Jim Cramer: "PepsiCo is spending more to promote its products and expand its market share"

Cramer asks why Wall Street reacted with relief rather than panic even though PepsiCo lowered its constant-currency earnings outlook from 4~6% to 1~4%. He says revenue is not the problem: the company recorded its strongest organic growth since the 4th quarter of 2023, and management is confident of achieving 3% growth for the year. He assesses that Laguarta's turnaround measures, including price cuts, smaller snack packages, aggressive marketing, and olive-oil Lay's, are working. He explains that the main reason for lowering the earnings outlook was the choice to incur additional costs to expand market share, compounded by pressure on fuel and packaging costs stemming from the Iran war. He says the bad news was already priced in during 8 months of selling, and the guidance brought relief because it could have been worse. The supplied captions cut off as he moves toward a positive assessment, citing a P/E ratio of 15 times while noting that it is too early to declare a full recovery. All directional outlooks are the speaker's conditional judgments, not definitive predictions of short-term prices.