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F500-2021-158-Kimberly Clark

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F500-2020-175-Kimberly-Clark

With a history that dates back to 1872, the manufacturer of paper-based products has many household brands in its portfolio, including Kleenex, Depend, Scott, and Huggies.

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Kimberly-Clark, founded in 1872, manufactures and sells a wide range of consumer products including disposable diapers, baby wipes, feminine care products, tissues, soaps, and sanitizers. Its household-name personal care brands—like Huggies, Kotex, Cottonelle, and Kleenex—are stocked at retailers in over 175 countries. In 2025 Kimberly-Clark announced a plan to devote $2 billion over five years to its U.S. manufacturing business, as it seeks to expand its domestic capabilities amid Trump’s manufacturing push.

Q4 2025

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Q1 2025

Q4 2024

Kimberly-Clark (KMB): Company Profile, Stock Price, News, Rankings

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Kimberly-Clark

kimberly-clark

Greetings. Welcome to the Kimberly Clark 4Q 2024 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. Please note this conference is being recorded.

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

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. I just want to remind everyone that during our comments 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 and our filings with the SEC. We will also discuss some non GAAP financial measures during these remarks. 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 and the supplemental materials posted at investor. Kimberly clark.com. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike for a few opening comments.

Okay. Thank you, Chris. 2024 was an outstanding year for our team and the future of Kimberly Clark as we launched our multiyear Power and Care transformation strategy. Last year, we built the foundation to accelerate our growth in the years to come. We rewired our organization into 3 powerhouse segments to become a better, faster and stronger organization.

We pivoted to volume plus mix driven growth and established strong market share momentum. And we made the successful transition from margin recovery in 2023 to establishing a new phase of margin expansion in 2024. Our progress enabled us to deliver full year results that exceeded our long term algorithm even as we absorbed discrete headwinds. Now we enter 2025 with good visibility on the key drivers of our growth and profit potential. We're confident in our plans to deliver innovation like growth ahead of the categories in which we compete.

We're continuing to invest in product quality, brand support and capability building. And we're bullish on our ability to continue powering investment and bottom line growth with industry leading productivity and SG and A savings through wiring for growth. This year, we'll continue to transform while performing, scaling our playbook and capabilities across the globe and shaping our portfolio for stronger, more profitable growth over the long term. Through Power and Care, we're taking actions that are enabling us to navigate a dynamic environment and provide better care for a better world. Now, with that, we'd like to open the lines for your questions.

Certainly. At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session. Your first question for today is from Dara Mohsenian with Morgan Stanley.

Hi, good morning. So just hoping to spend some time on the top line, maybe we can split it into the long term versus the short term. Maybe Mike, you can just take a step back now that we're at year end, give us a review of where you think you stand on the organizational front with the rewiring plans you announced at Analyst Day, both in terms of reorganizing the way you approach the business, but also some of the tangible benefits from that. You talked about greater more impactful innovation, more effective marketing, etcetera. So, are you pleased with where you stand today?

Maybe give us an update. And as you think about 2025, is it more of a step function in yielding some of those benefits from all those changes? Or do you see those benefits building more over time?

Okay. All right. Thanks for the question. There's a lot in that. I'll try to get to all of it.

And Nelson may and Chris may keep me honest here. Overall, Dara, I'd say I feel very good about our setup for 2025 and also for the long term. Maybe the one external piece I'd say is our categories continue to exhibit very durable growth. The underlying demand is healthy. Our categories continue to expand in both dollars and units or value and units.

And that's because I think we've talked about this before, Dara, we see really 3 durable drivers of growth over the long term. Number 1 is penetration, which remains an opportunity. I'd say the good news is birth rate declines are leveling off and in some markets, notably Korea, we saw positive birth rate in the Q3, which continued into the 4th and that was the first time in 8 years. And in China, was positive in birth rate as well. So I'd say, 1, on penetration, birth rate declines kind of inflecting a bit at least early signs.

Aging population for adult care categories remains a big tailwind, especially in developed markets like South Korea and China, U. S. And then there remains in much of the developing world an expanding middle class that remains a big driver for us. 2nd big thing, frequency remains strong. There is some pockets of softness.

Notably, I'd say in pockets of Latin America and Southeast Asia, but frequency remains robust for us. And then maybe one of our bigger opportunities remains trade up. Consumers remain very interested in better performing products and so we're seeing the premium end of our categories continue to grow. So with all that said, I'd say in the short term, we're seeing and I think it was in our prepared remarks, 2% category growth this year, which is on the lower end of what we said. But I'd still say fairly robust durable for our categories.

The big thing is our categories are daily essentials and so they don't move around that much from day to day and year to year. So I'd say maybe that would be on the shorter term. And then over the long term, I think we're positioned well to deliver consistent volume and mix growth over the long term. I think we believe our growth profile will continue to improve over time. And that's, as I just mentioned, a function of demographics and income and all the investment we're doing to make our categories and our products and brands better.

I think what we said last March at Investor Day, we expected weighted average category growth to revert to a historical range of 2% to 3%. And last year through the first half, we were a little ahead of that. And then after lapping some price moves from the prior year, I'd say we've seen some lower frequency in some markets and a little bit of a slowdown in North America professional consumption. But overall, I think the categories have globally performed pretty well. So I don't for this going forward or for this year, I don't really expect a whole lot of new pricing that will that drive that up.

And I think, as I mentioned, the category we have at 2 around 2% this year and expect longer term 2% to 3% volume mix driven, I think is a reasonable aspiration for us or for what the category is going to do and then we want to grow faster than that. So I'll pause there. I know there's a lot to your question. I just gave you a lot. What other things did I miss?

That was very comprehensive. I think you got it all. But maybe I'll just follow-up on 2025 specifically. It didn't sound like you expect a lot of pricing. Maybe just take me through your decision process on pricing, particularly given some FX pressure and how you think about the balance between price and volume as you look out to 2025?

And just level of visibility you can do it 2 plus or better than category growth, presuming it stays in that 2% range. Just given if we strip out hyperinflation, you've been a bit below that the last few quarters. Some of that's probably inventory, but just how you think about the level of the facility also specifically?

Yes. I'll ask Nelson to give our thoughts on that.

So, yes, there are. So let me give you unpack a little bit the top line expectations for 2025 and also walk through the pricing trajectory that we've seen in 2024 because it builds into what we're expecting for 2025. So a few things. As Mike said, 2025 overall, we expect pricing to be pretty much muted on an enterprise level aggregate, so largely flat. We're coming off a year as we put in our prepared remarks and as you would have seen in the earnings release where the full year pricing realization was more around 200 basis points for the enterprise of which hyperinflationary and Argentina specifically contributed on the year about 300 basis points.

Across 2024 that number came down every quarter. So from a 4 50 basis point contribution in Q1 that came down to 160 basis point contribution in Q4. That coincides with inflation tapering off in Argentina as the macroeconomic situation has been stabilizing driven by the government actions that were taken about a year ago. In fact, as we go into this year, whereas Argentina contributed on the full year about 300 basis points to tough time growth and pricing in 2024, we only expect around 30 basis points tops in or less in 2025. So in essence pricing is not going to be a driver of growth in 2025.

It's really going to be a volume and mix led growth. It builds on the transition that occurred in 2024. 2024 was a year in which volume and mix contributed 1.2 points of growth, volume being 0.8 points or 80 bps. And as we had and in Q4 that actually accelerated to 1.5% of growth. So it will be a volume mix led growth accompanied by continued gains in market share.

For 2024, our weighted average market share was gain was 10 basis points and we expect that to be at least that or higher as we head into 2025.

Your next question is from Robert Moskow with TD Cowen.

Hi, good morning. The productivity savings are really outstanding at 5.9%, and it sounds like you're guiding to that again in 2025. And I wanted to know in 2024, did any of that productivity savings help you on pulp costs? Because it would appear that pulp costs are going higher in 2025. Do you have productivity baked in, in your procurement estimates for that and any other commodities?

And then secondly, you're confident in your PNOC outlook for 2025. Maybe you can give a little more color on that and how it compares to how you did in 2024? Thanks.

Yes. So a few things, Robert. Yes, we're very pleased with the 1st year of delivery towards our 3,000,000,000 dollars 5 year target of productivity, solid start. We stood up our global supply chain organization on July 1, 2024 and last year constituted the 1st year of our transformation of the global supply chain. We did deliver historical high productivity and the lion's share of the productivity was on what we call our integrated margin management productivity, which is what we're doing on our manufacturing facilities, largely network optimization, automation as well as value stream.

In terms as it relates to pulp and any productivity related savings, that's really not the case. I mean, we've been managing the commodity basket in a much more proactive manner, not in a reactive manner. As we've been explaining over the last couple of years, we've been engaging in strategic relationships with our suppliers that have allowed us to manage through the volatility that we would have seen in prior years. So on that end, as we go into 2025, our expectation is to be in the 5% range of productivity, a tad lower than the 5.9%, but solidly within what we consider to be best in class levels for 2025. We have significantly improved cost visibility in the next couple of years or so and that's part of our integrated margin management approach and the strategies on risk management that we've deployed.

We are confident in our ability to continue to drive in the mid long term pricing net of cost that it's at least neutral. We've seen that play out. In fact, it was favorable in 2024. And as we go into 2025, we will continue to hone in our skills for our teams to manage towards a pricing net of cost at least neutral strategy.

Yes. Maybe Rob, I'll just add. From my view, I'd say our Powering Care strategy is powering what we want to be on algorithm performance. And I think we feel very good about how our plans line up for this year based on what we're seeing in the current environment. And I think one of the most important thing is we know we're lapping some discrete factors like this big private label exit and the PPE exit and some of the other things.

But we do have very strong visibility into productivity and we feel great about that. And that's been the key driver for us to fuel our investment in the business and fuel our bottom line growth. And then commensurately in last year and this year in this plan, we will continue to invest in pioneering innovation, strong commercial activation to drive volume and mix. And then on top of that, we expect to see some SG and A leverage through our Wiring for Growth initiative this year. Again, we're feeling very good about overall the productivity and our visibility into it.

Your next question for today is from Steve Powers with Deutsche Bank.

Just to put a I wouldn't really want to ask about SG and A, but just to put a little fine point on what Rob was asking about. So it sounds like the on PNOC specifically, just given that it's going to be a volume driven year on the top line, and I'm assuming there's some cost inflation, it seems like you're going to have to overcome some net negative PNOC on the year.

But tell me if that's the wrong read from what you said there, Nick?

Yes. Probably that's not probably not what we meant to convey, but maybe Yes.

So maybe just to unpack on costs, because I think it's important to give kind of our view on costs for the year. So we in December, we shared that for 2025, we'd expect the costs to remain relatively muted and manageable. And our expectation for 2025 is that cost will be still elevated and on an aggregate basis including currency, we expect to be at around a $200,000,000 level, which is largely in line with what we saw in 2024. So it is within the levels that we would consider manageable, in what we've got. In terms of pricing net of cost to your specific questions, we still expect our teams to manage pricing net of cost neutral.

At times, we will make strategic decisions around price back architectures or competitive elements where we'll make some tactical investments. But it is our expectations that teams will drive over time lower total delivered costs. That's one of the key premises of Power and Care and why we've re segmented the company the way we did it so that we can drive the lowest possible cost in each of our products globally, while we drive the best performing products in each of our categories. But that's just to clarify on the peanut. Steve?

Yes. And then maybe Steve, sorry, I'll just pile on. Just to give you some context of how we're thinking about it. I mean and I think we've kind of moved through this period of what we internally call it inflation super cycle, right, where the company took on record inflation over a couple of years. I think we've moved past that.

And so starting last year and definitely this year, we're very, very focused on volume plus mix driven growth. And then while maintaining PNOC discipline. So that's kind of the thing, which is, hey, we definitely see that pricing to offset inflation or the inflation super cycle has kind of receded as we all expected. But we think going forward and this is what Nelson is trying to communicate, which is maintaining that discipline in PNOC going forward, it's going to remain important. Right now, again, as I just said earlier, we feel like we have good visibility on our costs, but we definitely believe that pricing net of commodity and cost needs to be positive over the long term.

And then so I think we have good visibility in costs and then we have a very good commercial toolkit. We've invested a lot in the analytical tools to toolkit. We've invested a lot in the analytical tools to support our revenue growth management capability and so we feel confident in that. But really the near term focus is on driving volume and mix through the pioneering innovation and great commercial activation. And just

to add there, Steve, keep in mind the productivity plan that we're running right now. So we expect productivity to also be a contributor and an offset as an integrated part of integrated margin management for this year at least in the 5% range, which will be another strong year of productivity in 2025.

Yes. And actually that segues into my main question because it feels like this year a lot of the overall productivity savings that will enable underlying profit growth to hit that high single digit run rate on a constant currency basis. It seems like a lot of that's going to come from SG and A. So could you give us a bit more detail on the sources and timing of that productivity, your line of sight to achieving it cleanly and your confidence to be able to kind of get there without having to walk back some of the value add investments that you made in 2024? Thank you.

Yes. Okay, Steve. Maybe I'll start with an overall perspective on marketing and then ask Nelson to comment specifically on the SG and A program. But I'd say overall, we're very comfortable with our current investment level in marketing. We're comfortable investing more to support faster, more profitable growth also, right.

And to give you a little more perspective, our advertising spend has more than doubled since 2018 and we feel like we've gotten very strong returns on those investments. We closed last year or 2024 at what I would say is a healthy 6.5%. And Patricia Corsi, our new Chief Growth Officer, she's really, really here focused on helping us become world class brand storytellers. And so under her direction, we're doing a lot of things to improve our creative. One of an important one is we're consolidating our agency partners both behind creative and the media side and that's going to both improve the content that we have and also the efficiency in spending.

So with that setup, I'd say we're expecting to spend at a similar level in 2025 and we feel good about that. And as we drive additional productivity, we're going to continue to look for opportunities to spend more.

Yes. And as it relates to the overhead savings in particular, when we were at our Investor Day on March 27, we said that our plan was to deliver as we went through our Power and Care program around $200,000,000 of SG and A savings. And they'd kick in once we were fully operational under our new segment structure. And that happened in Q4 of 2024. So we went live with the 3 new segments on October 1 and our organizational changes are pretty much in place as we speak.

So we expect those SG and A savings to your point to begin to kick in, in a material manner in 2025 and that's built into our outlook. So we said it will take us around 2 years for that to materialize. So this would be the 1st of the 2 years where we would begin to see those savings flowing through. And of course, we will make investments as we create space on the P and L, but we expect that to be part of the rationale of why we expect operating margins in 2025 to grow at a faster pace than gross margins.

Yes. Okay. Very clear, very comprehensive. Thank you both. Appreciate it.

Your next question is from Lauren Lieberman with Barclays.

It's all good. So I wanted to just talk a little bit about sources of growth. So a lot of talk so far on the call about pricing, but one thing that stood out to me this quarter was the volume growth. And China numbers on Personal Care specifically cited in the release, you also had good volume growth in North America and in Personal Care in particular. But I was curious sort of when we can expect to start to see volume growth coming through from other markets because we're very U.

S. And China weighted at the moment. Share gains have continued versus Procter seemingly in those categories just based

on what they've had to say about those businesses. And so

I was just curious, if you could talk a little bit about broadening out sources of volume growth in terms of other geographies, and just any kind of signs of changes in competitive dynamics that you may or may not be seeing? Thanks.

Okay. Thanks for pointing that out and I'll try to answer it. I would say it goes back to maybe a board meeting we had probably about 5 years ago where our discussion internally in the board meeting was, hey, if there are markets we have to win, it is the U. S. And it's China.

And those are our largest markets and are the biggest categories in the world. And so I'd say the good news is, I think we've put our strategic focus there and it's working, right. And so we're really proud of that progress that the organization is making. I'd say though, maybe I'll point out, Lauren, I do think it's a little bit broader than what you're seeing in the U. S.

And China. Maybe I'll just give you some facts. On the share front, we're making progress. And I am pleased with our progress, but not satisfied. Our focus continues to be building superior propositions at every rung of the good, better, best ladder.

And I think that's a unique kind of positioning for us that I think we're really happy to be in that space. As you may have seen, our 2024 weighted share was up about 10 basis points and up and even in about half of our cohorts, but we had very strong improvement in North America with the trend improving as the year went on, especially in diapers, adult and facial tissue. In North America, Personal Care was up 80 basis points in weighted share. Consumer overall was up about 10. And so and importantly, in North America, we were up in 7 out of 8, upper even in 7 of 8 categories.

And then in our focus markets, we felt like there are some pretty solid gains beyond just China. Of course, leading off with China, Huggies was up 200 basis points in the quarter. But in the U. K. For our 3rd consecutive year, Andrex, which is the big bad tissue brand in the U.

K. Was up another 100 basis points. Kleenex in the UK was up almost 400 basis points in share. In the U. S, Kleenex was up almost 400 basis points as well.

And then we had share growth in Australia and Indonesia Feminine Care. And then importantly in diapers in South Korea, which is a big business for us, we were up almost 400 basis points as well. So I think we're seeing pockets of growth. The thing that maybe you're pointing to Lauren is and it does kind of it's why we're doing the reorganization that we're doing. I mean the whole point of our new operating model is we want to move faster to implement our global growth playbook.

And we think this rewiring is going to better leverage our scale, brings the best to KC faster and better than any of the individual markets can do on their own. We as I mentioned in our Investor Day, we have great technology in our portfolio that most of the world hasn't seen yet. And so that's kind of why we're doing this organization. And from my chair and I can see what all the teams are doing around the world, I'm seeing the benefits of these focus segments and I'm seeing like us move kind of great ideas faster into different markets. It's also why we're seeing the productivity spike up because we're bringing kind of the big supply chain ideas faster around different parts of organization.

Your next question is from Bonnie Herzog with Goldman Sachs.

Good morning. I was hoping to get some color on phasing this year. There are several moving parts, including the impact from potential retailer destocking, FX, your private label exit, etcetera.

you. I don't know if we just left. Holly, are we still on?

Maybe, Nelson, you want to answer phasing and then

And then we can follow-up when she gets back.

Okay. So let me unpack, 2024 and the phasing that we saw because clearly in 2024, we did see a series of one time factors that led to sales not necessarily tracking what you would have seen on the consumer offtake, which by the way for the year in North America was higher than our sell in. And it also had an impact on the phasing of earnings across the year. I do think that it is we need to recognize what our teams did across the year to manage through all these factors and still manage to deliver a solid full year that was ahead of our algorithm that we had set out back at the beginning of the year. By far the most notable item that we faced last year was the retail inventory reductions, largely in the U.

S. And as a reminder, the impact from changes in inventory on organic growth in any given period is really a change on change. And it's a function of shipments versus consumption in the prior year versus what's transcended this year. In 2024, between the restocking that we saw in 2023 and as a reminder in Q3 of 2020 3 is when our supply chain largely normalized in the U. S.

And got back to full supply. And the trade destock that we saw throughout 2024 as our service levels came up to the necessary levels where we needed to be operated, that led to a total enterprise impact on the year of around 60 basis points to full year sales. And it was largely concentrated in the 1st 3 quarters of the year, but it caused some hiccups at least on the reported organic growth that you would have seen, not on the consumption. If we think about 2025, which is the phasing you were asking Bonnie, a few things to keep in mind. The assuming that shipments are in line with our consumption for the year, we should see less than a 40 basis point tailwind in 2025 versus 2024 in light of the changes in the trade stocks that we lap.

So that would be built in into our outlook. And the important thing to highlight is that our growth is going to be volume and mix driven all across the year. So that's one of the bits to keep in mind as you look at the phasing. We are planning to build on share momentum, which we saw in 2024. And again, as a reminder, that was a 10 basis point share gain movement gain that we saw in 2024 and we expect that to be at least at that level if not to accelerate in our outlook.

In terms of overall P and L, we expect revenue, sales to be largely evenly distributed first half, second half and our view on profits is more or less the same as well. We expect that to be more evenly distributed in 2025 than what you would have seen in 20 24.

Kimberly-Clark (KMB) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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