting. But after two years, cutting becomes dangerous. We cannot have a culture of cutting because it’s – these are not long-term. But we have to change that culture to a continuous improvement mentality. You can always improve. And actually, the consequence of continuous improvement is productivity. We can always increase productivity. We decreased productivity in the last two years.And I think that moving forward, it’s a combination of things, new leadership in place, better planning, a different mindset regarding continuous improvement, less innovation that generated a lot of complexity and investing innovation and less SKUs and increased a lot supply chain losses. And so these are absolute drivers of what we have to do for the future, for the success of the future.

[David Palmer:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Rob Dickerson with Jefferies. Your line is open.

[Rob Dickerson:]

Great. Thank you so much. So just a quick question, I guess, just regarding overall portfolio mix and then kind of perspective on divestments for even potentially 2020. As you’ve discussed last call and on this call, productivity, gross margin recovery is key focus. But then at the same time, we’re seeing some increased volume elasticity on some of the commodity-driven brand and categories that you play in.So kind of as you think about divestment potential going forward, vis-à-vis kind of productivity and gross margin recovery potential, and then you’ve also mentioned some of your flagship brands, like, as of now, and I realize we’ll hear more about this in May, but kind of as of now, like, what are some examples that you consider your flagship brands? And then also, like, why not consider divesting some of the potentially lower-margin, more commodity-driven categories that you now play in? Thanks.

[Miguel Patricio:]

So I will – thanks for the question. It’s a good question, but it’s a long answer, so I’m going to divide the answer in two. I will cover the first part on portfolio and brands, and I will ask Paulo to give you more color on the rest of the question.Portfolio, you are mentioning magic words. I think portfolio is absolutely critical for us to define the strategy for the future. Portfolio is all about choices. And when I think about our portfolio, we have to see the portfolio in two ways

[Paulo Basilio:]

Now on the divestiture of this year that you asked, I think, aligned with our strategy, we will opportunistically explore divestitures, but we are going to be very disciplined on price and, more importantly, with no hurry. So we want to explore potentially the parts of the business that makes sense, aligned with our strategy, with no hurry to execute that and only at the right price. So no time commitment around that.

[Rob Dickerson:]

Okay, super. Thank you so much.

[Operator:]

Thank you. And that’s all the questions we have – all the time we have for questions. I’d like to turn the call back to Chris Jakubik for any closing remarks.

[Chris Jakubik:]

Thank you, and thanks, everyone, for joining us this morning. For any analysts that have follow-up questions, myself and Andy Larkin will be available. And for anybody in the media, Michael Mullen will be available to answer your calls. Thanks very much, and have a great day.

[Operator:]

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect. Everyone, have a great day.