Thank you. Mr. Perreault, without further ado.
Okay. Yeah. Hold the applause. All right. Good to be with you this morning. I just have a few slides for those of you who aren't familiar with the story, gonna bomb through them. Safe harbor statement, take a look at it when you have a chance. Okay, we've had an evergreen model. We tell our investors we try to grow organically top line 3%, bottom line 8%, try to expand our operating margin 50 basis points annually. Get a little bit from gross margin and the rest leverage from SG&A. Where we get the top line growth is 2% domestic, 6% international, and 5% SPD. You'll see on a slide or two that very small exposure internationally, so we have a lot of opportunity there. Here it is.
We're 76% US, 18% international, and 6% specialty products. This is very relevant right now in these uncertain times. Our portfolio is balanced 60% premium, 40% value. Interestingly enough, if you went back to 2008, 2009, we actually coincidentally had the same split, 60/40. We have 14 power brands, and those 14 power brands account for 80% of our revenues and profits. This company's been built through acquisitions. If you went back to the year 2000, the only brand we had was Arm & Hammer. All the other brands you see up here were acquired since the turn of the century. All these brands, if you notice these tombstones, they're number one or number two in their categories.
What we say to investors, we're 14 brands today, 20 tomorrow. We think using cash for acquisitions is the highest and best use. If you look at just kind of the history, we went back to 2004, where top line was $1.5 billion. You know, in 2021, it was $5.2 billion. If you look along the bottom of the slide here, you can see in just about every year we've acquired something large or small. We're very, very fussy about the businesses that we'll acquire. They need to be number one or number two share. They need to be able to grow at or above our evergreen model of 3%. They need to have at or above our corporate gross margins. Asset light's very important to us.
We don't like to buy businesses that have plants. We like to be able to leverage our supply chain, both manufacturing, logistics, and purchasing. Anything we buy, we have to conclude it's got a sustainable competitive advantage. Now, the most recent acquisition was in December. We bought TheraBreath. Now, TheraBreath is a non-alcohol mouthwash. It's the number 2 mouthwash in the non-alcohol category. It's the fastest growing brand in mouthwash. Now how we run the company. The first 4 are important. We leverage brands. You saw that we have 14 power brands. We've been a friend of the environment for a long, long time. I'll take you through that in a second. We have the most productive employees in CPG.
We have about $1 million of sales per employee, about 5,000 employees, and we think that's an underappreciated statistic in investing. We're asset light, as I said before. If you do the first four right, we get really good returns. But if you're also able to leverage acquisitions, you're gonna get great returns, and we have. Here's a story about a friend of the environment. Just quickly, if you went back to the end of the nineteenth century, we're actually putting trading cards, pictures of birds in the Arm & Hammer boxes just to promote the environment. At the turn of the century, we started to use recycled paperboard. In the 1970s, we're the only sponsor of the first Earth Day. 20 years later, in 1990, we're still the only corporate sponsor of Earth Day. We started planting trees.
In 2017, we've planted millions of trees in the Mississippi River Valley. Remember from fifth grade, trees take CO2 out of the atmosphere. More recently, we committed to science-based targets. Now, here are the external goals that we've been promoting for the last few years. We're trying to be 100% carbon neutral by 2025 via planting trees. Second, water. We're trying to reduce our water consumption 10% a year. In solid waste, we'd like to recycle 75% of all of our waste. We get a lot of recognition for that externally. Of course, we don't do these things for the recognition, but I think it's important to say that our efforts have been recognized. Financials. First quarter. Organic sales grew 2.7%.
You see gross margin contracted 190 basis points. Actually, it was a little better than we thought it was gonna be. Our EPS was flat, also better than we thought it would be. We had a really good first quarter. As far as the outlook for the year, we started the year with 4%-8% call. More recently we said we're gonna be at the lower end of the range, would be 4% EPS growth. For us, prioritize uses of cash flow. We generate lots of cash. We think the highest and best use of cash is TSR accretive acquisitions. You can run your eyes down the page here. Obviously, CapEx for organic growth, new products, debt reduction. At the bottom, we have return of cash to shareholders.
We don't have a big yield, about 1%, and we do buy back shares from time to time. 121 consecutive years of dividends. As Jason said in his opening remarks, we're a very consistent company. With that, we can fireside chat.
Awesome. Get comfortable. Make yourself at home.
Okay.
Either one works. I mean, it's up to you.
No, it's okay. I appreciate it.
We got two. Again, if anyone in the audience has questions, feel free to raise your hand, press the button, and you can vocalize them. Generally, my list of questions are gonna focus around three topics, M&A strategy, some of your recent top line and market share performance, and then digging into margins and all the various puts and takes within that, which is a lot.
Yeah.
It's a lot to unpack in terms of supply chain, cost inflation, pricing. I don't know where to start and unpack that. You closed with talking about your priorities of capital allocation with M&A being one of them. Let's dig in a little bit more there. The last couple of acquisitions have put you into OTC in a bigger way, and appliances. Is this where we should expect you to hunt going forward?
No, I wouldn't say appliances is where we're to be hunting. If you look at our most recent acquisitions, we acquired in 2017, Waterpik. That's been a complete home run for the company. It's grown top line about 10% annually, and we think it's gonna continue to grow strongly. Why? Because we have so much international opportunity. That was a hit. We bought Flawless then, 2019. That's gone sideways for us, but it was a small acquisition. We had about $475 for that, but it was only 8x EBITDA. As far as the other ones, more recently was Zicam at the end of 2020 and then TheraBreath at the end of 2021.
Yeah.
The thing to keep in mind is that all of these acquisitions fit our criteria, whether it's Waterpik, Flawless, TheraBreath or Zicam. They're number 1 or number 2 in their categories. They're asset-light. They can grow, and they have gross margins at or above our corporate margins, and they have a competitive advantage. We're somewhat agnostic with respect to the categories that we'll get into, but we're essentially a consumables company, and those they have generally the highest priority when we're looking at deals.
I'll be honest, with TheraBreath, I had never actually dug in and tried to parse out the mouthwash category and thought about it any differently than between alcohol and alcohol-free. How big is the alcohol-free or the alcohol-free segment of the category? How's it growing? And what do you bring to the table for this?
Yeah. Well, the mouthwash category is about $1.6 billion consumption. The alcohol free is about $700 million. Yeah, so we're number two there with 15% share. But that side of the non-alcohol has been growing about 4% a year. TheraBreath has been growing 20%-50% a year the last few years, so it's sort of the new kid on the block. You know, the big dogs are Listerine, Crest, Scope. But we're now the number four in all mouthwash and number two in non-alcohol. What we bring to the table, frankly, is scale. You know, we have bought lots of businesses that were family-owned, so obviously we have a professional sales organization. We can drive distribution.
We can also take them internationally 'cause they didn't really have an international presence, and obviously, we can bring some synergies to the table as well. You may not notice, Jason, but we make mouthwash in our Montreal plant for Orajel, so one of our other brands, so we're not a stranger to mouthwash.
On Zicam, is it similar? I mean, it's a different category, obviously, but in terms of what you bring to the table.
Yeah. Yeah, cough and cold. You know, it's essentially the same playbook when we bought it. You know, whenever we buy a business, we buy a business. Now that one went off a cliff. We bought it in December 2020. We knew that people were masking and social distancing, so 2021, the sales just dipped significantly. It's coming back now. So in the first quarter, Zicam was up 50% year-over-year. By the way, TheraBreath in the first quarter, consumption was up almost 40%, so that continues to grow. The reason why that grew so much partly is due to distribution, but also just the velocity. Consumers are discovering the brand.
With Zicam bounce back, is that just bouncing off the COVID lows or are you controlling some of that destiny?
Yeah. No, it's I talked to somebody at another large pharma company and what she told me is that what they're seeing is that people don't wanna be sneezing or coughing in public, so there's a lot of preventative consumption that's going on right now.
I can relate to that. I've got some allergies acting up, and I feel guilty every time I cough. Like, is someone gonna be. I have been COVID tested, by the way. I'm clear, but it's like, yeah, I'm paranoid around this.
Yeah.
I can appreciate that.
Okay. I've got some in my bag. I can help you out.
Yes. Send it my way. Slip it over. I'll give it a try. Good question.
You get 20 power brands. Can you talk about a failed
I'm gonna replay that question 'cause he wasn't on the mic for the.
Yeah.
Can you give us examples, and correct me if I'm not paraphrasing this properly. Can you give us some examples of where some of your M&A went wrong, where you bought a business that should have been your next power brand and it failed to effectively become that? If so, what drove that failure?
Yeah. One of our competencies is that we're you could say, if you look at our total shareholder return over the past 15 years, is because we don't make those mistakes. The only one I would call out to say didn't go according to plan was Flawless. You know, that consumption went flat for the last few years. Now, the front end was managed by the organization that sold it to us, so they made decisions with respect to sales and marketing. Why? Because we had an earn-out tied to it. You know, now we own the whole business. We own the sales and marketing front end of it, so we still like our chances to be able to grow the business going forward.
You mentioned Zicam rolled over quickly after you bought it, but I'm pretty sure I recall you buying it and saying, "This business is gonna roll over.
Yeah.
We're going in eyes wide open.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, what COVID does here, and like, it's factored into expectations, price, et cetera.
Yeah. We just thought that could be a long-term brand. You know, the other thing too is with Zicam, if you could get like Emergen-C, if you could convert that to an everyday usage, you'd drive significant growth. That's one of the things that's an opportunity for us, as opposed to being episodic when you feel a cold coming on.
Sure. Now, you highlighted in your presentation 60% premium, 40% value. We're all hypersensitive around price sensitivity for the consumer buying. A few data points here and there saying maybe it is, but for every data point saying maybe it is, there's a data point saying not really yet. What are you seeing in your portfolio? Any evidence of that trade down piece, that more value-oriented piece beginning to get more momentum in this environment?
Yeah, there's a few things that I could call out. In our litter business, we have two types of cat litter. We have premium cat litter, and we have value cat litter. In the first quarter, the value cat litter was growing faster than our premium cat litter, so we hadn't seen that. The second thing is that if you look at the detergent, if you just look at detergent as segments, the premium segment and the value segment, premium had been gaining share over value for many quarters. In the first quarter, that actually was flat. It didn't lose share. The third one I would call out is for Waterpik. What we have high-end water flossers, and then we have some less expensive ones.
We're seeing that the greater velocity on the less expensive versions in the first quarter. I would say those are three things we're keeping an eye on.
I know you don't have a crystal ball, but y'all do a lot of work on assessing the consumer and making some educated assumptions of what the future holds. Do you think that builds even more momentum, meaning the trade-down components? Do you think we're early innings in that? Or do you want to say?
Yeah, well, look, it's been $5 for a gallon of gas is somewhat sudden, you know. You know, we weren't living with that last year. When you think about the median household income in the United States being around $65,000 a year $5 gas does take a bite.
Yeah.
Besides that, you know that food, everything's gone up, food, consumer products, et cetera. I think it's just common sense to think that the consumer is gonna feel squeezed. The question is, well, how long is that gonna last? It's gotta be two, three quarters or are we gonna go into a recession? I think we're maybe on the front end of that.
Yeah. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but, well, 60% of your portfolio is premium and 40% is value. My perception is that your share within the value tier is actually higher than it is within the premium tier. If we start to get a rotation back into value, it's gonna actually benefit your overall market share. Is that a true statement or did I just totally fabricate that?
Well, the way we look at it is, if you look at what are the big categories in value, that'd be detergent, that'd be cat litter, which is the orange box, and vitamins. Vitamins has been really rocking, and it's been a very strong category. I think those being probably our three biggest businesses, if there is a trade-down, I think we stand to benefit.
Yeah. This is my natural transition into the broader market share comments that I told you I wanted to get into. It's been a tough year. I'm not sure that I recall seeing so many of your categories in the red from a market share perspective, as we've seen more recently. I know there's a lot of transitory factors at play there from a supply chain perspective. Can you unpack those for us and give us more context and detail around that?
Yeah. You've heard we have 14 power brands, and we do publish our report card pretty regularly, saying how many of those gained share. In the first quarter, it was seven. Seven lost share. We've been struggling with a number of brands as far as the supply chain goes. I mean, it's no surprise. We have difficulty getting at times bottles, difficulty getting raw materials, packaged materials, labels. You know, one small ingredient can affect your ability to ship a product. Our goal is for two-thirds of our 14 brands to grow share, and that is still our objective. Yeah, we've been hampered by some issues with supply chain.
Any line of sight, are those supply chain issues abating?
Yeah, yeah. No, as far as the supply chain, we've been spending a lot of time qualifying lots and lots of new suppliers and co-packers, no different than any other CPG company. That doesn't necessarily create more incremental costs. It's just that you have another supplier. Wouldn't be concerned about the gross margin hit to that. There are lots of raw packaging materials that we never thought we would need a second supplier, but now we do. We think we're better prepared coming out of it. Our fill levels are starting to come back finally. You know, we're in the high 80s now. Normally it's 99%. When I say fill level, I mean, are we filling 99% of retailer wings?
It's high 80s right now.
I thought you were like low 80s% exiting the year, still sort of low- to mid-80s% in the first quarter, is that right?
Yeah. No, the first quarter, one of the months we dipped below 80.
Okay.
'Cause we had the Omicron, a lot of people calling out in the plants.
Yeah, yeah.
A lot of our suppliers were having the same problems with attendance.
Okay.
That hurt us. You know, our organic growth in Q1 was 2.7%. I think we left a lot of money on the table if we were able to ship.
Remind me, did you guys quantify how much money you think you left on the table?
Nah, 'cause that.
Will, will you qualify it today? Can I pry this from you?
No.
Since then, you've gotten back to the high 80s%. That's obviously a good place. To get all the way to right, it sounds like you need some of these new suppliers to come online. Any sense of when they will be online fully?
Yeah. We're internally saying we expect to be in the mid-to-high 90s% by the end of the year, by Q4.
Okay.
It'll be kind of a slow build.
Do you have subdued inventory levels at retail? Like, will there be a catch-up here as you look to replenish shelves and get us back to bright?
Yeah, there'll be some of that.
Okay.
I do think that there's probably a little bit left to go as far as the distribution centers filling up. I think they have a base level right now that they're able to replenish the shelves.
I'm surprised that you're saying it's not going to weigh on cost. I mean, I've always had this perception that the reason you go to a single source supplier is to consolidate volume and scale behind said supplier. In turn, they of course give you a better deal. If you were to fragment it. How can you go and unwind that and start to fragment it without suffering incremental cost?
Yeah. Well, there's still competition, right? If there's a particular raw material or component that you're looking for, we're not necessarily going to the only person that can supply it. There were other options, and we may have stayed with the same supplier for 10, 15, 20 years and say, "Hey, now we gotta get a backup to a lot of these suppliers." Consequently, it's still a bid process, it's an RFP.
I think the impact here has been most notable on litter you called out, I think, because of clay supply. Is that right?
Yeah. No, actually, well, at times there were. We had intermittent issues with supply of clay, like I say, also supply of cartons was an issue.
Uh-huh.
Supply of glue. You know, just there were a lot of things from time to time that were hurting us with respect to litter. Similarly for detergent was bottles, labels at times. Again, these are coming from third parties.
Some of this was as you were converting to the more concentrated formula.
Yes, that's right. We recently converted 150 SKUs in laundry detergent and concentrated it, so we took 10% of the water out. Right, that was going on. At the same time we had some issues with respect to components. But that's behind us now. That was a Q1 issue.
I'm gonna come back to that in a minute as we leg into the cost side, 'cause I wanna probe on what sort of costs that unlocks. Real quick, to close the loop on share and sales, you mentioned vitamin category has been ripping. It doesn't look like it's doing that well for you.
No, it hasn't been 'cause we haven't been able to supply.
That's a supply issue there too?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, we have third parties as well that we use for supply.
We've got laundry, litter, vitamin. Back to your point, your three biggest categories.
Yeah.
All seeing supply chain issues, right?
Yeah, but that's gonna be behind us. We're gonna be out of the woods in the second half.
Okay, good. You also, speaking front half or second half, you came into the year with the expectation of front half gross margins down. Not a big surprise. As you mentioned, you actually fared a little bit better in the first quarter than you expected. You're looking for a back half recovery in gross margins. I know you're still calling for at least a fourth quarter recovery on gross margin.
Yeah.
Could we see it as early as the second quarter? Or the third quarter?
No, I think what's gonna happen is first quarter was down 190 basis points. We think the second quarter is gonna be a replay of the first quarter, aro down 200 or so. Q3 will be better, won't be as much of a contraction year-over-year, but it'll still be negative. We don't think it'll expand until the fourth quarter. The things that will be helping us by then are things like, well price increases, 'cause we have another round of price increases that we just announced for laundry and litter that'll take effect July 1. Our fill levels will be better 'cause there's a lot of inefficiencies associated with that.
We'll be lapping some of the big cost increases that we had year-over-year, 2021 versus 2020.
Sure.
I think those are probably the primary reasons why we think we're gonna be expanding in Q4.
On lapping those costs, I love that illustration you have from somebody within your organization, showing somebody running down a hill chasing a ball, right?
Down a hill, yeah.
I know you've been talking for it feels like two years now about just trying to catch up with costs. It's like chasing a ball downhill because the costs just keep going. We've seen some fatigue in the freight markets. Resin, it looks like we're lapping the hurricane-related disruptions, and maybe we're not down as far as we hope, but from a spot price, we're still below where we were last summer. Any evidence collectively that maybe we found a ceiling here and we're not still chasing the ball downhill?
Yeah. Well, look, you're right about resins. I mean, it came off a little bit, but they're still really high. The way we plan the rest of the year is that they don't come down, that we're planning on they stay at the current spots for resin. What was the other commodity you had?
Freight.
Yeah, freight. You're right. Freight has come back a little bit, but you gotta keep in mind, diesel now is all-time high.
Sure.
You do have an offset there. We don't necessarily look at the inputs right now and see signs of relief, at least not in the near term.
Yeah, even signs of no longer chasing the ball downhill.
Yes.
Would be incrementally positive, right?
Right. Yeah. That's right, 'cause if you say that the costs are gonna start plateauing and you've been we've been raising price, we've priced up 80% of our portfolio globally, and more recently two large categories, laundry and litter, that'll take effect. That's the second round takes effect July 1. We think at that point, as you know, as far as chasing the ball down, by Q4, we'll have started to cover all the cost increases.
Yeah. Yeah. I remember early innings, you guys got hit by force majeure issues left and right on the resin complex. You now have the industry I think you're unlocking like somewhere high single digit percentage of new capacity expansion coming in the back half of this year. Is it possible that we actually get some relief there? Your assumption of we're moving sideways proves to be too conservative?
No, I don't think it's too conservative. I think it takes a while for a lot of stuff to come online and to work its way through the supply chain. I wouldn't expect relief until 2023 on resin.
I guess here's a bigger question I'm gonna ask a few people today. There's always been this debate for decades actually. Is deflation good for the industry or not? Would we rather find ourselves in an environment where we've got 2%-3% sorta evergreen, steady-as-she-goes inflation, that you can put 1-2 points of pricing in every year and get a little bit of leverage, or would we rather get a windfall of costs coming in and a margin recovery?
Yeah. Well, it's all a question of what's driving the deflation. Now, if this deflation is driven by reduced discretionary consumer demand, that's a bad thing. If deflation comes, why? Because the availability of raw and packaged materials is more widespread, then we would take that.
Yeah.
I would generally prefer to have a period of just low inflation, low steady inflation. It's very possible that we will have a bit of deflation when things come back down to earth, when availability comes back.
Yeah. Yeah. It feels that way.
Yeah.
More on your side of the house than some of the food companies I cover right now.
Yeah. Yeah.
You know, they've got some issues that look like they're gonna be, I don't know, evergreen, but certainly a bit more durable.
Yeah.
Sticking on margins, productivity, I was gonna have pricing, but you actually covered proactively a fair amount of the pricing actions that you've taken. Were there any sizable productivity initiatives that you had to put the pause on during COVID just to try and keep up with demand? Is there gonna be an unlock on the back end of, "Hey, we got this pipeline of projects now that we can finally unleash?
Yeah. Well, we always have a pipeline of projects. We have this continuous improvement program we call the Good to Great the book that everybody's familiar with, but probably very few people have read. The Good to Great program, we have lots of projects for 2022, 2023 and 2024, so you can't do everything all at once. You're right, we haven't been able to crack into a lot of the lines in the plants in order to make changes so we become more efficient. Our productivity programs in the first quarter were about 70 basis points of a tailwind of help for us. That was all netted in that 190 number that you saw up there. By the end of the year, that will probably double.
It'll be call it between 100 and 140 basis points, I think by Q4 of a tailwind. That's ahead of us, but we bake that into our thinking.
Sure. Well, is that like getting back to normal run rate? Should we take that $140 and extrapolate it?
No, that's just happened to be the year-over-year math. You know, we'll start all over next year. We have programs in place for next year. Generally, what we try to do is to target about 2% of sales. We have $5 billion in sales. You're looking for 2%, you look for $100 million of ideas to reduce the cost and make yourself more efficient. We don't always get there every year. We get damn close.
Mm-hmm. Back to laundry compaction the waves we had.
Yeah. You know, that's another reason for second half improvement of
It's embedded in that 140.
Yes. Right. That would be another reason why fourth quarter, we're gonna exit the year with an expansion of gross margin.
Okay. We'll get some wrap around run rate on that too then.
You mean next year?
Yeah.
23 versus 22?
Yeah. At least in the first quarter.
Yeah.
Maybe a little bit in the second quarter.
Yeah. That's right.
Okay. Now every company, we rewind the clock to 2020, was calling out extraneous one-time COVID-related gross margin drags, like with one-time pay, one-time bonuses, all the testing.
Yeah.
People not showing up. Everyone did.
Sanitizing the plants.
Yes. There's not a single company I'm aware of who's now called out the benefit of lapping that. Is like, where'd the costs go? This isn't. I know I'm kinda picking on you 'cause you happen to be on stage next to me. Like I said.
Okay.
There's not a single company that's called that out. Are these still comparison tailwinds that we should expect? Are these costs gonna fall away?
Yeah. Once you're in 2022, though, that most of that's gone away. You know, I think a lot of that started to abate in 2021.
Yeah.
You know, we started to sanitize less frequently. We were able to run the plants more efficiently as well once we figured out how to protect employees. I think that's all behind us now. Of course, going the other way is wages, and that's permanent. You know, when we talk about deflation, wages won't be part of that. Deflation can only come from raw pack materials and maybe transportation.
Yeah. On that topic, this is more of a debate. Our economists ask us. They survey the covering analysts once a month. We all know wages went up and you had to spend. You pay more to get people back. Is it still escalating, or have we found sort of a new level on the right wages, the right compensation to have your employees back in the manufacturing facilities, the distribution centers, et cetera?
Yeah. I would say we probably have hit the right level. What would be the empirical data to support that? It would be the ability to hire. Particularly we have 5,000 employees and 60% of them are in our supply chain, so they're in our plants. We've got 15 plants. You know, we've had a lot of vacancies over the past couple of years. More recently, we've made a dent in that. Just every week, we're growing. We're hiring more people and closing the gap. So I would say we probably have hit the right level with respect to wages.
Just a reminder, anyone in the audience has questions, I welcome them. Feel free to raise your hand and jump in. All right. Nobody's taking the bait right now. We talked about the.
You didn't ask me about the cows.
Yeah, let's pivot. We'll do that. I'll ask you about your cow Gatorade. The specialty nutrition business. Yeah, it's cyclical, but we've got dairy prices up and to the right right now. I've got to believe this is supporting the robust growth outlook for that business.
Yeah. Well, look, you mentioned it's cyclical. That is true. Just for people who are not familiar, we have a $300 million business in specialty products. Two-thirds of that is animal productivity. Historically, most of the business was all of this devoted towards dairy. In the last few years, we've acquired a couple of small businesses that got us into other species, cattle, swine, poultry. Now 70% of the business is non-dairy. Consequently, this will be the first time that we've had three years in a row of organic growth in that business. Historically, it's two up, one down, two up, one down. We feel good that we're finally getting it to the point we'll have sustainable organic growth.
Yeah. Fingers crossed it sustains for another year or two.
Yeah.
Kinda comes back to where we see the commodities, though. With grain prices where they are, I've got to imagine that,
Well, milk prices are up as well.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Exactly. That's gonna support it. Even with higher grain prices, I think last time I saw the income on feed, the farmer economics still looked pretty healthy.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
The other one, international business has been a juggernaut for us historically. You saw at the opening remarks that our evergreen model calls for international growth 6% a year, and it has grown at or above that for the last five or six years. In the first quarter, it was zero, it was 30 basis points, we'll call it flattish. Second quarter, we're expecting more of the same, maybe 0%-1%. The reason for that is because we have lockdowns in different parts of the world. The biggest part of our international business, or the fastest-growing part is our global markets group. That's where we ship product to 80 countries around the world. The struggle there is delivery. We have the orders, we just can't get them there.
Yeah.
We again expect that to start to improve in the second half.
Yeah, the export business.
Yeah. It's been real important to the growth story.
Sure. You know, it has. China is one market that some of us got excited about because you recently, I don't know how long you've been there, but certainly there's a much bigger spotlight on it a couple of years ago when we looked, and I think you're looking to go cross-border and penetrate that market in a bigger way. Any update on the progress on that?
Yeah. We know we've been doing well in China. The biggest brands we have in China are Waterpik and vitamins. We sell into China through two major distributors that we've contracted with. That's going well. The lockdowns don't help right now as far as consumption goes, so that's another reason why we see that zero in the first quarter for organic growth. We do think long term, that's gonna be a big grower for us because just the population, we're just so underrepresented there.
Yeah. Now, turning back to the US, I've been covering this industry from the outside looking in for a while, and I worked in it before. I've never seen the industry being able to price with such ease. I haven't seen it since probably the 1990s. I mean, it doesn't seem like the industry's been able to just push this much price in the US in decades, literally decades. Why is it so unique? And is this a new normal? I mean, do you think that the industry perhaps flexed their pricing muscles and realized, "Wow, maybe we have more muscle than we actually appreciated. Maybe, maybe we've been capitulating and playing cat's paw to Walmart for too long. Like, we actually have leverage in this relationship.
Yeah. No, you're right. We haven't been able to take price for many years. We're almost wholly dependent upon efficiencies in our operation in order to drive gross margin expansion. Yeah, as far as the muscle goes, yeah, you're right. It is a new muscle, but you also have to be careful about volume destruction.
Sure.
You know, you get to the point where you say, "Oh, okay, the consumer just can't tolerate it anymore." I do think you're right in that I think CPG companies and food companies now have a process. They probably have an internal capability they once didn't have. There's a lot of science behind raising prices and measuring elasticity. Not a lot of companies have developed the talent in-house in order to evaluate a category to determine, okay, how far do you go with price, and what do you think the elasticities are gonna be?
Yeah.
We have that muscle now. We actually started developing our pricing group five years ago.
Wow.
A good thing, too, because we were ready when the opportunity posed itself.
For sure. Yeah. I think you've demonstrated you're able to get out there faster than some of your other competitors, despite some of the maybe price makers moving slower.
Yeah. It was unusual for us to lead price-
Right.
in laundry.
Yeah. Exactly.
Not being the number one brand.
Yeah. It worked out okay.
Yeah. Yeah, it has.
I think part of the reason elasticity is, I think we all know part of the reason elasticity functions have been so low is because everyone's been marching to the same beat and move in unison, and category elasticities are never really that high. It's always the cross-price elasticities where things get blown out of whack. How does this play out if we start to see costs come in? Would you expect that there's gonna be somebody who goes for that market share and gets the spiral of promotional intensity building back up?
Yeah. No, that could happen. You know, if you have deflation, then you have a price umbrella a profit umbrella. So consequently, you can reach for it and start dealing it back.
Yeah.
If you look at sold on deal behavior right now, usually you have to look at the household products 'cause trade promotions isn't a big lever on personal care products. On the household side, liquid laundry detergent's around 30% sold on deal today, and it's typically around 35%. You might see that float back up to that in a period of deflation. For cat litter, sold on deal is around 10%, and that's generally in the high teens 18, 19%. That's actually very depressed. I think the reason for that is because just about all of the producers, Nestlé, Clorox, Church & Dwight, had problems from time to time with respect to supply.
Consequently, I think all the trade was pulled back. Yeah, certainly that is a potential in the future if there's a big pullback in-
Yeah.
in costs.
Potential, in the interim, it looks like the outlook for your business is improving, not eroding, particularly as we go into the back half of the year. Supply chain issues, the gum in the system coming out, paving the way for better top line, more pricing taking effect, productivity ramping, cycling some of the costs. We should get market share improvement, top line improvement, and margin improvement all coinciding at the same time.
Good summary.
It's a good summary, and it's a great way to end this. With that, let's wrap this up, 'cause we're bumped up against it. That was perfectly timed.
Okay. All right.
We're fresh out of time. Matt, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.
All right. See ya.