(Reuters) – Clorox said on Wednesday it expects to post a loss in the first quarter after a cybersecurity attack in August caused product outages, processing delays and wide-scale disruption to the bleach maker’s operations.
Shares of the household staples maker fell 2% in extended trading as it also expects net sales for the quarter ended Sept. 30 to decline by 23% to 28% from the year earlier.
The company had disclosed in August that a cybersecurity breach disrupted portions of its IT infrastructure, forcing it to temporarily take certain systems offline and switch to manual processing of orders.
Clorox now expects its loss per share to be between 35 cents and 75 cents in the first quarter. It had reported profit of 68 cents per share in the year-ago period.
First-quarter gross margins are also expected to be down over the year earlier, compared with its prior projection of an increase, as the impact from the cyberattack more than offset the benefits of cost-savings and supply chain optimization, the company said.
Operational impacts from the incident is expected to be “ongoing, but lessening” in the second quarter, as the company makes progress in returning to normalized operations, it said.
“Clorox is in the process of assessing the impact of the cybersecurity attack on fiscal year 2024 and beyond,” it said.
Last week, the company said its manufacturing facilities resumed operations and it was ramping up production to restock retailer inventories.
(Reporting by Savyata Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
