Prestige Consumer Healthcare Inc. (PBH) August 2026 Conference Transcript

Well, good afternoon, everyone. I think we can start. So I'm Victor from the Consumer Staples team here at Barclays. Thanks a lot for attending this session. So I'm really pleased to have with us today Prestige Consumer Health, which is one of the few listed consumer health, pure play consumer health companies in the space. So I am joined today by Ron Lombardi, which is the CEO of the company. We also have Christine Sacco, which is the CFO and CEO, and Phil, which is also joining doing investor relations.

So thanks a lot for being with us today.

So, right, I think we can start. We have a pretty packed agenda, so I'll jump straight into the questions. And maybe to start, Ron, with you, could you please give you an overview of, I guess, Prestige Consumer Health today? What are your sales, your margins? Maybe if you could outline a few key brands, the key geographies, just to orient everyone.

Sure. Thanks. And thanks to everyone for joining us this afternoon. So Prestige Consumer Healthcare is a consumer healthcare-focused company. We have about 80% of our revenues coming from North America and the balance outside. And maybe it's best just to step back for a second and talk about calendar 27, excuse me, calendar 26 and fiscal 27 for a second. We've had a number of big changes in the company, although it's really more of the same for us, even though we've had a number of meaningful transactions in the last nine months. We started the calendar year off by acquiring a key sterile eye care supplier, Pillar 5, up in Canada to better position us for long-term support of our key Clear Eyes and Thera Tears brands. We followed that up in June by closing on the company's largest acquisition in our history with a billion-dollar acquisition of Breathe Right and a number of other brands. from a PE seller, and then followed that up with a June 1st closing of a business based out of Australia that is added to our care pharma business in Australia. So lots of change in the last nine months. And as I think back, boy, it's been a quick nine months. So lots of change, but I said earlier, it's more of the same. Prestige has been focused on building out a portfolio that we believe positions us for long-term growth and meaningful cash flow generation to create value. And we saw that with these transactions I just described. So on a pro forma basis, taking account for the recent acquisitions, sales are now approaching $1.4 billion. We would expect top-line sales growth of about 10% over the next three years as we integrate those acquisitions, get them going, and recover our clear-eyes business. EPS growth would be pretty close to that. And then I think just as importantly, if not more importantly, we would expect to generate around $900 million of free cash flow over the next three years as well to help deleverage and pay off the debt that we put in place to do the acquisitions. So more of the same. We've continued to add and build out the portfolio. We continue to expand outside of North America. The Breathe Right business came with a nice business in Europe. It's very additive to what we've got going on. And the Licorium acquisition in Australia is certainly additive to what we've got going on there.

Great. Thanks a lot for that. There is a lot in there that we'll unpick a little bit later as well. But as a follow-up, I also wanted to ask about, you describe yourself about a company of brand builders. It seems like you have a business model that is slightly different from the other consumer health companies on the market. So can you tell us what does that mean in practice and what distinguishes, I suppose, your business model from those other companies?

Yeah, in a lot of ways, we're doing many of the same things that the big, spun-out consumer health care companies are doing, where we're looking to grow our brands in categories, like looking to grow the categories as well. The difference is we've focused on niche categories where our brands can define the space and take on the responsibility of growing the category. I always like to use Dramamine as the best example of that. We bought it from a big pharma company back in January of 2011. And in the last 16, 15 years, we've been able to grow it by 5 or 6x because we focused on it, right? We talked to the consumer to learn that they were looking to treat motion sickness and nausea in a way that wouldn't make them drowsy. There wasn't a child or a children's skew out there, so we launched a chewable one. So we got feedback from consumers about what they were looking for, why they didn't treat, why they mistreated, and look to bring propositions to help them take care of their health.

Great. I would like to take a step back for a minute and just look at the consumer health market as a whole. So the companies playing on that market, it seems like they all have a very different definition of actually what is consumer health. So I was wondering what is prestige definition of the market. How do you address it? What are the different categories that you are playing in? If you could give us a little bit of colors on that. And then as a follow-up, what would you say is your biggest competitive advantage? And conversely, what are the areas where you think you can improve as a consumer health company going forward?

Sure. So we start by thinking about defining the space the way consumers think about it, right, which is how do they think about taking care of themselves? On one end of the spectrum, folks may think about eating right, exercising, getting good sleep to promote wellness. In the middle, it may be OTC-type products. Over the counter, you're taking care of your own health. And on the far right would be medical intervention, whether it's prescription drugs that come from a doctor, you know, GLP-1s is a great example of that, all the way up to surgeries to address medical situations. You know, we see ourselves in the middle in that kind of OTC space. Now, we've got a number of products in our product offering that aren't OTC, but consumers think about them as OTC medicines or treating a disease state. So we want to line up with how consumers are thinking about taking care of themselves and offering efficacious product that works to address what they're looking to deal with. I think the second part of your question is, how might we do it differently? How might we have a competitive advantage? And it goes back to, and I mentioned this a couple of times already, thinking about the consumer, getting consumer insight. And we do it brand by brand. So we don't think about women's health and get insights around women's health. We get insights around Monistat and how women are thinking about taking care of vaginal yeast infections. Summer's Eve is a hygiene-oriented product, so we talk to women to get insight on that. Same thing with GI, right? We'll get consumer insight on motion sickness and nausea for Dramamine, and then we'll get specific information around fleet for constipation. So our focus is trying to grow the categories and brands brand by brand rather than thinking about competing in large categories. So I think that's both the advantage and the difference in how we approach growing the brands that we have versus the big players.

Thanks, that is very insightful. I guess on the market tier, there is one specificity about consumer health, is that it remains very fragmented as market if you compare it to the broader staples. So why is that? And in your view, do you expect the market to consolidate further going forward? Yeah.

Let me let Phil start with this. So you're exactly right, Vickr. we see the same thing you do, which is on a global basis, consumer health care is quite fragmented when you look at it in comparison to other sections of the grocery store and the pharmacy. And what you ask, why is that? Well, when consumers think about taking care of their health, those brands are very individual to the ailments they might be treating. So we often use skin care as an example. If I have a wart that I'm looking to treat, that's far different than if I'm treating eczema or any number of other skin ailments. On top of that, there were pharmaceutical companies, families, et cetera, that owned these brands historically over the last, in many cases, 50, 100 years potentially, and gradually over time that consolidation has begun. So we see future opportunities for that to further consolidate and for us to play a part of that. The most recent acquisitions that Ron just highlighted earlier, Breathe Right here in the U.S. and Liquorium in Australia are just the latest examples of that.

Yeah, exactly. So you mentioned those two acquisitions, and I think because we are talking about the consolidation, the market, and M&A, this is a good moment to deep dive maybe into that. So Breathe Right, you mentioned it earlier, biggest acquisition in the company's history. You closed it in June. Can you talk us through just the rationale of this company? What are your expectations for this business going forward?

Yeah, sure, if you want to take it. So we've come to this conference a number of years, and in the last few years we get a lot of questions around M&A. We're an inquisitive company, and, you know, why are you out of the market? And we would say, well, we're not out of the market. We just stayed very disciplined. And hopefully, as I take you through the rationale for Breathe Right, you'll understand why. We remain very disciplined to our criteria, right? Number one, we're looking for brands that have long-term growth potential. So we start with that. Breathe Right has a nice heritage and connection with consumers. It has a 90% brand awareness and only a 3% household penetration. So we see a lot of opportunity there. We look for brands that we have the ability to innovate, as Ron mentioned, use consumer insights to bring new users into the category, grow the category as a market leader, holding that type of position. Breathe Right checks all of those boxes. We then move on to kind of operationally. You know, does it fit within our, do we have similar distribution models? Do we have similar consumers usually looking for something that's asset light, although we won't shy away from something with a facility if we have a competitive advantage to doing so? Breathe Right checks those boxes. We kind of joke with folks, and we're not kidding, that their distribution center was across the street from ours. Similar customers. There's a few nuances, but generally speaking, it fit the operational piece. And then third, we go to the financials. Breathe Right has a financial profile that actually was accretive to prestigious, which is industry-leading to begin with, with gross margins over 70%, able to support higher levels of advertising and marketing and actually pulled the company's EBITDA margin up. So it checked all of the boxes that we were looking for. We use it similarly to Dramamine. It's a category-defining brand, right? I just said 90% brand awareness, right? It's synonymous with the brand. The opportunity, if you take the brand back several years, and it's been through a few owners, it started with snoring. It was a snoring brand, right? And over the years, and what we intend to keep going, and just kind of got going recently, we're going from an incident-based, like snoring, to an overall wellness brand, right? Breathe Right. Better breathing. We all came out of COVID, and the data tells you that we're all stressed, and people aren't sleeping and such. And so the concept behind Breathe Right is it will get you a better night's sleep so overall you wake up in the morning and you feel refreshed. And so there's a number of things in the pipeline for innovation that's also in our M&A criteria. Can we innovate to continue to be the brand leader, to continue to differentiate ourselves from private label and other branded players out there? We recently launched Breathe Right Sport and it's a different technology slightly, but it's been tested against extreme sweat, for example, to stay intact. And so for all those attributes, We think we have the potential to grow it pretty nicely. Breathe Right has been growing above our company's 2% to 3% organic revenue target. Came with a couple of tail brands. We don't see that as a negative because we know how to run those. We run them. They're OTC brands. They have strong margins, and we don't need to invest behind them. So they throw off a lot of cash. And so when you put those together, it really just reinforces the higher end of our 2% to 3% outlook range for our revenue growth organically. and for all those reasons, we feel really good about the transaction.

There's also another brand that you acquired very recently. You talked about it a little bit earlier, so I would also like to deep dive on this. This is Lacorium. So this one is smaller, but this is also growing very, very, very fast. So it's an Australian brand, I think, in therapeutic skincare. Care, can you talk us through a little bit about your long-term growth ambition for that brand, and also, I guess, how do you see your ability in other regions when it has been mainly concentrated in Australia in the past?

So Le Corium, again, based out of Sydney, Australia, actually located in the same office building that our Care Pharma is. And Care Pharma is on the third floor and Le Corium was up on the sixth floor. And the folks have moved down to the third floor and we've turned the sixth floor into a conference center with meeting rooms and whatnot. So great fit with our business in a lot of ways and very consistent with the M&A criteria that Chris just laid out. We've actually had this business on our radar screen for a long time. Our care pharma general manager has drank probably 10 gallons of coffee with the owner and founder of that company over the years, trying to convince them to engage in discussions for us. And that time finally happened this past year. But strong brands, their position is efficacious skincare. We met with somebody today who told us they ordered some during COVID because they weren't, weren't able to get out and see a doctor or something. And her comment was, boy, it worked really well, which is the tagline for the brand. It works. So that's kind of the positioning. We believe that it's got a great runway to continue to grow it at high levels because it's really just getting going. So not only is there room in Australia to launch continued new products and to expand into adjacent skin care products, but also to step into the distribution that the care pharma business has in the region. We have a very nice distributor-based network through Asia Pacific, and we believe there's an opportunity to take those brands and work with the existing care pharma distributors. and those countries to grow. So it's going to be the same kind of playbook where we look to invest in new products, innovation, marketing to grow the categories that they define.

Well, those two acquisitions sound very promising and exciting. So we'll be looking forward to the progress. Turning out to you, maybe, Christine, for the next question, and I would like to pivot a little bit more to your core business now that we've been talking about acquisitions. So I guess your long-term growth algo is to 2% to 3% organic growth, but you've been tracking in the past period a little bit below that, and that has been due mainly to ClearEyes, which is a brand playing in eye care that has been quite struggling lately. The brand has significantly reduced in size. You've been facing supply disruptions. So I guess the question is, Can the rest of the portfolio sustainably deliver towards the 2% to 3% range, or are you actually expecting a recovery in eye care to meet that target?

Yeah, so certainly when we talk about the ClearEyes franchise, it's undergone a lot of challenges. It's been the biggest challenge to our organic growth, right? It is now 3% of sales. Historically, it had been high single digits as a percent of sales. I'm sure we'll get into a few more questions around that. But as we look to our long-term growth algorithm, the rest of the portfolio is performing well. We feel good about our ability to deliver that. And I think ClearEye's recovery over the next few years likely puts us towards the higher end of that range. But yes, we believe the other brands performing, according to the playbook that Ron mentioned, can get us within that range of that 2% to 3%.

Can you tell us about what is the roadmap? What is the plan to recover your eye care category and ClearEye? I think you mentioned also another acquisition earlier, Pillar 5. So can you talk about what's the roadmap, what is the timeline where you expect actually this brand to be back on track and to its leadership position? And I suppose a follow-up on that, because you've been off the shelf for a while because of all those disruptions, is there actually a risk that the market share that you lost might be a little bit more sustainable, or do you think you'll be able to recover that?

Sure, so hopefully I'll hit on all of those points. So if we just step back, the sterile eye care industry globally, industry-wide, has gone through increased inspections, increased activity from not just the FDA, but regulatory agencies around the world. You know, there's a reason on the May earnings call we mentioned that at this point, at that point, Every single one of our sterile eye care facilities, whether it's Pillar 5 that we now own or our third-party CMOs, had been inspected by at least one regulatory authority. So it's been a lot of increased activity for a number of reasons around those facilities. Those inspections have resulted in things between industry-wide recalls and observations to specific facilities. And those observations have required sometimes more downtime for folks to address them, sometimes not as much. It varies pretty widely. What has happened for us is we've been talking for years and been looking for years really because of third-party sterile eye care capacity. It's limited worldwide, and ClearEyes demands almost 10x, sometimes 5x, sometimes 10x, in terms of units that are required to sustain the brand, having this leading position in units for a long time. And as we scoured the globe looking for a provider and in connection with then this increased activity around regulatory, we realized that Pillar 5, acquiring Pillar 5, who was a third-party provider to us in Canada, was our fastest path to improvement and long-term continuity of quality supply. And so in December of last year, we acquired Pillar 5 up in Canada, and I think since we've owned it, we've been reassured that we think we made the right decision in acquiring it and taking ownership of a sterile eye care facility, not just for our near-term continuity plans, but for our long-term capacity plans to bring further capacity into that facility. And so we talked, the most recent update was on our August call, where we said we've, to date now, we've owned it almost nine months, right? We've made investments in equipment. We've made investments in infrastructure. And what we didn't want to speak to previously that we did on the call is we've changed out a lot of the leadership positions. The previous owner, for their own reasons, of course, made shorter-term decisions that we will look to make different decisions on. There were a number of third-party consultants that they had hired that were in pretty top positions there. we have now brought in sterile eye care experts into the facility that I think will make a meaningful impact. And, you know, under previous ownership, right, PE firm owned them and had different priorities, and now we have one priority, and it's to manufacture ClearEyes. And so we feel good about the path that we're on. We talk about expecting increased supply in the back half of our fiscal 27. Our fiscal year ends on March 31st. And it's going to take some time, But over time, we do think we can improve capacity, increase capacity, and improve continuity of supply at that facility.

So maybe I'll take the brand recovery part, right? Chris just kind of covered, you know, how do we feel about Pillar 5's progress. But in terms of brand recovery, right, we see the first step being getting better inventory levels of max red and base red, the two top SKUs in place. And then we would look to expand the product offering to include the other SKUs that we've had historically. And then work with the retailers to make sure we've got full distribution. And then ultimately get back to a place where we can market and advertise the brand. You know, the ClearEyes brand really has a unique position as the defining OPP in sterile eye care over the counter. If you go out to the shelf, you see that eye care products start at about $5. It can go up to as high as $25 to $30 a bottle, and clear eyes was the beginning of that price offering at retail. So it's important to the category. It's what consumers are looking for to treat red, itchy, and dry eyes.

Okay, great. It does sound like you have a lot on your plate for the year to come. Obviously, you have the two integrations of the acquisitions that we talked earlier, so Aquarium, Dweezrite. Then you have also this around ClearEyes that you are working on. How do you feel about that? How are you getting organized as a management team to, I guess, tackle all these different goals and milestones that you need to reach for this year?

Yeah, so we started in December acquiring Pillar 5, right? So the leadership team, obviously, at Pillar is only focused on what they need to be doing in the facility. Our operational team in New York, really just the head of operations, focuses on that. And then the executive team is obviously focused on it. When we acquired Breathe Right, we separated into, you know, 85% of Breathe Right sales in North America versus international. They function very differently. We were aware of that through our diligence. On our August earnings call, we announced the big chunk, the 85%, had been fully integrated. That's the hard work. That's getting them in our SAP system. And as of, I want to say August 4th, it might be August 3rd, we flipped the switch. All the product is in our warehouse. It's coming in one order and through SAP. It's on our PO. We're collecting the cash. It's fully integrated. The international piece, about 15% of the business we knew was going to take a little bit more time just because it's different than ours. And quite frankly, we want to choose the best model. So we structured a transition service agreement that extended for a longer period of time for that international business. And we're in that stage now, and it's going according to plan. Then LaCoria came along, and as Ron said, you know, a lot of coffee had been drunk between the two leaders of the groups. And so you can't always plan when something comes, but we just said we'll de-risk it by structuring it differently. That's the Australia team who's integrating that. Limited impact to the U.S. team. And we also gave them a very long transition service agreement to account for that. 23 of, I think, 33 people from Le Corium came with the transition. That also helps. And so we really structured these in a way we were aware that there was a bunch to take on. We always start, by the way, any acquisition discussion when people say, when are you going to do the next transaction? And we say, we always start with, is the organization ready to take on a transaction and so we structured this in a way certainly we had conversations with ourselves and our board and folks around okay how can we structure this to de-risk it and having gotten through that big chunk of the largest acquisition breathe right being fully integrated from the majority of the business I think we're on the right track maybe one question for for you Ron I would like to switch gear to international expansion which is also a very important topic for you.

So I think international represents about 16% of your revenue as of today. So you have planned to expand that to about 20% on the medium term. So how do you plan to approach international expansion in terms of strategy? Are you planning to acquire local brands just like you did in the U.S., basically applying the playbook that you have in the U.S. to other geographies? And how confident tell you that this playbook will actually work in some other countries? Maybe if you have a few examples of brands that you acquired that work very well, and maybe some others that didn't work as well, and the learnings from that.

Sure. You know, one of the things that our company does well is we don't apply a master approach to every situation and every business opportunity. We step back and evaluate the right way to move forward and take advantage of opportunities. And that's true for how we think about managing growth opportunities internationally. So each market and each brand opportunity is going to be a bit different. So in Europe, with the addition of these Breathe Right distributors in about a dozen different countries, we're going to manage that differently, right? And the approach is going to be, how do we make sure we have the right distributor partner and make sure that they execute the marketing programs and the retail programs to maximize the opportunities for breathe right in those markets. And then secondarily, once that's on its way, is there opportunities to bring other brands into those markets in Europe. And then same thing for Australia and Asia Pacific. So we'll look to see where we can take the LaClorium brands into the distributor network that we have for the Care Pharma brands, Hydrolite in particular, to take advantage of a good distributor partnership, somebody that executes marketing plans well in a given market to look to grow and then build off of it from there. So that's where we are today. In terms of examples of acquiring brands and taking them a step forward, we acquired the brand Zadadin in Australia from a big pharma company and have had a nice success growing that eye care brand. It's an allergy eye care brand that was additive to our marine eye care business in Australia. So again, consumer insight, we look to invest further in marketing and advertising. So each opportunity is going to have nuances to it, and we're going to approach it, each one of those opportunities uniquely.

Okay, great. And now going back to your core business, so I think you are playing now in eight categories, and there are a few that stand out to me. Maybe can we talk a little bit about gastrointestinal? So this is a category that has been very successful for you over the past five years, I think five consecutive years. So you talked a little bit about some brands that are successful for you. Fleet, for instance, Hydrolite, DramaMine as well. So how much of that growth has actually come from category growth versus you gaining market shares against your competitors? And I suppose as a follow-up, are you happy with your portfolio currently or do you think you will require another leg of growth to continue growing gastrointestinal going forward?

Yeah, so although we categorize sales by these segments, we don't think about them that way. So we don't think about GI per se and having a strategy around GI. We think about the brands. And there's one common thread amongst the four brands you just mentioned. So Dramamine, Fleet, Hydrolite, and Gaviscon up in Canada is they're number one brands in their niche categories, and they define the space. And although we have grown share in those cases, we've really grown the categories. And as a result of that, been able to grow our share as we've brought in new users into the category. I talked about Dramamine earlier as the best example we have. It's grown by 5X as we moved it from four SKUs and very much motion sickness oriented to nausea over time. fleet enemas and suppositories. Again, we've taken the opportunity of GLP-1 side effects, the number two side effect is constipation, to do clinical studies to be able to communicate with sufferers of constipation from GLP-1 use about how fleet can be helpful to them. So each one of those GI brands has its own version of how we're thinking about growing the category in growing the brand over time.

Another one I would like to focus on is a few brands there. You have MoneyStat that you talked about also earlier and Summer's Eve. It does feel like those two brands actually have a different trajectory. So when it comes to MoneyStat, you're gaining share in a category that is mostly declining, whereas Summer's Eve is improving. So can you talk a little bit about the strategy for those two brands? How can you accelerate growth in women's health? What is the outlook and your ambitions for those two brands and this category in general?

Yeah. So again, our goal for both of those brands is to continue to find ways to grow the categories that they compete in. They're both category-defining brands. They both have significant shares. Monistat is over 50%, and Summer's Eve is clearly the number one share in the hygiene category. So each of them will have different playbooks. So Monistat defines vaginal yeast infection treatment over the counter. There's only so many of those incidences each year, so for us to be able to grow outside of whatever kind of natural growth rate there is in infections, is to move into adjacencies, so care, prevention. A couple of years ago, we launched a WASH under the Monistat Care line, and it has quickly grown to be a very meaningful skew for us in the offering and connects very well with what women are looking for as part of prevention and care, either before, during, or after a vaginal yeast infection. So that's Monistat. For Summer's Eve, we acquired the brand back in 2017. We did a lot of consumer insight work, and what women told us was that they'd like to think about Summer's Eve differently, destigmatize it, move it away from just odor. And we went down the path to launch a number of new products and changed our marketing campaign around daily usage. And what we learned was you always have to think through the feedback you get through consumers was that they really think about Summer's Eve around odor and odor prevention and odor treatment. So we've moved back to the long-term positioning of the brand and have it well-positioned to get back to a growth trajectory and continue to be the leader of the space.

I think we have time for one last question. So maybe to conclude and summarize, if you were sitting there five years from now, looking back, what would success look like for Prestige Consumer Health? I suppose what are the milestones that you would like to have achieved over the past five years? Yeah, I suppose what does success look like? on a five-year time for?

Yeah, so our strategy of creating value for shareholders is pretty simple, right? Lever number one is continue to focus on growing the brands that we have. The second is to continue to deliver industry-leading cash flow. Over the next five years, we'll use that to meaningfully delever and create capital allocation optionality. If you look back over the last five years, we've had significant share repurchases. We've done meaningful acquisition and continue to position our brands for long-term growth. So, you know, we sit here today, and I look back at the progress our business has made over the last five years. We feel good about what we've done, and five years from now, I think it would look a lot like the same things that we've executed over the last five years. Okay, great.

Well, I think we can finish it there. Thanks a lot, Ron. Thanks a lot, Christine. Thanks a lot, Phil. And, yes, thanks a lot for attending the session, everyone.