Central Garden & Pet muscles into the third quarter
Central Garden & Pet Company celebrated double-digit growth in its third quarter, with particularly impressive growth in its Pet segment.
Central Garden & Pet Company celebrated double-digit growth in its third quarter, with particularly impressive growth in its Pet segment.
"Central's strong showing this quarter continues its trend of revenue and profit growth," said George Roeth, president & CEO of Central Garden & Pet. "The areas where we have been focused are the main drivers of our success. Organic sales growth was driven by our customer first orientation, our gross margin expansion was enabled by executing on key cost savings initiatives, and our bottom line was enhanced by the effective on-going integration of our recent acquisitions and exiting an unprofitable business."
Net sales for the quarter ended June 25 came in at $514.5 million, up 12.0% from the previous year's $459.4 million.
Organic sales growth, excluding three businesses acquired in the prior 12 months and one business exited earlier in the year, rose 5.0%.
In the Pet segment, sales were up 20.6% to $287.2 million, though sales in the Garden segment only rose 2.7%.
As for net income, a bottom line of $26.0 million represented a 38.5% improvement over the year-ago period, and earnings per diluted share increased 34.2% to $0.51.
"Going forward, we will be even more aggressive in executing on the initiatives we believe are important to the company's long-term success," added Roeth. "These include continuing to focus on our customers' needs, increasing our innovation output and success rate, and lowering our costs to invest in growth. While there is a near-term cost to some of these actions, we believe we will have the financial flexibility to fund incremental investment while continuing to drive meaningful sales and profit growth. We will have more to say on our longer-term strategy and goals later this calendar year. In the meantime, we will stay focused on executing on our current plan."