Del Monte Foods Company F1Q09 (Qtr End 07/28/08) Earnings Call Transcript

  • download
  • Print
  • Recommend
  • 0

2008-08-28 14:16:10.0

Tags: Del Monte Foods Co.

Question-and-Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley.

Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley

Interest expense came in at about $27 million and if I just annualize that, that would get you to about $110 million which is below your $120 milling to $130 million guidance. Can you just help me understand where we are there?

David L. Meyers

I think the biggest thing is that our pack has come in a little bit later because of the weather conditions that we experienced in the spring and therefore you’re going to see our revolver increase over the next few months back to the normal levels.

Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley

So you’re still comfortable with the $120 million to $130 million then?

David L. Meyers

Yes.

Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley

The pet number came in well below what I think I and a lot of other people were expecting but you seem to indicate that it did better or you said broadly the business did better in the quarter than you expected. Would that be true for pet as well?

Richard G. Wolford

It would be true for pet in terms of top line and as we expected, the cost increases in pet accelerated at the end of last fiscal year and into this year. There was a significant acceleration in the commodity costs as everyone’s aware during Q1 and that impacted the cost of our business this year. As well some of our top line in pet reflected a softer mix than in prior year particularly in the dry dog as I mentioned with our promotional activity.

Vincent Andrews - Morgan Stanley

And if you could just remind us, it’s just the huge drop in operating income given the cost increases which everybody is well aware of at this point, why is pricing lagging so much? We’re just not seeing it lag so much in any other company.

Richard G. Wolford

Right. We took significant pricing last year. What happened beginning in the spring of calendar 08 is a dramatic increase in cost across our business and as a result of that we announced pricing in the end of last year, early part of Q1 and have implemented the pricing to address this most recent increase. The year-over-year increase was dramatic if we look at costs that we incurred last year versus this year and as soon as we had visibility to the cost we had increased our pricing. I think as you can tell we have significant pricing that we’ve implemented to address this cost, 14% in vegetables and so on as mentioned in the course of the prepared comments but the fact is that we, as well as the entire industry saw dramatic increases in of course the last four to six months and we’ve taken actions to address it.

 

BNET TalkbackShare your ideas and expertise on this topic

Please add your comment:

  1. You are currently: a Guest |
  2.  

Basic HTML tags that work in comments are: bold (<b></b>), italic (<i></i>), underline (<u></u>), and hyperlink (<a href></a)

advertisement
advertisement
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
  • Click Here
advertisement
Click Here