Altria Group affirms FY23 EPS view of $4.98-$5.13, consensus $5.06

The company states: "Altria Group hosted an investor day conference at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City, New York earlier today. Billy Gifford, Altria’s Chief Executive Officer, and other members of our senior management team highlighted our progress toward our Vision, introduced our 2028 Enterprise Goals and provided updates on internal product development efforts for smoke-free products. We announced our new 2028 Enterprise Goals. These goals include corporate financial metrics and specific U.S. smoke-free volume and revenue targets. These goals assume the successful completion of our previously announced acquisition of NJOY Holdings, Inc. We also announced our aspirations to compete beyond the U.S. nicotine space. Our corporate goals include financial policy and capital allocation, share of the U.S. tobacco space and total adjusted operating companies income margin. In financial policy and capital allocation, we set goals for adjusted diluted earnings per share growth, dividend growth and leverage. Our goal is to deliver mid-single digits adjusted diluted EPS growth on a compounded annual basis through 2028. Our goal is a capital structure with a debt-to-earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization ratio of approximately 2.0x. We established two new goals for our U.S. smoke-free portfolio, including smoke-free volume and smoke-free revenue. For U.S. smoke-free volume, our goal is to grow volumes by at least 35% from our 2022 base of 800 million units. For U.S. smoke-free revenue, our goal is to approximately double our smoke-free net revenues to $5 billion from our 2022 base of $2.6 billion, with $2 billion coming from innovative smoke-free products. We announced our aspirations to compete in the international innovative smoke-free and non-nicotine categories. We believe the international smoke-free and non-nicotine categories combined represent multi-billion dollar opportunities for us. Our teams are evaluating these opportunities and expect to finalize strategies for these growth areas over the next 12 months. We intend to share specific goals for these areas once established."