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Text: Additionally, David Bray, group president, poultry; Noelle O'Mara, group president, prepared foods; Shane Miller, group president, fresh meat; and Chris Langholz, group president, international, will join the live Q&A session.
Earlier today, we announced our first quarter fiscal 2022 results.
Tyson Foods once again delivered strong financial results.
At our Investor Day, I shared our plan to grow our top and bottom lines aggressively over the next three years.
This meant earnings per share growth of high single digits relative to a 2019 baseline and volume growth ahead of the market.
Our results this quarter put us firmly on that path.
We achieved double-digit sales and earnings growth, both of which were driven by ongoing demand strength, productivity savings, and improving execution across our segments.
Our diverse protein portfolio, omnichannel capabilities, leading brands, and value-added products contributed to our results.
Strong performance in our beef segment, earlier-than-expected recovery in prepared foods, and improvement in chicken and pork all supported strong earning results.
Our retail core business lines, which include our iconic brands, Tyson, Jimmy Dean, Hillshire Farm, and Ball Park maintain their volume share position even as we work through price increases to address inflationary pressure.
And our foodservice Focus 6 product lines grew share year over year in broad-line distribution.
This growth was driven in large part by value-added chicken, which outperformed industry recovery and breakfast sausage where we were seeing improved fill rates.
Importantly, and despite the continued impact of COVID-19, our volumes improved slightly across the company relative to the same quarter last year.
Chicken was a bright spot, where we saw our volumes improved 3.6%.
While this is a good start, we are not where we want to be on volume.
So we're taking actions segment by segment to improve our volume performance.
These actions include investing in our team members, in additional capacity, and in brands and product innovation.
As discussed at Investor Day, we are also in the process of building 12 new plants.
Each of these is progressing and each will enable Tyson to address capacity constraints and meet the growing global demand for protein.
Bottom line, we're committed to improving our total company volumes during the year.
We're also making sure that our pricing incorporates inflationary cost pressures on our business.
In the quarter, our cost of goods sold was up 18% relative to the same period last year.
We are seeing higher costs across our supply chain, including higher input costs, such as feed and ingredients.
We're also managing the higher cost of labor, transportation due to strong demand and limited availability.
With these higher costs, we work closely with our customers to achieve a fair value for our products.
As a result, our average sales price for the quarter increased 19.6% relative to the same period last year.
This helped us capture some of the unrecovered costs due to the timing lag between inflation and price.
Finally, our balance sheet and overall liquidity position are strong, providing optionality to pursue strategic growth priorities and invest in growth across our portfolio.
We have a disciplined approach to deploying capital to support capacity expansion while achieving improved returns on invested capital.
Our first-quarter results clearly demonstrate that we are making progress on our growth objectives, that we remain focused on outpacing the overall market, improving operating margins, and driving strong returns for our shareholders.
While we're growing our business, we are mindful of our corporate responsibilities around environment, social, and governance goals.
For example, we committed to investing in and supporting our communities in rural America and around the world.
Last year, Tyson Foods donated more than 16 million pounds of protein, the equivalent of 64 million meals to fight hunger.
We're incredibly proud of this work and the people that make it possible.
Tyson is a great company with a great team doing great things, and I'm pleased that this was recognized just last week by Fortune Magazine, who announced that for the sixth year in a row, Tyson Foods was No.
1 in our sector in their rankings of the world's most admired companies.
Now let's look at a few financial highlights from the first quarter.
Our results included double-digit top and bottom-line growth.
We delivered solid operating income performance, up 40% for the quarter.
This performance was broad-based across segments where continued strong consumer demand and effective pricing to mitigate the impact of inflation drove higher earnings.
On volume, we are up slightly.
And while we're working to achieve optimal throughput across our segments, labor challenges are still impacting our volumes and the ability to achieve optimal mix across our network.
Compared to pre-pandemic levels, our volume performance is outpacing our peer set.
In retail, despite substantial market pressures, core business lines held share in the first quarter, led by strong performance in lunch meat, hotdogs, snacking, and bacon.
We also realized strong e-commerce results with Tyson Foods outpacing total food and beverage growth in our core lines gaining share in the quarter.
Still, customer demand continues to outpace our ability to supply products.
So we have targeted actions in each segment to improve volumes.
This is key to delivering on our commitments.
To realize our volume goals, we must be able to fully staff our plants across the company.
We continue to take meaningful action toward becoming the most sought-after place to work.
For example, we provided our hourly team members with more than $50 million in bonuses during the first quarter.
We are piloting subsidized and on-site child care and we are adjusting schedules to flex with workforce needs.
These actions are bearing fruit as we see some improvement on the labor front.
And while we have seen some labor challenges during the omicron surge, we are generally seeing lower turnover in absenteeism.
We saw chicken volumes grow 3.6% in the quarter, driven by strong fundamental demand and improved live production.
What is important to note is that we grew ahead of the market and gained market share.
In prepared foods, volumes were down 2.6% in the first quarter.
About half of the decline was related to pet treats divestiture.
We expect to sequentially improve these results over the remainder of fiscal year '22 as we take actions to expand and improve capacity utilization.
In beef, volumes were down 6.2%, driven by labor shortages previously mentioned.
In addition, port congestion has also dipped in export volumes in the segment.
We expect these headwinds on volume to normalize over the course of fiscal 2022.
In pork, we have sequentially improved our capacity utilization.
We are still working to optimize the mix.
In international/other, while we are starting from a relatively small base, our investment in capacity, innovation, and brands are supporting our market share growth objective.
Overall, we expect to grow our total company volumes by 2% to 3% in FY '22, outpacing protein consumption growth.
Chicken remains a top priority and we continue to execute against our road map to achieve an operating income margin of 5% to 7% on a run-rate basis by mid-fiscal '22.
I remain confident we will meet this goal.
In the first quarter, we've started to see profitability improvement resulting from our actions.
For example, we're investing aggressively in automation and technology to help us address some of the most hard-to-fill roles.
This is not a series of projects but is a well-planned program with automation designed to use common designs and equipment across our plants to optimize cost, maintenance, and asset utilization.
The second imperative is to improve operational performance and critical to improving performance is maximizing our fixed cost leverage, which means having enough furs to run our plants full.
Since September, we've seen an improvement in our hatch rate ahead of our expectations.
We continue to expect full recovery in this year.
We were pleased with our volume growth in the quarter and expect further improvements as we grow our harvest capacity utilization from an average of 37 million head per week in FY '21 to 40 million head per week by year end.
We've noted previously that strength in spot prices for commodity chicken products put our buy versus grow program at a relative disadvantage.
We have reduced our reliance on outside meat accordingly.
We will staff our plants, service our customers, grow our volumes and be the best in the business.
The plan we have continues to be the right plan and our commitment to winning with our team members, winning with our customers and consumers, and winning with operational excellence is delivering results.
Last year, we announced the launch of a new productivity program designed to drive a better, faster, more agile organization that is supported by a culture of continuous improvement and faster decision-making.
The program aims to deliver $1 billion in recurring productivity savings by the end of fiscal '24 relative to a fiscal 2021 cost baseline and has three critical focus areas, which are operational and functional excellence, digital solutions, and automation.
We're making some good progress on this front.
I spoke just a minute ago about our investments in automation, but we've also attacked other issues.
In Prepared Foods, we're making use of supply chain, digitization, and advanced analytics.
Our digital manufacturing platform allows us to analyze real-time data to take actions to optimize process conditions that drive better yields, lower costs, consistent quality, and increased output.
In transportation and logistics, we have established ongoing optimization of the mix and allocation of our private fleet, dedicated fleet, and third-party fleet, mitigating inflationary pressures and supporting better on-time deliveries to our customers.
In addition, we continued the expansion of our direct shipment program, reducing miles driven, and product touches in our supply chain.
As a result of projects like these, we're on track to deliver $300 million to $400 million of savings in fiscal 2022.
We shared at our Investor Day that we are taking actions to accelerate our growth and drive disciplined return on invested capital.
The five imperatives on this slide show how we will achieve our commitments and drive value creation.
This starts first with our commitment to our team members with a focus on ensuring their health, safety, and well-being as well as ensuring an inclusive and equitable work environment.
We are proud of our COVID-19 vaccine policy implemented last year in the U.S. and of the broader investments that we have made to keep our team members, their families, and our communities safe.
Because of our policy, our team members are better protected and the cases we do see have been mild or asymptomatic, resulting in an extremely low number of hospitalizations.
We are strongly encouraging boosters and are hosting clinics to make it easier for our team members and their families to get boosted.
Second, we are working to enhance our portfolio and capacity to better address demand.
This includes increasing the contribution of branded and value-added sales.
As a result, we expect our volume to outpace this growing market.
Third, we are aggressively restoring competitiveness in our chicken segment.
This starts by returning our operating margin to the 5% to 7% level by the middle of fiscal 2022.
Fourth, we're driving operational and functional excellence and investing in digital and automation initiatives.
This is at the heart of our new productivity program.
We're working diligently to drive out waste, minimize bureaucracy and enhance decision-making speed across the organization.
Fifth, to address projected demand growth over the next decade, we are using our financial strength to invest in our business.
On capital alone, we're expected to invest $2 billion in fiscal year '22 with a disproportionate share focused on new capacity and automation objectives.
And we continue to return cash to shareholders.
During the quarter, we returned over $500 million in dividends and share repurchases.
To wrap it up, we are committed to winning with our team members, customers, and consumers as well as winning with operational excellence.
I'm more excited about the future of Tyson Foods with each passing day.
Let me turn first to a summary of our total company financial results.
We're pleased to report a strong overall start to the year.
Our sales were up approximately 24% in the first quarter, largely a function of our pricing initiatives to offset inflationary pressures.
Volumes were also up slightly, although impacted by continued labor challenges.
Looking at our sales results by channel, retail drove almost $350 million of top-line improvements versus last year.
Improvements in sales through the foodservice channel drove an increase of $1 billion and our export sales were nearly $333 million stronger than the prior-year period as we leveraged our global scale to grow our business.
First-quarter operating income of $1.4 billion was up 40% relative to the same quarter last year due to increased earnings in beef, pork, and chicken.
Driven by the strength in operating income, first-quarter earnings per share grew 48% to $2.87.
Higher operating income led to higher adjusted earnings per share compared to the same period last year.
And first-quarter earnings per share also benefited from lower net interest expense and taxes.
Slide 10 bridges year-to-date operating income, which was $407 million higher than fiscal 2021.
Volumes were up slightly during the year, primarily a result of improvement in chicken, pork, and international/other, offset by declines in beef and prepared foods.
Declines in beef and prepared foods were largely due to continued labor challenges in those segments.
Our pricing actions led to approximately $2.1 billion in sales and price/mix benefits during the quarter.
which offset the higher cost of goods sold of $1.6 billion.
We saw continued inflation across the business, in some instances, up 20% to 30%.
Notable examples were labor, grain costs, live cattle and hog costs, and freight costs.
And finally, SG&A was $88 million unfavorable to the same period last year, which was largely a result of cycling a $55 million benefit recorded last year for the recovery of cattle.
Moving to the beef segment.
Segment sales were more than $5 billion for the quarter, up 25% versus the same period last year.
Sales growth was driven by continued strong demand for beef products, which has supported higher average sales price.
Partially offsetting higher sales prices were higher capital costs during the first quarter versus the comparable prior-year period.
We had sufficient livestock available in the quarter driven by strong front-end supplies.
We have good visibility into cattle availability through fiscal year 2022 and continue to expect it will also be sufficient to support our customer needs.
We delivered segment operating income of $956 million, up 81% versus the prior comparable period.
This improvement was driven by strong global demand for beef products and a higher cutout, which were partially offset by higher operating costs.
Our operating margin of 19.1% was notably higher than the same quarter last year but was down on a sequential basis versus the last two quarters as cost increases led to a narrowing of the spread.
Now let's move on to the pork segment on Slide 12.
Segment sales were over $1.6 billion for the quarter, up 13% versus the same period last year.
Key sales drivers for the segment included higher average sales price due to strong demand and increased hog costs, partially offset by a challenging labor environment.
Average sales price increased 12.8% and volumes were slightly higher relative to the same period last year.
Segment operating income was $164 million for the quarter, up 41% versus the comparable period.
Overall, operating margins for the segment improved to 10.1% for the quarter.
The operating income improvement was driven by higher spreads in the business.
Moving now to prepared foods.
Sales were $2.3 billion for the quarter, up 10% relative to the same period last year.
Total volume was down in the quarter with strength in the retail channel and continued recovery in foodservice more than offset by labor and supply chain challenges.
Sales growth outpaced volume growth driven by inflation-justified pricing.
During the quarter, retail core business mines maintained share, driven by consumer demand for our brands and continued strong execution by our team.
Operating margins for the segment were 8% or $186 million for the first quarter.
The decline in segment operating margins versus the same quarter last year was driven by significant increases in raw material and other input costs that we were not able to fully recover through price during the quarter.
Raw material costs, logistics, ingredients, packaging, and labor have increased our cost of production.
Our pricing lagged inflation, but we expect to recover cost increases during fiscal 2022.
In addition to pricing, we've executed productivity, revenue management, and commercial spend optimization initiatives while ensuring the continued development of brand equity through marketing and trade support.
Moving into the chicken segment's results.
Sales were $3.9 billion for the quarter, up 37%.
Volumes improved 3.6% in the quarter due to strong consumer demand and increased life production.
Our teams have been focused on streamlining our plants to deliver higher volumes and we expect to deliver substantial volume improvements in fiscal 2022 as hatch recovers, and we continue to look for ways to operate our plant more efficiently.
Average sales price improved around 20% in the first quarter compared to the same period last year.
This increase is due to favorable product mix and price recovery to offset cost inflation.
On pricing, we made tremendous progress toward driving our pricing mechanisms toward more variable structures and are now seeing those benefits.
We restructured our pricing strategies given our experience in fiscal 2021 to ensure that we have the flexibility to better respond to market and inflationary conditions.
Chicken delivered adjusted operating income of $117 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2022, representing an operating margin of 3%.
Operating income in the quarter was negatively impacted by $185 million of higher feed ingredient costs.
Now turning to Slide 15.
As part of our capital allocation approach, we focused on building financial strength, investing in our business, and returning cash to shareholders.
In pursuit of our priority to build financial strength and flexibility, we used improved earnings to retire debt in fiscal year 2021 and expect to do the same this year.
Continued strength in our earnings this quarter have further improved our leverage ratio to 1.1 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA.
Investing in our business for both organic and inorganic growth will continue to be an important priority and will help Tyson increase production capacity and market capabilities.
This will support strong return generation for our shareholders.
Finally, as our track record has demonstrated, we are committed to returning cash to shareholders through both dividends and share buybacks.
We finished the quarter with a powerful balance sheet and continued capital allocation optionality.
Let's now discuss the fiscal '22 financial outlook.
We are maintaining our total company sales guidance of $49 billion to $51 billion, although we expect to perform at the upper end of the range.
In support of our sales growth, we still expect a 2% to 3% volume growth on a year-over-year basis as we work to optimize our existing footprint and run our plants full.
Looking at AOI margin target ranges for our segments, in chicken, our operational turnaround is working and we still expect to achieve a run rate profitability of 5% to 7% by the middle of the year.
We expect full-year margins that also fall between 5% to 7%.
Prepared foods is expected to deliver margins during fiscal '22 of between 7% and 9%.
Based on our first-quarter performance, we now expect the full-year margin performance in prepared foods to be at the upper end of the range.
In beef, we are maintaining our AOI margin at 9% to 11%, but we expect to perform at the upper end of the range.
Also, we expect the front half of the year to be meaningfully stronger than the back half as industry and labor conditions are expected to normalize partway through the year.
In Pork, we expect similar performance during fiscal '22 to what we accomplished during fiscal '21, equating to a margin of between 5% and 7%.
As is normal seasonality for pork, we expect the first quarter to be the strongest.
In international/other, we expect margins of 2% to 3% as capacity expansions and strong global demand support volume growth and improved profitability.
Consistent with our expectation for a meaningful increase in capex spending to pursue a healthy pipeline of projects with strong return profiles, we anticipate capex spending of approximately $2 billion during fiscal 2022.
We now expect lower net interest expense due to lower anticipated average debt balances during the fiscal year.
Our expectations for productivity savings and tax rate changes remain unchanged.
Our net leverage is expected to remain well below two times net debt-to-adjusted EBITDA, providing optionality for inorganic investment and additional return of cash to shareholders over the course of the year.
In summary, we've had a strong start to the fiscal year.
We have a great team, growing demand for our products, strong portfolio diversity, and the differentiated asset footprint needed to win in the marketplace.
We set out ambitious calls at our Investor Day, and we expect to achieve them.
Operator, please provide the Q&A instruction.

user
compname reports q1 adjusted earnings per share $2.87.
q1 adjusted earnings per share $2.87.
currently on track to achieve our planned productivity savings for fiscal 2022.
expect sales to be at upper end of $49 billion to $51 billion in fiscal 2022.
expect capital expenditures of approximately $2 billion for fiscal 2022.
tyson foods - targeting $1 billion in productivity savings by end of fiscal 2024, $300 million to $400 million in fiscal 2022.
tyson foods - qtrly beef sales volume decreased due to impacts associated with a challenging labor environment and increased supply chain constraints.
qtrly pork sales volume was up slightly as strong global demand was offset by impacts associated with challenging labor environment.
qtrly chicken sales volume increased primarily due to increased live production and a strong demand environment.
tyson foods - qtrly prepared foods sales volume decreased due to divestiture of our pet treats business in q4 as well as lower production throughput.
anticipate improved results from our foreign operations in fiscal 2022.

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