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Text: These are important to review and contemplate.
As everyone on the call today is well aware, business environment uncertainty remains heightened due to COVID-19 and continues to have numerous potential impacts.
This means the results could change at any time, and the forecasted impact of risk considerations is the best estimate based on the information available as of today's date.
Additional information concerning risk factors and cautionary statements are available in our most recent SEC filings and most recent company 10-K.
I'll now hand it over to our CEO, Ron Lombardi.
Let's begin on slide five.
We are very pleased with our record start to the year.
Our proven business strategy emphasizing brand building paid off meaningfully in Q1, and the strong results we'll discuss in detail are a key factor enabling us to raise our fiscal year guidance.
The fast start to our fiscal '22 was driven by two primary factors.
First, and most importantly, our base business continues to perform well with strong 5% growth across the base portfolio.
This result was driven by solid consumption and share gains across the portfolio, a continuation of the trends we have seen for a while now.
Second, we experienced a dramatic increase in sales for brands benefiting from travel-related activity as consumers shifted habits with increased vaccination rates.
We estimate this accounted for approximately $25 million of the Q1 sales increase over the prior year.
I'll discuss the change in consumer habits in greater detail on the next slide.
Our time-tested brand-building strategy and the reacceleration of certain categories and channels resulted in our highest level of sales ever when excluding our divested Household Cleaning business.
Meanwhile, our financial profile has remained solid throughout the change in consumer purchasing patterns, and we generated record earnings per share of $1.14 and free cash flow of approximately $68 million in Q1.
Our stable and strong cash flow profile continues to enable a disciplined capital allocation strategy.
Throughout fiscal '21, this meant focusing on debt reduction combined with share repurchases.
In Q1, we announced the acquisition of Akorn Consumer Health and its TheraTears brand, which closed on July 1.
We believe this acquisition is a great strategic use of capital, which we'll share more detail on shortly.
So in summary, we delivered excellent Q1 results underpinned by our long-term strategy and further fueled by a rebound in certain COVID-impacted categories and channels.
Let's turn to page six and review some of the changing consumer habits resulting from the pandemic.
Throughout all of fiscal '21, we noted dramatic ways in which consumer habits changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting effects on our portfolio.
We observed less consumer travel and more focus on hygiene as consumers stayed home and wear masks.
This meant a significant headwind for many of our brands, including Dramamine in motion sickness, Chloraseptic and Luden's in cough/cold, Hydralyte in rehydration and Nix in head lice.
Combined, these brands represent about 20% of our revenues.
Back in May, when we provided fiscal '22 guidance, we anticipated this portion of our portfolio would be largely flat as we expected consumers would take time to move away from the habits formed over the previous year.
While this is still the case in certain categories, this assumption proved conservative in others.
To start, we saw a dramatic rebound in travel-related activity.
This drove a meaningful recovery in Dramamine along with a recovery in our Australian Hydralyte business.
The recovery in travel activity also drove increases in convenience store consumption and the distributor inventory in this channel to support the increased takeaway at shelf.
This benefited brands like Dramamine as well as Clear Eyes with it's Pocket Pal on-the-go offering.
In addition, drug retailer traffic also increased owing to vaccination visits, leading to a strong consumption trends driven by our broad distribution and market share in this channel.
As these changes to consumer habits continue to evolve, our playbook remains the same and our nimble business strategy is a strength.
We will invest opportunistically across our portfolio to drive long-term brand building.
This strategy paid off again in Q1.
On the right, you see Dramamine with Q1 sales compared to prior years.
As consumer travel habits begin to accelerate, we leaned into our leading market position and marketing playbook.
We reactivated time-tested marketing strategies for the brand, resulting in both market share wins and the resumption of sales growth as consumers returned to the category.
While the timing of a full COVID recovery remains difficult to predict, our focus on investing behind our brands leaves us well positioned for future variability and the eventual return to more normalized trends.
As highlighted earlier, we closed on the announced Akorn Consumer Health acquisition on July 1.
As you can see on the left side of the page, the portfolio's revenues are concentrated in the TheraTears brand.
TheraTears, created in the '90s, has a proven history in the eye care category and will further enhance our efforts in this space.
The addition will be complementary to our existing eye care presence by expanding into the growing dry eye segment of eye care.
TheraTears is well positioned with the mild and episodic dry eye consumer with a long track record of steady market share gains and revenue growth above the category.
The portfolio complements Prestige's operating model nicely with outsourced manufacturing and is widely distributed across retail channels in the U.S., similar to our existing business.
Lastly, the Akorn portfolio has a solid financial profile of sales growth and margins consistent with Prestige's long-term targets.
So in summary, these attributes are a great match against our well-defined M&A criteria that evaluates brand opportunity, the business' fit with the Prestige operating model and the financial returns that align with hurdle rates that we measure against.
Strategically, TheraTears fits with our disciplined M&A criteria nicely.
But furthermore, as shown on this slide, it is a great fit alongside our Clear Eyes brand.
The transaction enhances our market-leading scale in eye care.
When combined with our existing eye care business, we now have a $100 million-plus franchise that addresses a range of consumer ailments across the $1 billion category.
Clear Eyes is time-tested and proven as a leader in redness relief and has a long heritage with consumers.
For a consumer, it stands for redness solution.
Clear Eyes remains a leader in the category with long-term sales growth and is a brand that remains as relevant as ever to consumers seeking redness relief.
TheraTears share similar attributes but is focused on a different consumer symptom.
It's established with consumers as a leader in dry eye solutions, particularly for those episodic users in dry eye relief.
For a consumer, it stands for tears and soothing eye relief.
As shown on the right, the two brands in totality represent a wide spectrum of consumer solutions in eye care.
This broad offering will continue to be supported by our brand-building strategy.
And with this comprehensive solution in eye care, we are well positioned for continued success.
Clear Eyes is a great brand success story and one that gives us an advantaged start as experts in the eye care category.
A brand we've owned since our IPO over 15 years ago, Clear Eyes is an example of how we think about long-term brand-building.
Its success has incorporated a number of marketing factors over time.
When we went public, Clear Eyes had about three SKUs with a very narrow focus.
Today, we have over 11 different solutions for consumers solving eye redness.
The most recent example shown here is Clear Eye Sensitive, which is specifically formulated for sensitive eyes.
These are constantly evolving, and most importantly, we emphasize a bottom-up approach to enable effective tactics at a given point in time.
For example, brand messaging evolved during the pandemic to emphasize the concept of at-home usage and used time-tested digital tactics, which helped grow share in the year.
We know from consumer insights that consumers respond to celebrity and influencer marketing in eye care.
As a result, we've had many long-term successful initiatives from spokespersons like Ben Stein and Vanessa Williams to more recent social media influencers.
The result of these efforts is we have broad distribution across retail channels with partners who recognize the value of Clear Eyes brand and the investment efforts we just discussed.
We continue to work with all of our retail partners to optimize their eye care assortment and drive long-term category growth.
The result is clear: our playbook continues to work, and we continue to win share to date in fiscal '22.
We look forward to applying this proven knowledge base to the TheraTears brand and drive continued long-term success across our eye care franchise.
With that, I'll turn it to Chris, who will walk through Q1 financials.
Q1 revenue of $269.2 million increased 17.3% and 15.6% on an organic basis versus the prior year, the latter excluding the effect of foreign currency.
As a reminder, Q1 faced a unique comparison in the year prior, where we experienced lower sales as consumers depleted items previously purchased in March 2020 as a result of COVID-19.
North America revenues were up about 15%.
Nearly all product categories grew with the largest increases in GI and eye and ear care.
As Ron discussed earlier, a return toward more normalized travel trends helped drive a significant lift for certain brands versus a year ago, namely, Dramamine in GI and Clear Eyes in eye and ear care.
International OTC increased approximately 30% in Q1 after excluding the effects of foreign currency.
The increase was attributable to a more favorable comparison in the prior year as well as an overall uptick of Hydralyte sales for more normalized consumer trends around illness and activities in Australia.
EBITDA increased in Q1, approximately 13% while EBITDA margin remained consistent with our long-term expectations in the mid-30s.
Diluted earnings per share for the quarter was a record $1.14 per share, up over 30% versus the prior year driven by both the higher sales discussed and lower interest expense.
Q1 fiscal '22 revenues increased 17% versus the prior year.
Our strong and diverse portfolio experienced approximately 5% baseline growth driven by the favorable year ago comparison and our long-term brand-building efforts.
In addition, we experienced a sharp rebound in certain COVID-impacted categories, adding an estimated $25 million to our Q1 revenue performance.
Of this, we believe roughly half of this relates to timing while the other half resulted from increased consumption in the current quarter.
We also continued to experience year-over-year double-digit consumption growth in the e-commerce channel, further building off the sharply higher online purchasing shift of the prior year.
Total company gross margin of 59.1% in the first quarter increased 70 basis points versus last year's gross margin of 58.4%.
This strength was driven by higher-than-expected sales performance as well as product mix.
We continue to anticipate a gross margin of about 58% for fiscal '22.
Advertising and marketing came in at 14.7% for the first fiscal quarter.
Following the abnormally low rate of spend in Q1 of last year due to COVID-19 shelter-in-place restrictions, A&M returned to normalized levels of spend of approximately 14% to 16%.
For fiscal '22, we still anticipate an approximate 15% A&M rate as a percentage of sales.
And for Q2, we anticipate A&M of closer to 14%.
G&A expenses were just over 8% of sales in Q1.
For the full year fiscal '22, we still anticipate G&A expenses to approximate just over 9% of sales.
G&A dollars are likely to be the highest for the year in Q2, owing to the timing of certain expenses.
Lastly, record diluted earnings per share of $1.14 grew 32.5% over the prior year.
Higher sales and lower interest expense drove this growth.
Looking forward, we now anticipate interest for the full year to approximate $63 million, reflecting the recent financing completed in conjunction with the TheraTears acquisition.
In Q1, we generated $67.8 million in free cash flow, down versus the prior year due entirely to the timing of working capital.
We continue to maintain industry-leading free cash flow and are raising our outlook for the year.
At June 30, our net debt was approximately $1.4 billion, inclusive of the cash we built ahead of the anticipated acquisition closing on July 1.
Following the acquisition of Akorn, our net debt at July one was approximately $1.6 billion.
The acquisition was funded from cash on hand, our ABL revolver and our term loan, which we simultaneously amended and now matures in calendar 2028.
Our covenant-defined leverage ratio was 4.3 times at the closing of the transaction, and we anticipate leverage of approximately four times by year-end fiscal '22.
Over the last year, we faced an unprecedented and dynamic environment.
The many positive attributes of our business and our execution leave us well positioned moving forward.
This is evidenced by our strong Q1 results, where our long-term brand-building efforts paid off in a big way.
For the full year fiscal '22, we now anticipate revenues of $1.045 billion or more, which includes an organic revenue growth expectation of about 6% and the revenue from the acquisition of the Akorn Consumer Health.
For the second quarter, we anticipate revenues of $260 million or more.
This revenue outlook assumes a few key factors: one, that the travel-impacted portion of our business will continue at the recovered levels for the remainder of the year; two, we still anticipate flat sales to prior year in the cough and cold and head lice areas of our business; and three, the acquisition of the Akorn portfolio discussed today should contribute approximately $40 million to the fiscal year net sales.
We anticipate adjusted earnings per share of $3.90 or more for fiscal '22.
For Q2, adjusted earnings per share is expected to be $0.95 or more.
These attributes translate into strong free cash flow as well, where we anticipate adjusted free cash flow of $245 million or more for the year.

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q1 earnings per share $1.14.
q1 revenue $269.2 million versus refinitiv ibes estimate of $232.4 million.
raising full-year fiscal 2022 outlook.
sees 2022 adjusted earnings per share $3.90 or more.

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