Beiersdorf A G (

BDRFF.PK

)

Q3 2010 Earnings Call

November 4, 2010; 12:00 pm ET

Executives

Thomas Quaas - Chief Executive Officer

Bernhard Duttmann - Chief Financial Officer

Jens Geissler - Corporate Treasurer & Head of IR

Analysts

Matthias Eifert - MainFirst

Guillaume Delmas - Nomura

Philipp Frey - MM Warburg

Iain Simpson - RBS

Eamonn Ferry - Exane BNP Paribas

Heiko Feber - Bankhaus Lampe

Mark Christensen - Morgan Stanley

Arne Rautenberg - DZ Bank

Rosie Edwards - Goldman Sachs Financial

Alex Molloy - Credit Suisse

Eva Quiroga - UBS

Presentation

Jens Geissler

» Beiersdorf AG Q2 2010 Earnings Call Transcript
» Beiersdorf AG Q1 2010 Earnings Call Transcript
» Eurand CEO Discusses Q3 2010 Results – Earnings Call Transcript

Good morning, welcome to Beiersdorf conference call for the first nine months of 2010. This is Jens Geissler, together with Beiersdorf's CEO, Thomas Quaas and CFO, Bernhard Duttmann.

We will start with a brief presentation by Thomas Quaas and we will then come to question and answer. The replay of this call will be available on Beiersdorf’s IR website in the course of the day. I’d now like to handover to Thomas Quaas and the result of the first nine months.

Thomas Quass

Thank you, Jens, and good morning and welcome from my side to all of you. Sorry for those who are in different the time zones, as we, after we’ll get you out of the allocation for earnings. But let’s try to get quickly through the most important information. Before, we go into the details I want to give you my general view on the current business situation at Beiersdorf.

And I look to put it into somehow a prospective, after a couple of years of strong growth we all have to see the effects from the financial crisis 2009. And coming out of that, we finally decided that we’ll see a great opportunities to shape the future for our company in the upcoming years.

So we are right in the process, in the middle of the process to take final conclusion that make the final decisions in order to get the setup right for the next couple of years and then just fixing a couple of things for the next couple of months. So all we are doing now, we’ll talk about now its in the life of this kind of pre-comment that I want to, see also the result that we are facing in 2010 definitely we’ll see in that light, since we are shaping for a future, which is ahead of us.

So we, now we’ll continue in doing so and what the details of all this moving forward concept is going to look like, we cannot share in detail with you today, but we will certainly take up on those in the upcoming Investor Day I think as we communicated that on December the 15, and that will be in London.

So please bear this in mind and then now I’ll take a brief look at the key figures of the first nine months in 2010. On group, our sales increased by plus 8.1% on a nominal basis, if we exclude foreign exchange effect this is plus 4% on a like-for-like basis. The group EBIT was EUR552 million and this translates into 11.7% EBIT margin, profit after tax margin came in at 7.5% after three quarters into 2010.

The resulting number for earnings per share is EUR1.53 both the EBIT and profit after tax margins do not include material extraordinary expenses at this point in time.

Now looking at the business segments, our tesa business again showed strong growth against increasingly tougher comparables of course from the back end of 2009. All regions contribute to this increase and especially it is, Asian business was particularly strong on the back of good sales with our partners in the Auto and Electronics industries.

On the profit line, tesa recorded an EBIT margin of 13%, so for tesa, now the sales in Beiersdorf’s consumer segment increased by plus 2.3% like-for-like in the first three quarters 2010. NIVEA sales only the brand group NIVEA went up by plus 2.2% with deodorants NIVEA for Men and especially NIVEA Sun being our currently fastest growing categories.

Eucerin, which is our top brands in the pharmacy channel, has shown a sustainable and solid performance again with a sales growth of plus 9.8 almost double-digit growth rates we can enjoy here. However, the overall performance of the consumer business is somewhat clearly below our expectations again as I mentioned before I started my comments on the result as we see them here after nine months.

And this actual situation, we have of course deflected in our guidance for the full year and I will talk about the updated guidance in a few minutes. Let’s now look at the regional number for Beiersdorf consumer business in more detail. Total consumers sales in the first nine months of 2010 again we are plus 2.3% above last years number.

Looking at the sales development in detail, the German consumer business was slow and decreased by minus 1.6% compared to the first nine months last year. On a category basis, we have seen NIVEA body, Nivea Hair Care dragging down overall sales performance. And as you know, we launched a promotional campaign in Q3, similar to last year’s activity, but it was smaller in size and then primary aims at building bonds with the consumers and not so much pushing for additional sales.

Western Europe, outside of Germany still provided the same mixed picture as before so nothing new on that side, we have some highlight and I love to talk about the – in UK. And also Switzerland is doing well at the same time quite a few countries underperformed and dragged down the overall consumer sales in the Western European world and launched dollars especially other dimension Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain.

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