All right, thanks everybody, and welcome back. I'm thrilled to welcome Church & Dwight back to the conference. With us from Church & Dwight, our CEO, Matt Farrell, CFO, Rick Dierker, and Executive Vice President of International, Mike Read. What we're gonna do today is the team from Church & Dwight will rapidly run through, as they typically do, some slides that articulates their story. That'll take about half the session. We'll use the balance of time for Q&A. With that, I'm gonna hand it over to Matt and off we go.
Okay. Thank you, Steve. I'll begin with the safe harbor statement. Encourage everybody in the room and who's listening in to give it a read. Okay. Who we are. Church & Dwight is a wildly successful consumer products company. See the numbers there over one, three, five, 10, 15 years. The numbers so far in 2022 are double digits, but they have a bracket around them, and we hope to change that in the near future. Okay, here's our evergreen model. Top line, we grow 3%, bottom line, 8%. We try to expand our operating margins 50 basis points annually. Our organic growth, how we doing with that 3% organic growth? There's the look over the past 10 years or so, and you can see virtually in every year, we're able to meet or exceed 3%.
EPS, 8% is our target on the bottom line. You can see there as well, virtually every year we've hit 8% with the exception of 2021, where we were around 7%. Okay, we have 14 power brands. Those 14 power brands account for 80% of our revenues and profits. Here's how we split. We're essentially 3/4 U.S., 18% international, and then our original business, which was both sodium bicarbonate and also animal nutrition, is 6% of the company. This is important. We have a balance between premium and value, so we believe that our portfolio performs well in virtually any economy. We have a long history of growth through acquisitions. This is the number one destination for cash. Go back to 2004, we were $1.5 billion.
You can see along the bottom of the slide, we've acquired a brand in virtually every year, and now we're a $5.2 billion top line. The brands that we've acquired, 13 of the 14 acquired over the past 22 years. In the year 2000, the only brand that we owned was Arm & Hammer. All the brands you see here displayed today are number one or number two in their categories. We say 14 brands today, 20 tomorrow. Why are we winning? Okay, here's our winning formula, and I'll run through each of these five attributes one by one. First is a nimble organization structure. We make quick decisions.
We operate like a $50 million company as opposed to a $5 billion company, and very quick communication and decision-making, and we're very adaptable, and I think we demonstrated that throughout the pandemic. As far as the split goes, it hasn't changed that much since 2009. This is sort of a then and now look. You can kinda run your eyes around the page as far as the household and personal care split is somewhat similar, a little bit higher on personal care today. We have a report card. We measure how many of our brands have held or gained share each year. Our target is for 2/3 of those 14 brands to gain share annually. We have low exposure to private label.
I think this is very important considering we're in a recession that's gonna worsen over the next six quarters. A weighted average the market share for private label is about 12%. Here are the five categories where we have exposure to private label. If you look at the graphs that are displayed on the slide here, you'll see that they're fairly constant over the past few years. These are things we'll be watching over the next six quarters. We have very clear acquisition strategy. We get opportunities to buy lots of businesses, but we're very fussy about what we'll buy. Running your eyes across the page, have to be number one or number two brands, have to be able to grow 3% or better and be at or above our corporate gross margins.
Need to be asset light. We don't like to buy businesses that have plants. We like to be able to leverage our supply chain footprint. Finally, it needs to have sustainable competitive advantage. That means that when I'm in a nursing home, this brand is still growing for the company. Our most recent acquisition is TheraBreath. We acquired that business in December of 2021, and I would say that we stuck to our long-term plan of the number one destination for cash being acquisitions. In December of 2020, we bought Zicam, which is the 75% share, number one brand in cold shortening. In December of 2021, we bought TheraBreath, which is the fastest-growing brand in the mouthwash category. Year after year, we have consistent innovation.
Generally, of our 3% top-line growth, half of it is driven by new products. That is our formula. All right, then and now, I wanna deepen the understanding there. If you go back to 2009, about three-quarters of the company was U.S. That's still the case today. International has grown more organically than the U.S. The U.S. has benefited from acquisitions, which is the reason why those ratios have stayed pretty close together. This is really important. Now back in 2009, the split between premium and value was 60% premium, 40% value. That's still the case today, and this is why we say that we can perform well in virtually any economic environment. Here's the e-commerce. Back in 2009, we were 1% of our sales were online.
That was true in 2015. We were fourth quartile in comparison to other CPG companies. We're 15% now, probably hit 16% in 2022, so we were—we first quartile today. As far as our brands go, there's some important brands we've displayed across this slide. You look at what the market share is. Arm & Hammer Liquid, Litter, Baking Soda, OxiClean. You can see that we buy businesses, that's OxiClean on the far right, and we're able to grow share, and even the Arm & Hammer brand has continues to grow over time. As far as power brands go, we had eight back in 2009. We have 14 today. Why is that important?
'Cause we believe that the more categories that you're in, the more you're gonna spread your risk, the more revenue and cash flow streams that you have. As far as categories go, 11 categories in 2009 and 17 in 2022. You can see we put a red line on the ones, the new categories that we've entered. Now, here's the international story. Mike's gonna come up and take you through a few slides.
Great. Thanks, Matt. From an international perspective, our aim is to grow 6% organically each year. Just for context, that's a combination of our subsidiary markets across U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Mexico and Australia, and our global markets group, which we coin GMG, which is we service about 130 countries through 400+ distributors around the globe. If you look over the last 10 years, we've averaged about 6.7% growth. This is due to kind of wider distribution, continuing to kinda leverage innovation and some acquisitions and entering new geographies. The result of that is going back to 2014, we're a little over $500 million. We're now in excess of $900 million. We're approaching scale in many of our markets.
We're still very, very early days in many of the world's largest economies, so lots of runway ahead from an international perspective. For 2022, kind of a story of two halves. Certainly, we've been impacted by some inbound and outbound supply issues. We've made some strategic choices as it relates to some of our laundry business and trading off kind of profit in lowering sales. We've had some intermittent challenges with consumption, particularly in our China market, which is our largest GMG market. Again, we're seeing some good rebounding for the back half. This just sort of breaks down how we're positioned across international. Now over a third of our business is within our GMG group.
It's growing the fastest out of all of them. It's doubled over the last five years. Canada represents just under 30%. Europe across the three subsidiaries at 22%, and then Australia and Mexico. Again, if you kinda look at the split across GMG now represents 35%. Again, it has grown double over the last five years and will be the key growth driver at the international for the years to come. From an animal productivity perspective, in this area, we aim to grow 5% a year. If you break it down, 2021 was an exceptional year. We grew at 12%. That's broken up between the dairy market, non-dairy, and then specialty chemicals.
Essentially from an animal nutrition perspective, our focus is on prebiotics, probiotics, and nutritional supplements, which is really key in terms of a portfolio as the market moves away from antibiotics. We're well positioned for future growth in this area. Most notably, the dairy market in particular is quite cyclical, so we've had sort of an up year followed by two down years over the last number of years, evidenced by 2011, 2014, and 2017. As we expanded to other species like cattle, swine, and poultry and also diversified globally, it has allowed us to break that cycle. Now we've got more consistent growth moving forward, which is good.
Just in terms of breakdown, if you go back to 2009, we did have a chemicals business in Brazil, which we exited, but now we've got a good, healthy balance between kind of our dairy nutrition business, our non-dairy nutrition, and chemicals for steady growth. Overall, trusted brand, Arm & Hammer, everything's under the Arm & Hammer brand name. Very on-trend portfolio around kind of prebiotics and probiotics. We've expanded our species footprint, and we certainly have a lot of runway for global growth similar to our consumer business. All right.
All right. Okay. Now how we run the company. We have five operating principles. You can run your eyes down the page there. In the first four, if you do those well, you get good returns. If you can make good acquisitions, you get great returns. If you saw the very first slide, that's the catalyst, the difference between good returns and great returns. First off, leverage brands. You know, we believe we want brands that consumers love. Within the company, we like to promote that have an obsession with the consumer. We have been a friend of the environment for a long, long time, going back to the nineteenth century.
If you live in the United States, you know that baking soda comes in a little yellow box. Well, back in the nineteenth century, the company was putting cards with pictures of birds on there. Not baseball cards, but birds or collectibles to promote save the birds, save the environment. If you kinda run your eyes across the page, in 1907, we were using recycled paperboard in our cartons. In the 70s, we were the only corporate sponsor of the first Earth Day. 20 years later, in 1990, we're still the only corporate sponsor of Earth Day. This is part of the company's DNA. More recently, we started planting trees in the Mississippi River Valley, and we've planted millions of trees to date.
Why? 'Cause we always remember from primary school that the trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere. More recently, we signed up for science-based targets, so that's reduced the amount of CO2 we're putting into the atmosphere in addition to the offsets that we're doing through trees. Here are some of our goals. We wanna be 100% carbon neutral via offsets, that's planting trees, et cetera, by 2025. Just to give you kind of a fun fact, our little company puts 350,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually. That's just Church & Dwight. We're gonna offset that by planting trees. As I said before, we signed up for science-based targets recently. Try to reduce water usage, and we'd like 75% of our waste to be recyclable from our plants.
Again, a lot of recognition from, you know, around the world, different agencies. We don't do this just because we're looking for accolades or take a bow. It's just the right thing to do. Number three is leverage people. We believe we have the most productive team in CPG. We have over $1 million of sales per employee. We have 5,000 employees. We got over $5 billion in sales. We think this is an underappreciated statistic in evaluating companies. We do have a very simple compensation structure. We have revenue and gross margin, cash EPS, 25% each, and everybody in the company is tied to this. What that does is it promotes financial literacy. This is. I think this is important.
It is somewhat unique among incentive compensation plans, is having everybody tied to gross margin. How do you get gross margin? You know, we have a Good to Great program. That's the name for our continuous improvement program. That's the book that everybody's familiar with, but maybe nobody's read. It is the name we've given to our continuous improvement program. Supply chain optimization, we're always trying to make our lines more efficient. New products, try to launch new products that have higher gross margin than the products that they're replacing. Finally, acquisition synergies. When we buy a business, generally, we're able to expand their gross margins. Number four is being asset light. If we like to be around 2% of sales far as our spend goes.
You can see that some years we've been right at it or a little bit below it, a little bit higher in 2020 and 2021, and we'll be even higher in 2022 and 2023. Why? Because we're gonna be spending $200 million this year and $300 million in 2023 to expand our capacity, notably in laundry, litter, and vitamins. Finally, leverage acquisitions. I mentioned that before. It's the same slide. Good returns become great returns when you can do good acquisitions. Now I'm gonna have Rick come up and say a few words about the business results, and then we'll get into Q&A.
All right. Thanks, Matt. Three things today. Just talk about the evergreen model briefly. We'll go through a supply chain update and then wrap up with capital allocation. For our long-term investors, they've known that we've done this for not one or two years, but for over a decade. We run this place with an evergreen model. Organic sales of 3%. Gross margin, typically 25 basis points of expansion. Marketing, higher dollars, but flat as a percent of sales is what we aspire for. SG&A, we leverage hopefully by 25 basis points. Half of that we can get typically when we grow the top line, SG&A at half the rate of the top line. That leaves the operating margin expansion of 50 basis points or 8% EPS growth. Okay, real quick on just supply chain.
A lot of momentum recently, but we talked about Q1, how our fill rates were in the 70s. Remember, if you take a big step back for over a decade, almost in perpetuity, we were at 98% on time in full. What does that mean? It means 99% on time and 99% in full. You multiply the two, and you get 98%. Industry average is in the mid- to low 90s, and that's where we're gonna get back to. Good news is in April, we were around 90%. In May, we were around 90%. By Q4, we're gonna be right at, hopefully 95%. That's the outlook. Okay, moving to capital allocation. We have five destinations for really our free cash flow.
Number one is TSR accretive M&A. For those of you who have followed Church & Dwight for a long time, I would say one, two, three, four is typically TSR accretive M&A. CapEx for organic growth and G2G. You know, Matt just talked about 2% of sales is our historical number for CapEx. NPD support as well. Then the last four and five is debt reduction and return cash to shareholders. Of course, if cash builds in the balance sheet for a period of time, we typically do a higher buyback. We expect to be about 1.6 times levered by the end of the year. Under-levered balance sheet as well.
Moving into capacity and really just CapEx, we are spending quite a bit on CapEx, about $200 million-$300 million in 2023. Here's what we're spending it on. Laundry, litter, vitamins, baking soda, some technology and capacity. Here's the track record over time. You can see back in 2009, we spiked up as we were developing capacity. 2011, same thing. 2022 and 2023 are no different. With that, we'll turn it back over to Steve for Q&A.
All right. Thanks. Maybe Rick, while you're transitioning, you talked about how supply has evolved. I'll loop back on that. Can you talk about start with cost and just how the cost picture for the company has evolved since the 1Q reporting. We've had, I mean, we've heard mix, but generally an upward trajectory on cost. How is it for Church & Dwight?
Yeah, yeah. Just as a backdrop, right? In 2021, we experienced 9% COGS inflation. On a typical year, I would say it's anywhere between 1%-2%. In 2022, our initial outlook in January, we thought we were gonna be about 5% COGS. It ended up, our forecast in April was 9% COGS. It moved pretty rapidly. In our release, we explained that $85 million of incremental pressure had shown up just in those three or four months. I would say maybe, not status quo, still inflation. I mean, what's unique is, you know, we used to be able to say, if we could manage just six commodities, then that would be all the volatility in our COGS line.
One day we'll get back to that, but that's not true right now. We have commodity inflation because of oil and oil-based derivatives like ethylene and resins, but we also have broad-based increases across everything 'cause labor trickles down, freight trickles down. We saw broad-based increases. I'd say, maybe there's by and large, it's similar to what we had said back in April. Freight is still, you know, of course, freight rates might be recovering a little bit, but we have diesel pricing, the highest it ever been. A lot of offsets, but about the same.
Yes. Steve, I would say that the cost environment that I think is even more significant is how it affects the consumers.
Mm-hmm.
Our expectation is that food prices have not peaked.
Mm-hmm
That ahead of us.
Yep.
The other is price of gasoline and petrol. You know, in the U.S., say it's $100-$120 to fill up a tank of gas. You're reminded about your situation every time that happens. You know, the median household income in the United States is around $68,000. That's not a salary. That's all the income within a household. The median, you know, we have 115 million households in the U.S., that's in the middle. The low-income consumers squeeze, and will be squeezed even more. Of course, if you're more well off, you're looking at your portfolio, you're not feeling very good. Consumer confidence is pretty low right now, as you know.
Yeah.
I think that's gonna worsen.
Yeah. You were among the more, you know, cautious on those fronts three months ago.
Typically, we're more transparent.
Okay.
We were looking at what we were seeing.
Yes.
We're looking at what others were seeing, and said, "Wow, that doesn't seem right.
Yeah. How has that caution been progressed in the last couple of months?
Yeah. Well, look, we can't give any kind of mid-quarter outlook right now, but you know, the things that we were seeing were that in the first quarter, the value segment of laundry detergent had suddenly stopped losing share to premium. People were trading up for six or seven quarters. Why? Because of the stimulus. That's turned around in the U.S. Water flossers, we're selling the same number of units, but people are trading down from the high price to the lower price units. In cat litter, as another example, we have premium cat litter, and we have value cat litter.
Mm-hmm.
Premium had been growing faster than our value. In the first quarter, that turned around. Value was growing faster than premium. That was just in the first quarter.
Mm-hmm.
We'd say, well, that was a canary in the coal mine. We said, "Well, that's what we're seeing, so we expect that to worsen.
Okay. Mike, overseas in your markets, health check on how you're seeing the consumer across the landscape?
I think the timing of when it's gonna hit is gonna vary by market. Certainly the demand for the portfolio is still strong, but we are starting to see similar dynamics, and I think it'll just be a lag effect of when do people come out of COVID restrictions, when does recession hit in different markets. We are preparing no different than what we're doing in the U.S. We're probably just getting a head start in the U.S, and we'll inform kind of what comes next. Yeah, we're ready to react to all those, but it will vary by market for sure.
Okay. You did a number of compares and contrasts, Onin, in the slides. Can we just level set on how does the company define value versus premium?
Oh, we just look at the category.
Mm-hmm.
So-
Just medium price point and upper
Yeah. Price points.
Yeah.
Right. We, for example, gummy vitamins, you know, gummy vitamins are a premium to hard pills, but they are the Vitafusion is the value in the gummy category.
Okay. The overall balance, 40/60, hasn't changed, but there are, as you pointed out, there are a number of new categories, new brands, Waterpik, Flawless, vitamins, TheraBreath, Zicam, et cetera. Even Batiste is new versus 2008. What data do you have on those categories in terms of how they perform through recessionary periods, even before you owned them? What are your expectations for them? 'Cause, you know, I think to many people on the outside, including myself, many of those categories feel more discretionary, maybe even vitamins coming off pandemic demand. How are you guys thinking about the additions since 2008 performing through a recession?
Yeah. There's no question that the consumer is going to trade down.
Mm-hmm.
That they will be stretching what they buy. For example, if you're a cat owner and you got cat litter, you're not gonna change the box as quickly as you did before. Even some of the retailers are saying that consumers are trading down from, say, you know, a gallon of milk to a quart of milk. Some of the things that you described, you know, we didn't own back in the last recession, so we didn't own TheraBreath, Zicam, Batiste. These are all brands that we've acquired. What we do believe is that ultimately, the consumer is gonna be interested in are they getting a bang for their buck?
We do think because we have low exposure to private label, we do think a lot of those brands will still perform well during the economy, but we do think volumes would have to be impacted over the next six quarters.
Another big topic, it's been a topic for a while, but big topic this week, pricing. In the context of, you know, a weaker consumer, a stretched consumer, and under the prospects that costs continue to rise, how do you assess the ability for companies, including Church & Dwight, to go back to the pricing well, if needed by costs as we go forward?
Well, I'm sure many of you know that we've priced up 80% of our portfolio. In some cases, we've taken a bite at the apple twice. Laundry and litter, we've raised price in 2021, and we just announced it takes effect July 1, price increases for a second time in laundry and litter. As far as going back to the well, it's more likely that we and others will resort to pack size changes. Instead of eight ounces, it's seven ounces, or size of the box or the container is smaller. That requires CapEx and retooling in order to pull off.
I did think that would be the next logical shoe to drop in 2023, and that's something we are preparing for now should we need to reach for that.
One great example of what's already out in the market is laundry, right? We compacted by 10% for laundry detergent. I know our competition has compacted within the last 12 months before that, and that's really no change to the consumer, right? The same dosing as before, just less water, smaller bottle, so that's kind of a win-win.
Mm-hmm.
Is that bias towards pack size changes versus list price increases, is that because the consumer can't bear it? Is that because retailers won't allow it? A combination of both?
Yeah. Well, the easy answer is a combination of both. Yeah, I do think that you're gonna have demand destruction the more prices go up. You know, the thing I'm sure everybody's worried about is stagnation or stagflation. You know, prices go up, wages go up and continue. It's very possible that in 2023 wages will take another step up. Why? Because wages have not kept pace with inflation. Consequently will need to do that in order to hang on to your workers. I would say it's probably a combination of both.
Okay. Mike, overseas is the same thing in terms of. Is there more opportunities as you see it for, you know, list price increases?
Yeah. We've been quite disciplined around list price increases, but I do think it's been a good opportunity to also, in part, in light of inflation, but also to manage kind of recessionary pressures on the consumer, to use all the revenue growth levers. How we think about pack and price architecture, mix management, trade promotion, optimization, all those things are things that we're focused on. Pricing has been a key lever internationally, as it has been in the domestic market.
Yeah. Just one thing on pricing, Steve. You know, back in 2016, one of the first things that Matt did was we put in a pricing department, right? You know, 170-year-old company, and we only had a pricing department for about six years. But those folks have really added a ton of value. So we know more so than we ever have about our what tiers matter, what elasticities are, what the interactions are among competitors. That group has been worth their weight in gold. You know, they inform us on every single price increase we do, whether it's list price or pack size changes or whatever. But we just have the capability, the muscles pretty well developed now.
Sure. You mentioned CapEx in order to drive some of these pack size changes. Is that CapEx you've already budgeted in terms of you've got those capabilities now, or is this incremental need for CapEx to drive-
No, it would be baked into.
Baked into.
our forecast.
Okay, fine. On the supply side, the 90%-95%, that's a global. Is that a global number or is that a US number?
It's a US number, but it's true, globally as well.
Okay.
Because, really got to remember, most of the production that happens in the U.S., for export or in the U.K. for export, is it would be incorporated in that number.
Okay.
Yes is the answer.
Okay. Should we think about that as a relatively smooth glide path, or are there known, you know, known bottlenecks to break through that relate, you know, creates a step function?
Yeah. Well, you know, 90% right now, which is a great recovery, and 95% by the end of the year, so there is gonna just be a little bit more step change. I think, you know, one misnomer is that our asset-light strategy is the reason why we're having supply issues, right? 25% of our revenues are handled by third-party co-packers. I would say most of the issues that we had from a fill level perspective was more on the raw and pack side. Our raw material suppliers, and that was the backup to the main supplier, you know, wasn't filling their role as good as we had hoped. Now we have a backup to the backup. Those decisions take time to implement.
Even though we said go 12-18 months ago, most of those and we've showed a slide at CAGNY in New York. We have a 20% increase in raw material suppliers and packaging and then a 20% increase in third-party manufacturing. All those changes will be online by late Q3. That's, you know, a step change in my mind.
Okay. You cited the sales per employee productivity number, which, you know, has been an attribute of the company for a long time. How much of that is true product productivity versus, you know, Church & Dwight utilizing more third-party co-manufacturers, as Rick just mentioned, or third-party partners versus someone who's more vertically integrated with their in-house employees?
Yeah.
Can you benchmark that?
Yeah. Well, some of it is due to the fact that it's co-packed, but it's not. I'm sure a lot of the people presenting here this week have 15% or 20%.
Mm-hmm.
Of their products are made by third parties. We're not unusual in that respect. Since I've joined the company, it's been very difficult to add people, and that's deliberate. The whole idea there is that when you have fewer people, you're forced to prioritize. You can only work on things that matter. We could easily hire a few 100 people, and they'd find something to do. That's just the way the world is. Yeah, we're very focused on productivity and our HR team they are business people, and they are focused on productivity. I think they have a big hand in maintaining that edge that we have with respect to productivity.
Okay. As you plot out supply chain, you know, redundancy, risk mitigation for the future, which I know is an ongoing effort, is the balance between, you know, in-house efforts versus outsourced efforts about the same?
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, when we say it's 25% today, long term, we'd like that to be higher.
Okay.
Because that is our model. In spite of what's happened during the pandemic and in spite of the fact we see that the trend is to bring more in-house and put more iron in the ground and more CapEx, that is not the path that we're going to follow.
Okay. ESG. It's important for you guys. It's been notably important for a long time. You know, I think only getting more important. To what extent, as is your compensation structure, right? To what extent are there plans or thoughts to marry those two and make ESG part of the company's compensation structure?
Yeah. That is in the works, right now. That we would expect that, you know, as early as 2023, we would have ESG in some respect tied to our compensation. The question is, do you tie it to your annual incentive plan or do you tie it to your long-term plan? That's something we have to sort out.
Okay. Is it also in terms of what level of the organization are you thinking about? Just the executive level or all the way through or a combination? I mean, what do you think about that evolution?
Yeah, well, the executives are the ones that can influence those the most, with respect to not just the environment, but also diversity numbers as well.
Right.
I think initially it may be more at the senior level of the company as opposed to the entire company.
Okay.
That remains to be sorted out.
M&A. I guess first in terms of the strategy around M&A, which hasn't really changed, but the company has obviously become a lot bigger and the portfolio a lot more complicated. Or maybe not complicated, but complex just in terms of number of brands and number of categories. To what extent can the model keep going, how long can the model keep going, right? In terms of, because you need to move the needle the same you did 10 years ago, you need either bigger deals or more numerous deals. How long can that flywheel keep going before it becomes too difficult to manage?
Yeah. Well, you know, you got to look at us in the context of our peer group. You know, we're a $5 billion top line, you know, $20 billion market cap. You might say, "Hey, we need to do bigger deals," but we don't think that is a gating factor for us. You know, it all comes down to, you know, did they meet the criteria? You know, if you look at Batiste, we bought Batiste in 2011. At the time, we had $20 million in sales. Today, it's $200 million globally. It's the No. 1 dry shampoo. Even though you might buy something small, that thing could be a good driver for you long term.
You know, one thing, Waterpik that we acquired in 2017, that's got so much runway internationally 'cause gum health is a trend and we think that's gonna continue. At some one day, we think Waterpik outside the U.S. will be bigger than in the U.S.
Mm-hmm.
I think it's a focus on whether or not you take the view long term, is this something that can be a long-term contributor as opposed to it's just gonna be a 3% grower.
Yeah. In terms of like, you know, people and complexity, remember we talked about sales per employee. We don't have that many people. As we add these acquisitions, we typically do add some people. As long as we're scaling in that way, we feel like the infrastructure, the backbone of the company, the back office, the supply chain, everything else is there just to keep growing module. I would, you know, a lot of room to run from that perspective.
Yeah. You know, just to add to that, if you think about oral care. Once upon a time you had toothpaste, and then the company bought a Spinbrush, and then Orajel, oral analgesics, and then Waterpik, and then TheraBreath. It's all oral care. You might say, "Well, I got a lot, lots of brands, lots to manage," but you got an oral care business unit. You got R&D focused on that. You know, you can leverage your supply chain and your sales force. Even though it may seem like, hey, you got lots of brands, but we group them so that they're easily managed.
Okay. What in this environment do you expect more opportunity for M&A to emerge at some point over the next 12 months?
Oh, yeah, there's always businesses for sale.
Mm-hmm.
I've been with the company since 2006, and there are always things to look at. Now, we've had droughts where we hadn't acquired anything. You go back to 2008 - 2011, three years, we didn't buy anything. Because in the U.S. we're regarded as a buyer as opposed to a shopper.
Mm-hmm.
A shopper goes to the mall, tries on a lot of clothes and doesn't buy anything. Because we do buy things, we do hear about everything that's for sale in the U.S. We never wake up in the morning and go like, "Wow, I didn't know that was for sale." We're certainly in the deal flow when it comes to the US market.
What about overseas? Are you in the deal flow overseas as much as you'd like to be?
No, we're not as much as we'd like to be. We have bought a couple of international brands. Batiste we bought. That came from our European folks, so they had that idea. Anusol, we bought from J&J. It's a hemorrhoid brand in four countries around the world. U.K., Canada, South Africa, Australia. I would say that's something we would like to do more of internationally.
Are valuation expectations from private sellers coming down at all?
No.
Not yet?
No. No. People always have very lofty expectations. You know, how we approach deals is, I think different than maybe a lot of companies. We're not focused on EPS accretion at all. One of the top 10 things to look at, that's number 11. The things that we're focused on is cash earnings. How much cash does the business throw off, and can we grow that cash?
Okay. Do you expect, I mean, at some point you would expect, you know, valuation expectations to come down?
Yeah.
More pressure to build.
Yeah. Well, it's true, like private equity is gonna have a much more difficult time.
Yeah.
Borrowing, right? I think that's already the case now. We rarely are gonna lose to private equities, 'cause they don't have synergies, and there's a cap about how much they can borrow.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, I think you're right, though. This time next year, as the recession deepens, I think valuations could come in a bit.
Okay.
that, you know.
Yeah.
If you think about that, you think about the drought from 2008 - 2011.
Yeah.
That was right after the last recession. For context. There are things for sale.
Okay.
For sure.
Okay. Just a couple minutes left, one of the things I think you guys have made, like, the biggest strides in versus peers over the last five, six, seven years is digital competency. You know, data analytics. You know, not just e-commerce, but you know, I can't say it. You know.
Yeah.
Digital.
Yeah. I can't spell it either.
Just maybe a little perspective from you guys on how you see that journey and how you see yourself versus aspiration on your digital competence and where the incremental investments go.
Yeah. Back in 2015, 1% of our sales were online, so we were the basement. We were bad when it came to the online-
I wouldn't say bad, but.
No, I'll say it.
Okay.
We looked and said, "Wow, we're really behind the pack.
Yeah.
Now, today, we'd say we're at the front of the pack. One of our expectations is that three or four years from now, that 40% of our sales will be ordered online. If you said, "What's it today?" We say if it's 15%-60% ordered online today, delivered right to your house. There's another maybe 5% or 6% that's ordered online, and then it's click and collect. You go and pick it up.
Mm-hmm.
You'd say, you know, you're about low 20s today as far as percentage ordered online. That is going to accelerate. We've had that point of view for a few years now, which is a catalyst for what we're doing.
Mm-hmm.
Inside the company. Look, everybody's got complete information. Everybody that comes up here today, we all know what's going on in the categories. The economic environment, conditions are universal. It's a level playing field. The difference is your reaction time.
Yeah.
You know, we've been adding data scientists because we want, we wanna make sure that we can. Predictive analytics is embedded in our functions...
Mm-hmm.
particularly sales, marketing, and supply chain. Earlier this year, we hired our chief digital growth officer.
Mm-hmm.
She is making a significant impact on the company.
Almost out of time, are there investments that are going in terms of? We talk a lot about sales, marketing, consumer insights, you know, kind of, and direct facing, you know, e-commerce to consumers. What about between you and your retail partners or between you and your suppliers? Have you leveraged technology more and in a better way to get closer and tighter in your relationships between up and down the value chain?
Yeah, just kind of a quick one as far as technology goes. We have 400 distributors that we manage. We're good at managing complexity.
Mm-hmm.
What the international business has done a great job doing is putting in portals, so it's easier for the distributors to work with us.
Work with you.
You know, we've done something similar on the supply chain side as well. As far as other investments we might be making, may not be technology-wise, but, you know, we aim to be the expert in Lean within CPG. And three-four years ago, Lean, no one knew what Lean was within the company. And of our 5,000 employees, 3,000 are in supply chain, and they've done a fabulous job. Out of those 3,000 employees, 2,000 have already participated in a Lean event. That, we think that's gonna help us with respect to managing costs going forward.
Great. On that note, we'll break.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
Thanks, Steve. Thank you.