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Text: This quarter, the battery category information includes both brick-and-mortar and e-commerce retail sales.
In our first quarter, strong demand, expanded distribution and execution in the holiday season led to a solid start to our fiscal year.
While the operating environment remains challenging, our first quarter results are a testament to our team's preparation, resilience and commitment.
Before I go into detail on the quarter, there are three key points to take away from our call today.
First, our team delivered in the critical holiday season and our categories remain strong.
Second, we continue to manage through a very challenging cost environment with increases in transportation, commodity and labor costs, as well as ongoing supply chain disruption.
And third, as a result of our additional pricing actions and cost containment measures, we are reaffirming our outlook for net sales, adjusted earnings per share and adjusted EBITDA for the full year.
As we look specifically at the results for the quarter, we maintained strength in our top line, delivering revenue of $846 million.
This was roughly flat to prior year on an organic basis.
Global price increases and expanded distribution in the battery business were offset by an expected decline in volumes as we comped elevated COVID demand from the prior year.
Adjusted gross margin decreased 320 basis points as increased input costs were partially offset by price increases, synergies and the comping of prior year COVID costs.
On a sequential basis, gross margin was roughly flat to the prior quarter, consistent with our view for the start of the year.
With our solid topline performance and lower interest expense, we partially offset the gross margin decline and delivered adjusted earnings per share of $1.03 in the quarter.
Before John provides more details on the quarter, I want to provide some additional color on the performance of our categories, the rising cost environment, the resiliency of our supply chain and other actions we have taken to operate with excellence in an uncertain environment.
First, our categories remain healthy with both battery and auto care showing robust demand versus pre-pandemic levels.
Specifically, the battery category benefited from two drivers: the increase in devices owned per household And an increase in usage of those devices, resulting in higher battery replacement frequency.
These trends have resulted in consumers using more batteries.
On a two-year stack basis, the global battery category has grown by 9.7% in value and 7.8% in volume.
As anticipated, we saw the category decline in the three months ending November 2021, which was down 3.5% in value and 8.4% in volume.
This was due to comping elevated demand in the prior year.
As we look to the long term, we anticipate category value to experience flat to low single-digit growth off a higher base.
as the category has increased in size due to consumers' behavior during the pandemic.
being the key driver.
As we turn to the auto care category in the latest 13 weeks, category value was up 9% versus a year ago and 20.6% on a two-year stack basis.
As with batteries, the growth is being driven by changing consumer behavior, including do-it-yourself habits, which were established during the pandemic, such as higher levels of cleaning and renewed interest in car care as a hobby, a higher number of cars in the car park and an increase in the age of vehicles given the shortage of new vehicles and a recovery in miles driven given the increase in personal travel by car.
As we look ahead, we anticipate that auto care category value will grow at low single digits once it has cycled through the COVID-related demand.
Energizer continues to be a leader in the auto care category through our strong portfolio of brands.
Specifically in appearance, the largest subsegment in which we compete, our Armor All brand outpaced the category in the U.S. due to distribution gains and the strength of our innovation.
In addition, our international auto care growth plan has resulted in growth ahead of the category in key markets, including Australia, Germany, New Zealand, the U.K., and Mexico.
While our categories are healthy, the macro environment in which we are operating, remains difficult.
This leads me to the next important topic, operating costs.
Commodities, transportation and labor costs continue to rise, resulting in increased cost pressures that are incremental to the outlook we provided in November.
We have moved quickly to offset these pressures through additional pricing actions, cost reduction initiatives and improved mix management.
Pricing actions in both our segments were announced within the last couple of weeks and are incremental to the increases discussed in November.
They will become effective late in the second quarter for North America and in the third quarter for international markets.
We expect the cumulative effect of these actions to offset the inflationary cost pressures on a dollar basis.
In addition to inflationary pressures, the global supply chain network remains stressed from pandemic-related disruptions, which includes port congestion and transportation delays, as well as availability challenges with respect to labor, sourced product and raw materials.
As a result of this dynamic, we took a proactive approach by investing in incremental inventory in the prior year and also in the current quarter.
This decision paid dividends as we were positioned to meet our customers and consumers' needs and delivered a successful first quarter.
We expect to operate with elevated safety stock for the foreseeable future while we monitor the supply network for signs of stability.
As you can see, the business is operating on solid footing and the underpinnings of our categories remain healthy, and in a stronger position than before the pandemic.
Even with the difficulties we experienced, we delivered strong results and are on track to deliver another successful year.
Before expanding on the financial highlights, I would like to point out that our segment reporting has changed from two geographical segments to two product line segments.
Going forward, our two segments will be battery and lighting products and auto care, more accurately reflecting how we manage the operations.
Now, turning to our results.
Reported and organic revenues were both essentially flat.
In battery and lights, strong demand and solid execution resulted in a modest decline in organic sales, while auto care continued its strong performance with organic growth of 1.3%.
Pricing actions globally delivered roughly 2% growth and additional distribution contributed another 1%.
Offsetting these gains was a decrease in replenishment volumes driven by the timing of COVID-related demand in the prior year.
As a reminder, we executed price increases in our battery segment in the first quarter of this year, and we have taken pricing in auto care in both the second and third quarters of the prior year.
The impact of these pricing actions was reflected in our initial outlook for this year.
As Mark mentioned, we experienced significant incremental cost pressures during the first quarter and moved quickly to implement additional pricing that will benefit the second half of fiscal 2022.
Sequentially, adjusted gross margin was roughly flat versus the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 as we expected.
However, adjusted gross margin decreased 320 basis points to 37.5% versus the first quarter of 2021 as pricing, lower COVID-related costs and synergies were offset by more than 700 basis points of margin erosion from inflationary cost pressures.
This quarter also marks the conclusion of the integration of our battery and auto acquisitions.
The successful integration positions us well to focus on continuous improvement initiatives to offset inflationary pressures going forward.
A&P as a percent of sales was 6.1% versus 5.8% in the prior year as a result of planned increased spend.
We remain committed to investing in our brands for the long-term health of our businesses.
Excluding acquisition and integration costs, SG&A as a percentage of net sales was roughly flat at 13.2% but declined $2 million on an absolute basis as lower compensation expense was partially offset by increased travel and higher IT spending related to our digital transformation.
Looking at segment profit.
Both battery and lights and auto care benefited from continued strong demand, pricing actions and distribution gains.
However, the inflationary input cost pressures more than offset the stronger-than-expected top line performance.
This impact flowed through to the bottom line for each business, resulting in a segment profit decline of $12 million for battery and $18 million in auto care.
Interest expense was $37 million or $10.3 million lower than the prior year, reflecting the benefits of significant refinancing activity of our debt capital structure over the past year.
We expect a similar quarterly run rate for interest expense over the remainder of the year.
I would also like to point out changes to our shares outstanding for the quarter and the remainder of the year.
In the first quarter, we completed the accelerated share repurchase program that was announced last August.
The total number of shares purchased under this program was nearly 2 million.
Additionally, on January 18, our mandatory convertible preferred stock converted to approximately 4.7 million common shares.
Absent any additional share repurchase, weighted average shares outstanding for the remainder of the year will be approximately 72.
As we look at our outlook for 2022, we are facing a number of gross margin headwinds.
We continue to experience significant cost pressures in transportation, driven primarily by the global backlog of ocean freight.
In addition, labor availability is a major challenge across most U.S. sites, pressuring rates.
And finally, many commodity markets remain at all-time highs impacting our raw material costs.
Through a combination of pricing actions, improved mix management and cost reduction efforts, we expect to offset the absolute dollar amount for these rising costs.
However, due to the lag in timing between the recognition of these higher costs, and the successful rollout of our pricing actions and cost reduction efforts, we expect as much as 50 basis points of additional gross margin pressure to impact us for the full year 2022.
This is incremental to the 150 basis points provided in our outlook in November.
We expect to see the most significant impact to gross margin in our second fiscal quarter as we will absorb the full effect of these costs without the offset from our incremental pricing position.
With the benefit of the actions we are taking now, we expect gross margin to recover in the back half of the year.
Given the continued strength of demand in our categories and our efforts to offset the majority of these headwinds through pricing and cost reduction initiatives, we are maintaining our fiscal 2022 outlook for roughly flat net sales, adjusted earnings per share in the range of $3 to $3.30, and adjusted EBITDA of $560 million to $590 million.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the call, our team delivered well in the critical holiday season and our categories performed well globally.
Like many companies, we also continue to face a rising cost environment and supply chain disruption.
Given these conditions, we are taking aggressive action to offset the most recent cost escalation, including an additional recently announced pricing action in North America battery and auto care.
We remain confident in our outlook for the year reflected in our reaffirmation of our guidance for net sales, adjusted earnings per share and adjusted EBITDA.
I am incredibly proud of our team to continue to operate with excellence and deliver on our priorities and commitments.

user
q1 adjusted earnings per share $1.03.
reaffirms fiscal year outlook for net sales, adjusted earnings per share and adjusted ebitda.
had a strong start to year driven by resilient demand, increased distribution, pricing actions and improved fill rates.
improved inventory planning and supply chain durability enabled co to deliver in quarter.
continue to see escalating input cost pressures in transportation, labor and materials.

assistant