It’s got to be tough captaining a ship that’s going through a patch of sea like the one the global economy is in right now. But public company CFOs and other execs are doing their darnedest to stay on course.
CFO Brew sifted through earnings calls for commentary that illuminates how the C-suite is responding to a global economy marred by trade tensions and declining consumer confidence. Simply put, corporations are tweaking their outlooks, adjusting prices, and trimming budgets.
Procter & Gamble, for instance, cut its fiscal year guidance from 2%–4% YoY sales growth to now be “approximately in-line with the prior year,” according to an earnings release.
“We continue to expect the environment around us to remain volatile and challenging from input costs, to currencies, to consumer, competitor, retailer, and geopolitical dynamics, and now tariff impacts,” CFO Andre Schulten said on a recent earnings call. Schulten also told investors the consumer-goods company “won’t cut to save the bottom line for a quarter only to lose momentum for the year.”
The new tariffs will slow growth at Procter & Gamble “in the range of $1 billion to $1.5 billion,” according to Schulten. “I think it’s clear that productivity, innovation, and pricing are probably the short-term levers that we will employ,” but the company will also consider things like “formulation and sourcing changes,” he said.
The Wall Street Journal reported that President Donald Trump’s quickly changing tariff decisions “mean companies have little predictability to make moves such as greenlighting investments or redistributing longstanding supply chains,” but cutting costs is a “time-honored” option. For instance, Hasbro will move quicker on its plan to slash $1 billion in costs, according to the outlet.
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Intel CFO David Zinsner told investors on a Q1 earnings call that trade policies and “regulatory risks” have increased the chances of a recession, which “makes it more difficult to forecast how we will perform for the quarter and for the year.” Intel provided a “wider than normal” revenue outlook for Q2 in the range of $11.2 billion to $12.4 billion, he said. The company brought in $12.8 billion of revenue in Q2 2024.
“The biggest risk we see is the impact of a potential pullback in investment and spending as businesses and consumers react to higher costs and the uncertain economic backdrop,” Zinsner said.
Not everything has changed amid recession fears. Phillips Edison & Co., a real estate investment firm specializing in shopping centers, isn’t talking about a potential economic downturn in lease renewal discussions because “it’s still a percentage number; it’s not a reality,” CEO Jeff Edison said on a Q1 earnings call last week. He added that most of the company’s retail tenants (nearly 80%) will see “pretty limited impact” from tariffs. One-tenth will feel “a fairly significant” sting, and the remaining 10% will see an impact, but not as severe.
“So when we put that together, we don’t see big changes in terms of our approach to leasing” and property acquisitions, he said.