Hindustan Unilever Limited Q4FY21 Conference Call Transcripts

Management Participants:

Mr. Sanjiv Mehta, Chairman, and Managing Director

Mr. Srinivas Phatak, CFO and Executive Director, Finance and IT

Mr. Amit Sood, Group Finance Controller and Head of Investor Relations

Q4FY21 Results:

• Turnover of the company grew by 34% and Profit After Tax (PAT) increased by 41%.
• Health Hygiene and nutrition forming, which is approximately 80% of the business continues to perform well for the company and grew in the high double digits.
• Discretionary and the out-of-home portfolio mounted a strong recovery in this quarter.
• Sharp focus on driving volume-led competitive growth has yielded good results as we are gaining relative penetration 87% of our business.
• Reported growth stood at 34% including the nutrition business and acquisition of V-Wash. We are pleased with the performance in both Nutrition and V-Wash.
• Domestic consumer business grew at 21% with a UVG of 16%. We continue to see a sequential pickup in momentum.
• Net profit after tax grew by 41% to INR 2,143 crores. A few callouts here. First, EBITDA margins were up Y-o-Y by 150 basis points to 24.75%.
• Home Care grew at 15%, enabled by a strong recovery in fabric wash and on the back of improved mobility.
• Beauty and personal care grew at 20% and there was good performance across the various categories.
• Foods and refreshments sustained a high-growth momentum and led the growth for us by growing over 36%.
• In foods and refreshments, our strategy to unlock growth in the HFD portfolio is to drive category penetration.
• Home Care performance had a strong performance in HHC continued and Fabric Wash had a rebound. Our HHC had another quarter of delivering strong double-digit growth led by Vim.
• In Beauty & Personal Care, the company saw good performance across the categories. In Skin Cleansing, the performance was led by high double-digit growth in Lifebuoy and premium segments. Lux performance was stable.
• Oral Care continues to do well and sustains growth momentum with strong results in CloseUp. This product continues to gain shares.
• Hair had a stellar quarter growing in high double digits. Consumer-focused innovations and communications are yielding good results.
• Have taken and will also take pricing actions in the products to cover the cost caused due to rise in prices of raw materials.
• The Board of Directors has proposed a final dividend of INR 17 per share which makes the total dividend 31.

FY21 Performance:

• On a full-year basis, we have reported turnover growth of 18% and profit after tax growth of 18%.
• On the portfolio front, we have expanded our proposition to include the immunity-boosting benefits of zinc in Horlicks and have also made a strategic intervention into the high sciences category of adult nutrition with a relaunch of plus range from the house of Horlicks.
• Have expanded EBITDA margins for our nutrition business by approximately 370 bps.

Inititatives for Covid-19:

• “Our VirusKi Kadi Todo” campaign reached out to more than 15 crore households in the country to create awareness and strengthen community response towards COVID-19.
• The company donated nearly 2 crore soaps and sanitizers to the vulnerable sections of the society and essential workers to help them in the fight against this deadly virus.
• Also, donated several much-needed medical equipments to hospitals, 75,000 testing kits, and assisted in setting up isolation centers.

Supply Chain:

• The company has added new manufacturing partners taking our potential capacity to 1.3x of pre-COVID levels.
• strength in distribution got further enhanced with the innovative model like a hub and spoke, direct store delivery, etc.
• Shikhar, our e-B2B app has proven to be a real game-changer for the company.
• In the last Fiscal Year itself, HUL has added 350,000 Shikhar outlets at the rate of more than 1,000 outlets per day, taking the total count to over 5 lakh outlets.
• Contribution to our turnover from Shikhar outlet has increased by 6x in March quarter '21 versus the same quarter in the previous year.
• The expansive network of nearly 136,000 Shakti entrepreneurs covering 18 states provides the company a distinctive advantage of massive rural reach.
• With all these strengths in the fold, Company is confident of ensuring continuity of supplies for the full range of our portfolio.
• The company has built capabilities to sense consumer demand signals through digital means.

Brand Portfolio:

• HUL has set up a Premium Beauty Business unit within our Beauty & Personal Care organization to strengthen our play in the masstige and e-commerce Beauty segment.
• The Health Hygiene and nutrition portfolio, which forms 80% of our business, has performed very well by growing at double-digit, 12% in the last financial year.
• This portfolio continues to remain extremely relevant and through innovation, we'll further enhance it to drive growth.
• HUL is focusing on the cost-efficient business model.
• The company is concentrating a lot on P&L, variablizing cost structures, and eliminating costs that do not offer much value to the consumers to generate more fuel for growth.

Domex:

• Domex is one of the biggest brands in the world, and it has very strong market positions in several countries.
• The company is looking not to restrict it to just the toilet cleaning, but we are also looking at it cleaning other surfaces.
• It has a very strong proposition of germ and virus kill, and that is what the company is looking at to harness during this period, and that is how we have also been trying to make the brand come alive.

Environment-Friendly Practices:

• Zero emissions in operations by 2030.
• Net-zero emissions in our value chain by 2039.
• To replace fossil fuel-derived carbon with renewable or recycled carbon in all our cleaning and laundry products by 2030.
• Having the company’s virgin plastic footprint by 2025 helps collect and process more plastic packaging waste than we use in packaging our finished products.
• Ensuring that 100% of our plastic is reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.

E-Commerce Channel:

• E-Commerce Channel is in the range of between 5% to 6% for us in terms of our contribution.
• And the profitability of this channel continues to be high.
• E-commerce is the highest profitable one, more profitable than modern trade, and which in turn is also more profitable than our general trade.

CapEx:

• The company has put up a subsidiary with an authorized capital of 20 billion.
• The company is investing significant capital into it, and we are putting up a new blown powder plant, which is coming under this subsidiary, which actually will be very, very relevant for us because today, we are having to import blown powder given the demand