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Earnings Calls: 
The Estee Lauder Companies Second Quarter Earnings Call
Author: Rozalina Destanova
123jump.com
Last Update: 4:22 PM EST February 29 2008


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The cosmetics company reported revenue increase to $2.31 billion from $1.99 billion last year, led by its skin-care and makeup categories and strength in the Middle East, Africa, China, Australia and Korea. Estee also announced plans to debut its Clinique line on television shopping channel QVC on February 17. Estee affirmed 2008 profit forecast of $2.28 to $2.40 a share, and sales growth of 7% to 9%.


Investors Question and Answers

 
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Lynn Green: I put them in a tie. I think that they both have the opportunity to drive new consumers and to recruit lapse consumers and I would not give more to one or the other.

Jason Gere (Wachovia Capital Markets): Can you talk about some of the brands in the portfolio that are under performing, how you are looking at potential divestures and also the acquisition outlook as well?

William Lauder: We will have brands that are performing at or about your standards and brands that are not performing at your standards. A number of those brands that are performing at or above our standards we are pushing them to continue their performance and enhance their performance and contribution to the company and using them strategically to grow our business in key markets around the world as well as to contribute financially. Brands that are not performing at our standard, we are looking to find ways to make sure that they improve their performance as well as to minimize their under performance in one way, shape or form, if they are key and strategic different responsibilities. There is a number of different brands which we believe have key strategic positions which are important to us as a key channel commander on a global basis and we continue to push them to improve their performance. As far as the acquisition landscape, we are continually looking at opportunities that would compliment our portfolio and enhance our long term strategic priorities. We are primarily focusing in on category approaches and channel approaches and markets outside of North America; those are the three scenes we are looking at. We are also overriding throughout all of these scenes are brands that we feel we can successfully plug in to our deep creditability and knowledge of the channel in our network around the world.

Jason Gere (Wachovia Capital Markets): Some of those brands that you might consider to be under performing can you quantify what are tail brands or is that a small percentage of the portfolio?

William Lauder: It is a small percentage of the portfolio. We are continually pushing and we feel that virtually every one of the brands in our portfolio has a reason for being and a reason for existence and if we did not feel they had a reason for being for existence they would not be in our portfolio any more.

Jason Gere (Wachovia Capital Markets): Can you give the update on SMI?

Richard Kunes: We are spending heavily and it did drive an additional $7 million of spending in our second quarter. Deveta is live, or should go live with our first manufacturing facility later this calendar year as well as the financial backbone here in North America and we are developing a model affiliate sort of concept testing and laying the groundwork for our first affiliate installation. Our hopes is that once that happens, we will then start to accelerate the pace because we will have touched every single model that we have as a company and we will then begin multiple stream implementations and pick up the pace on it.

William Schmitz (Deutsche Bank): Could you talk about the dynamics of developing markets and how that differs from the US and when the heavy up investment is going to be done?

William Lauder: I will compare and contrast our two largest and fastest growing markets in the emerging markets category right now, China and Russia. They each have dramatically different dynamics to each other and each relates to the region in which they are a part of. China being an Asian market is more a department store oriented market; it is entirely department store oriented market. Russia being at the far end or the eastern end of Europe is a perfumery oriented market and we are seeing dynamics develop similar to their total regions. As a result what you see in China is the number of doors in the number of cities which are all based on concentration and productivity concentration in a department store model and basis where we do partner with the retailer in different expenses to driving the business in those marketplaces for the installation and others. In Russia the comparison would be it is mostly perfumeries. It is primarily with two or three different perfumery partners as well as a handful of department stores and most especially the perfumery partners are aggressively opening doors on an average of one or two a week in Russia. These are perfumery doors, these are smaller doors that are not producing as much each but are going far deeper into more neighborhoods and we are now expanding our presence outside of the two major cosmopolitan cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The investment dynamics for each are different but just to give you an idea; our emerging markets as we classify them combined are growing at 43%. The economics of these markets are similar, we expect they are both in profitability for total affiliates and certain brands within those are meaningfully profitable and are beginning to approach, or we see them beginning to approach the norms for those brands in the international arena and that is what we expect over the longer period of time.

William Schmitz (Deutsche Bank): When does the mix stop being negative?

William Lauder: I do not want to make any prediction. UK is our most developed market, it was the first international market we launched as a corporation and it was back in 1959 or 1960 and we want to look at relative penetration to the total population and disposable income and what those growth opportunities are. We have said in the past that for example China, a rapidly growing economy, a large population with a certain level of wealth and that is growing, you should not want us to stop investing or to reduce our investment until we begin approaching the penetrations that we have in the rest of the region relative to disposable income, luxury spending, retail channels and profitability and scale.
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