Good morning, everyone. I'm Dara Mohsenian, Morgan Stanley's Household Products and Beverage Analyst. Just before we get started, a quick disclosure: please see the Morgan Stanley Research website at www.morganstanley.com for important research disclosures and contact your MS representative if you have any questions. And with that, we're very pleased to welcome Colgate. With us here today are Panos Tsourapas , who is the Group President of Europe and Developing Markets, and Stan Sutula, who's the CFO. Thank you very much for being with us here today.
Thanks for having us.
So maybe we can just start with organic sales growth. Obviously, we've been through a period of above-trend pricing in the group. That's coming off as we look out over the next few quarters. Maybe you can just talk about, are you confident at the enterprise level across the organization that we land at this 3%-5% organic sales growth going forward as we look out past some of this hyperinflation or just excess inflation in non-hyperinflationary markets? And part of the question is, I think from an internal standpoint, you guys have made a ton of progress with the strategy changes over the last few years. It seems to be driving greater household penetration, greater market share. So on the one hand, you seem to have a lot of momentum internally.
Perhaps the external markets are a little more challenged given some of the volatility we're seeing with the consumer and pricing coming off. So maybe juxtapose those two things versus each other. And as you look going forward, obviously we're not going to continue at the growth rates we've been at, which has been well above your long-term target. But are there some things that could move you towards the higher end? And how do you think about sort of headwinds versus tailwinds?
Sure. So first of all, the last few years have been interesting with COVID, post-COVID, and we've experienced some great growth as a result of that. But if we talk about our long-term algorithm, our long-term model at 3%-5%, it's really built off 2%-4% category growth rates and then driving performance above those growth rates. And we do that through a number of items. So first, our diversity of our business. So we operate in multiple categories and multiple geographies, and we believe that's a fundamental strength for us over the long term. And that's because we can have one market that may be underperforming and offset that with other markets around the world. And we operate roughly two-thirds international. The second piece of that is innovation. So as we bring innovation to market, that's one way to outperform that market.
And you've seen us do that in a number of categories, gaining share in our key categories around the world. And bringing that innovation to market is a key component. Now, on top of that, we've been reinvesting into the business, partially through the innovation capital, but also investing into advertising. And that investment in advertising has helped us execute above competition and gain share in the key components. So we're confident in our long-term algorithm of the 3%-5%. And look, every year has its own challenges, whether it was commodities or now we're dealing with whether it might be tariffs or different tax issues. But we deal with that over the last 218 years. We'll deal with it now.
Okay, that's helpful. And then a similar question earnings-wise. You've really been focused on balance across the P&L in the last few years. You've had this industry gross margin recovery as commodities dropped off while above-trend pricing was in place. Now that's abating somewhat. So as you think out going forward, maybe talk a little bit about gross margin expansion, what's left there. You've done good work on the productivity side over the last few years. So how much of that can continue? And how do you think about sort of delivering earnings in light of the environment we're in? The second part of that question will be around FX pressure and maybe Panos. You can speak to how you manage that in local markets.
But Stan, as you think about outsized FX pressure, if the dollar stays where it is today, how do you think about managing through that strategically and how that shapes the P&L?
So we started talking about the top line with organic, but I think one of the things that's happened over the last few years, we came out of COVID with a better business model, a healthier business model. So we kind of break that down and look at the components. And we start with margin on gross margin. Obviously, pricing has helped, but we have a whole set of RGM tools that we use to drive the overall placement of our product in market. Some of that's premiumization. We've been growing faster in our key categories like oral care and pet care. Those have higher margins, so we've had a mixed benefit. We also have a long-standing, what we call funding the growth, think productivity program. And that productivity drives really across both gross margin and the middle of the P&L and overheads.
But within gross margin, it is buying commodities smarter. It is getting efficiency in the plants. It's getting better labor productivity. It's doing automation. All those things will contribute to margin expansion. And we've used that margin expansion to fund investments back into business. Now, if you kind of continue down the P&L, things like overheads. Well, I don't like to think of finance as overhead, but as overheads, as we support the business, we like to grow those at a much slower rate than revenue to drive productivity. And this is some of the areas we are seeing benefits from AI as we get to figure out how to do it more efficiently and get more leverage out of those investments. Now, you've seen us over the last few years. We've made investments in that middle of the P&L, things like digital, analytics, and going through data.
We think that's helped us as a broad-based business model. Our objective at the end is for compounded dollar EPS growth. We believe that we can do that over the long term.
Okay, great.
I'm sorry, you asked about FX.
Yeah.
Let me come out of FX, and we can let Panos chime in. So we operate in 200 countries and territories. We deal with FX every day around the globe. We operate in hyperinflationary economies like Argentina and Turkey and Nigeria. And so we have to deal with FX on a regular basis. Our general philosophy is that we will go price and take actions for the transactional component of that, but not for the translational. The reason being on translational is if we go over-rotate, we'll become uncompetitive in local markets to local players. So we take a more holistic view of FX. And there's certainly been some incremental volatility lately, particularly in Latin America. We've seen the Mexican peso kind of between MXN 20 and MXN 21, the Brazilian real breaking BRL 6. And we'll deal with that over that period of time as we have historically.
Panos, I'm not sure if you'd add anything.
Panos, when you think about managing your business versus local competitors in that FX environment, can you take us through some of the strategy tweaks that you make and how you manage through that at a local level?
Yeah, as Stan said, we price primarily for transaction, and we deploy a number of tools: list price increases, RGM initiatives, innovation mix, premiumization, and this mix is different by brand and by country. Now, frequently, particularly in markets that we have high market shares, local competitors lag in terms of pricing. It is normal in our industry, but over the years, what we have seen is if you support your pricing with innovation, with advertising, with products which are perceivably superior, you might have a short-term impact by the relative uncompetitiveness in pricing, but in the medium to long term, you are gaining market share. Latin America is a good example. We lead in pricing always in Latin America because we are the market leader. Normally, competition doesn't follow. This happened a couple of years ago in this cycle.
But when you see our market shares this year, we grow market shares across all our core categories because in the medium term, the best marketers and the best brands at the end of the day win.
Great, that's helpful. And you've had, I mentioned the overall company momentum earlier. You've had a couple of segments with really strong growth and results in the last few years. I wanted to spend a bit of time on the pet segment where you've had very strong market share results, very strong organic sales growth despite some of the category weakness recently. So A, can you put your business in perspective versus some of that category weakness we've seen? Do you feel like there's durable momentum as we start to cycle some of that category weakness? And then B, you've made some capacity additions recently.
So can you spend some time discussing both what that means to the business today, if there are areas of constraint, but also as you look out from a multi-year standpoint, does that unlock some opportunities in terms of you guys going after some areas where you're not as well penetrated?
First, we really like our Hill's business. It has grown really nicely over the past several years. We think we have the best brand. It is profession-led with a vet based on science. We have a pet nutrition center. We have over 200 vets on staff in a variety of capacities. We think that that is a really well-positioned brand in a marketplace. The pet sector has been interesting over the last 12-18 months. We saw some softness in the category coming off of COVID. I think you've seen from competitors, commentaries, et cetera, that we're seeing a little bit more stability in the category. During that time, we've been growing nicely. We've been growing nicely and gaining market share because of the strength of the brand and the innovation that we bring. We've invested heavily into Hill's.
So that's across the entire P&L leveraging the balance sheet. So you mentioned capacity. When we entered COVID, we had a big issue on capacity. Our plants were running 24/7 and could not meet all of the demand. Now, as anybody knows, you can't just turn on a capacity. So we had planned several years ago to bring on a new wet food plant, which we opened in Tonganoxie, Kansas. That really helped us bring back all of our diets that we had to temporarily pause on during COVID. We also bought a wet food plant in Italy. And then we bought Red Collar, which was three dry food plants. So we've added a fair amount of capacity. But if you step back and look, we were at a point we were 24/7. We couldn't meet all of the demand.
And we had to take certain diets off just because of the complexity of manufacturing them. Fast forward to where we are. We have now recovered all of those diets back out into the market. We have been able to rebalance our supply chain across the world. And that's really important. You cannot successfully operate a plant long term at 100+% . It just doesn't work. And by doing that, we've given confidence to the profession. So we've given confidence to the vet that we are going to be there to deliver on those foods. And I think that's really important. So as we look forward in the environment, we think we're really well positioned. We bring innovation to market. In fact, our Prescription Diet now actually is growing faster than our Science Diet, and it has better margins.
And bringing innovation to market, this capacity opens up that scalability. We've also been able to go into other forms and bring certain things back in-house. So the capacity has been a good long-term investment. Now, when we look at the P&L for Hill's, we've also made a big investment in advertising. So as you look at the total company, one of the areas that's been a big beneficiary of that investment is in Hill's in advertising. That's helped us with the expansion, bringing new innovation to market, supporting the pricing. And you've seen the benefits of that over the last few quarters as we've gone and now gotten margin expansion, growing faster than the industry, gaining share. And we believe that will be a contributor going forward.
Great, that's helpful. And as you focus on the under-penetrated areas where you have expansion potential, maybe can you rank order them for us or how we should dimensionalize the opportunity?
So I think one of the great things about Hill's is we have an enormous amount of headroom still in the markets we already play in. So we don't have to geographically expand just to continue to gain. So in the U.S., we have good penetration, but our share is actually still pretty modest. We have a lot of headroom just in the U.S. We operate in Europe. We operate in Australia. We operate in parts of Latin America. But there's a great opportunity U.S.-based to expand. But we also see geographic expansion over time. Brazil is the number two pet food market. The model that works here, being science-based and profession-driven, also works in these other markets. So we see the opportunity to expand domestically, which helps deliver dollar-based growth. But we also see the opportunity from a geographic expansion. We think this model scales well.
What we want to do is do that in a deliberate, controlled manner. And so I think you've seen us demonstrate that discipline going forward, not to get ahead of ourselves in this race. But we really like the positioning of the brand for the long term.
Great, great, and can you give us a bit of update on your thoughts on the ability to price in pet going forward over the next few years? We're obviously in a consumer environment in the U.S., which pet is primarily a U.S. business today, where pricing is difficult given the consumer, but as I mentioned earlier, this is a brand that's really shown increasing household penetration and market share, so in theory, there's probably more opportunity here, so just how should we think about that versus the broader landscape of not much pricing for this pet business specifically?
The pet business is really interesting. It felt maybe a heavier brunt of all the commodity increases that happened a couple of years back. It took a bigger hit during that time. You've seen the pricing kind of offset that. We're expanding margins again. We do believe there's still pricing opportunity in the pet segment. Where we operate in that segment at the higher end with a therapeutic base and science base, I think also gives us leverage for potential pricing. Underlying that, I think the biggest benefit will be innovation that we bring to market. New diets, improved formulations. As we demonstrate that to the profession and that gets recommended to pet parents, I think that represents an opportunity for us continuing over time to take price where appropriate. We still see some opportunity in that space go forward.
Okay, that's helpful. And maybe we can segue that into a margin question on pet. Advertising spending is up almost 500 basis points. We estimated over a six-year period. At the end of this year, commodities have now dropped off. There was outsized commodity pressure for a while, more normalized levels here. Discussed some pricing in the category. Productivity in theory is ramping up as you've added capacity. You now can go after some of those productivity efforts. So it seems like this is a business that's pretty well positioned for margin expansion going forward. Just give us your thought process there on if some of the strong margin expansion we've seen recently can continue. And as you think about advertising as a percent of sales, obviously that's driven some of the top-line momentum here, but you've also moved up quite a bit.
So how does that trend over time in the pet business?
So you mentioned we have. I mentioned before, we've had significant investments in advertising, but that has supported the growth. And we've been outgrowing competitors and gaining share. And I think that's a key component of the business model. You've also seen in the last few quarters that we've seen improvement on the gross profit margin and net bottom line margin have been improving. That's a benefit of the scale coming on, driving productivity, having the pricing and our positioning in the market. We think that should be a contributor go forward. So we're still going to invest in this business, but that steep ramp on advertising, that won't continue at that same level, obviously. And we don't have a specific target. We build this up by category, by country as we go determine what's the right level of advertising.
And then even within that advertising, we look at how do we leverage analytics and data to get more yield and a higher ROI out of that business. And so as we look at the Hill's business in total, we think it's really well positioned from a product, capacity to scale, market opportunity, household penetration, and those investments we think are paying off. So the margin expansion we see now, we think that margin should continue to improve. And then just remember, as we bought the Red Collar facilities, we also, that was a private label manufacturer. So that private label, as we've stated, is going to run off. That is a natural margin expansion as well from just pure mix migrating to Hill's. So we feel pretty good about the Hill's business.
Great. Panos, maybe we can shift to your largest business, oral care. Similar to pet, we've seen a tremendous amount of success in increasing household penetration, market share the last few years, particularly driven by Latin America and Europe, so two regions under your purview. So A, I know the answers will be different by region, but what's behind the share gains that you're seeing? B, how sustainable are they going forward? And C, where are you seeing competitively in response to this as we think about the durability of these share gains as you look out over the next few years?
Yep, I think as you said, we do very well in oral care with significant market share gains in many parts of the world, in Europe and Latin America. There are several reasons. I think everything starts with strategy, and we believe that we have the right oral care strategy. We have a portfolio of brands, and we have developed and deployed effective strategies for each brand in the geographies they operate and each specific channels. Being more specific, there are several reasons that would make us optimistic that we are well positioned to continue in this trajectory. First and foremost, technology. We believe that we have the best technology in oral care. We are relaunching our flagship Colgate Total franchise across the world. I would recommend everybody to use it. It's going to be available here in the U.S. as of the first quarter.
You will see it's probably the best toothpaste that you can have in terms of mouthfeel and in terms of performance. It comes to innovation. We have innovation at the premium part of the business and also in new adjacencies that we are entering. Beyond innovation, we are regularly working, updating our core businesses like MaxFresh, like CDC, which have very high market shares across the world. We have increased substantially our advertising spending, and we have worked on improving the effectiveness of this advertising spending through data analytics and modeling. We are also focusing a lot on the profession. A lot of our brands are driven by professional recommendation. You talked about Europe. Our Elmex brand is the fastest growing brand in Europe, if I'm not mistaken, and a lot is driven by the professional recommendation.
Something that we believe is one of our competitive advantages is that we are executing with excellence in a consistent and scalable fashion across the world. When you put all this together, this leads to market share growth, penetration growth, and I think we are well positioned to continue to this trajectory. Now, talking about Latin America and Europe, more or less, this is the mix and the factors that they led to the market share gains. I would say in Latin America, we have been particularly successful to premiumize our business. If you see the share of the premium franchises like Colgate Total and Whitening in Latin America the last years is growing significantly. In Europe, I would mention the fact that we have three brands, and we have developed and deployed a strategy to grow these brands in a synchronized fashion, not to work against each other.
So we grow, for instance, in the premium therapeutic segment with Elmex. We grow in Colgate with whitening or mid-tier franchises. These, together with our effective and increased advertising spending, our innovation and execution, I think will continue to well position us to be in the same trajectory.
Great. And maybe we can broaden that European question to the entire enterprise. It's been a more difficult market over time, Europe, with the retailer structure, some of the structural differences versus some of your other higher growth geographies around the world. We've been in a period of above-trend growth here the last few years. How do you see that sort of landing as you look out over the next couple of years here from a category growth perspective? And just level of confidence in your ability to drive your own share. It sounds like a fairly high degree of confidence, but how do you think about that relative to category growth?
Listen, Europe is probably the most competitive environment in the world in terms of brands competing with each other and in terms of the retail environment. The last years, for many reasons, we had a typically high pricing in Europe. At the beginning, this impacted volume. Then we had the opposite. Volume was recovering, and now the market is going to stabilize, so most likely, we are going to see market growth rates, not at the same rate as the previous years, so the name of the game and the measure of success is going to rely on executing and on driving market share. As I said, we have three brands. We have very strong innovation plans. We have highly effective commercial plans, so we are well positioned.
Now, this being said, there are other people out there, and competition we see already is stepping up their aggressiveness, particularly in some areas in terms of promotional activities. Because particularly in toothpaste, we are the only company growing. The others are stalling or declining. So we should expect a competitive pressure to this respect. So we believe that with our planning and with our innovation, we will continue to outperform the market. This is always our objective, particularly in developed markets.
Okay, great. And maybe you can both give us some perspective around pricing. On the one hand, it does seem like Colgate's earned pricing in the marketplace with the market share gains, the higher household penetration we've seen, and you've invested a lot in marketing, as we talked about in Europe, Latin America, and the pet business. On the other hand, more challenging external environment from a consumer perspective. So Panos, maybe your perspective and your geographies, the answers will be very different in developed markets like Europe versus the emerging markets. And Stan, any thoughts around North America would be helpful. It's been a tougher market from a pricing perspective. How do you see that sort of evolving over the next few quarters here? And also internally, how you're positioned from a pricing standpoint in North America and your strategies there?
Yeah, I would say in general, pricing is not taken in isolation. It's a factor of inflation, input cost, and also marketing activities. You might have a strategy to drive your premium part of the business. So this could drive theoretically more pricing. So it varies. One of the advantages that we do have, and I think is core to our success, is that we have franchises and a portfolio that operates at all price points. And this puts us in a very good position. If there is a downscale for the consumers because of different macro reasons, there is a Colgate offering for them. And when we see pricing, we don't see it only at the top end of the market. We see it holistically in the category. We see it at premium, mid-tier, and low end of the market.
We run this exercise several times a year in every market in the world. That's why if there is a shift, we believe that we will be in a better position than the competition to continue growing market share.
If we pick that up on North America, I mean, same kind of fundamentals there, but as you've seen in North America, it's one area where pricing has actually been negative over the last couple of quarters, and as we looked, our focus has shifted a bit to drive household penetration and drive that volume, and in fact, we've seen a better volume performance in North America, so that's an important part of what we're trying to do, and North America, obviously, is very competitive, a number of competitors there, and as the economics have moved around, we want to make sure we stay competitive for long-term, so we pivoted a bit to drive that penetration up and try to get that volume moving. Now, innovation, as Panos talked about, is one of those other areas that comes that we will use to drive pricing.
And we think globally on pricing, there's still opportunities. But as Panos talked about, that's market and category specific on how we're going to drive that.
Great. And as you think about managing North America strategically, maybe give us some broader longer-term context versus the last few years. We just ran through your success in pet, in oral care, in Europe, Latin America. North America hasn't been a stronger region for you. So just give us a bit of state of the union on performance over the last few years, maybe tweaks going forward, and how you're looking to drive stronger performance going forward.
Yeah, so North America, obviously, we are roughly two-thirds international given any given quarter. So our North America business is obviously still an important part of what we do. And when you look underneath the covers, Canada has performed well. But in the U.S., we did make shifts over time. So if you go back to 2017, 2018, very high margin, but we weren't growing. And so long term, we have to make the investments back into the business. So we have invested both on the innovation side. We've invested in advertising. Advertising in North America has increased significantly over the last few years to try to drive that performance. Now, as we've done that, we look at our overall positioning within a market, we've had to make some adjustments.
And as I mentioned a minute ago, we've decided to pivot that a bit and do some work on household penetration to drive improved volume. And that, I think, is important for our competitiveness in the market. And when we look, we've made some conscious decisions. The drug side of the channel has been a very difficult place. If you look at that whole channel, it has had some challenges. And we've elected not to go as heavy in the promotions as in prior years. We didn't think it was a good business outcome. And we're feeling some of the effect of that. That will wrap around, and we think that that will have better performance going forward. So we think the pricing environment for us will moderate here and get back to some better performance and more balance between price and volume.
Great. And Panos, we talked about oral care in Latin America. Maybe you can just touch on the region overall. We've seen a bit of weakness in Mexico post-elections. Obviously, you've had the situation down in Argentina. So just your thoughts around what we're seeing in the region today, how that impacts your results, and the strategy tweaks you put in place to manage through that.
Latin America is our largest operation. We have a very strong business, as we know, and we are performing very well. We are gaining market share. We are posting six consecutive quarters of positive volume growth. Moving forward, we should see pricing not at the same level as in the past, and this is logical. And we are running against some very high comps in the region. We are well positioned to continue doing well. We have very strong brands, the strongest brands in our categories. We have very high market shares at the range of 70%, 60%, 50%. We have best-in-class organization that executes, I would say, better than most or best in the business. Very strong commercial plans. So we are well positioned to outperform the market, as we are doing consistently the last over 20 years in Latin America.
Regarding Mexico, as we said in Barclays and in the Q3 call, there has been a slowdown in Mexico because of the macro challenges the country is facing. Our business is continuing to grow share in our key strategic categories, and we are performing better than our peers. We need to see how the external environment will evolve, but we are well positioned overall. Now, as regards Argentina, companies apply different philosophies and operating models in Argentina. We have a factory we produce in Argentina. We are committed to the country as we are committed to the region, and our business is doing well. We are gaining market share. Actually, our toothpaste and toothbrush share in Argentina is at record high level. We have a very experienced team that manages very well the specificity of the environment.
I think in Latin America, we operate under the motto that every crisis is potentially an opportunity. Our objective is to emerge stronger after any situation. This is what is happening in Argentina: growing shares. When the country stands again to its feet, there is less devaluation, less inflation. Colgate will have a stronger business.
Right. Okay, great. And Stan, it's an interesting time of year. It's early December. I know you won't give us guidance for next year, but just for the investment community, as we should think about some puts and takes for next year. And we talked about how it's a volatile landscape. There's a lot evolving from a consumer political effects perspective, etc. Maybe you can just give us some conceptual perspective on some of the key puts and takes as you look out to next year.
So to be clear, we're not giving guidance today on 2025, and as you would not expect us to. But if you take a look at the external environment, we've been here 218 years. We've seen the number of cycles. We look ahead for that. But I think if you look at, there's obviously U.S. elections create some uncertainty out there, which has affected effects. It's affected tariffs and tax. And we'll digest that and deal with that as we go forward. But if you look at not our forecast, but the world economic forecast for GDP, it's roughly in line with last year, with this year, 2024. So if you look at our kind of longer-term algorithm of categories growing two to four, we expect to outperform and do three to five. I think that still makes sense for a long-term algorithm.
Now, for these other opportunities, I think as you've seen us in 2024 have rebalanced a little bit between pricing and volume, a better balance. I would expect that that also looks forward that would continue, so overall, our performance in 2024, I think, gives us a good solid base as we head into the future, and we remain optimistic about it.
Great. We touched earlier on the higher marketing and what that's done for your organization over time, and also how you've used technology to drive greater yield there. Can you just give us an update on AI, how you're using it, where it's having the most impact in terms of marketing or innovation or productivity, how you think about it, and where you're getting the greatest yield from AI or next-gen technology in general?
I think it's probably everybody's favorite buzzword. When we look at it, though, we have done a few key items. One, when we started, there's what we kind of now start to label traditional AI, which we've used for quite a while, and automation within finances and looking at how to do predictive analytics. But over the last several years, we have invested in digital analytics and data, all in kind of a step change within our P&L. That's brought new capabilities, new ways of looking at our business, which we think has given us better insight, the ability to move faster and get more yield out of those investments. So on traditional AI, again, we used machine learning and AI for some time now and use that effectively to drive both productivity and effectiveness and efficiency within the business model.
On the Gen AI side, we have absolutely been using that predominantly in a marketing space, and that's with image generation. We operate in 200 countries and territories, so altering your websites and putting the images up and doing the translation and ideation, we've seen enormous benefits from speed in particular, so speed has definitely gotten us. Now, I'm the CFO. I want an ROI that makes sense on all of these investments, and I'm not blinded by the shiny bright object of it's going to solve world hunger because I don't think it does. I think it will help us get more efficient and more effective, and we do experiment with those tools. I think one of the things we did very early on, which I think has served us really well, is educating our teams.
So when ChatGPT kind of broke the scene, instead of saying, "We're going to turn that off. There's too much risk," we said, "We're going to educate all of the teams within Colgate." That education, I think, has really played well, both on how to use it effectively, because there are problems with some of this, but how to apply it. And that, I think, has really been one of the biggest benefits for us on AI. I see that we're very early stages. I want to see a return on the investment. I don't think it just flips over and eliminates all kinds of roles, but I do think it's going to help us with speed of execution and speed to market.
Great. That's helpful. And while we're on the subject of technology, I know RGM has been a focus for you guys in recent years. Can you just give us an update on what you've done there, if you've been able to ramp up the mixed benefits, and how you think about that opportunity going forward?
I think it's one of the areas that our investments in technology has really paid off. We've been starting to talk about it as kind of RGM 2.0 with our teams. We've been doing this for a long time by market, and the same fundamentals exist. But applying technology has enabled us, I think, to do this better. As an example, we drive a promo calendar using AI, developing our own LLM to determine the best time to do the promo and the best level to do the promo, and with an important client of ours, and it's gone extraordinarily well, and we'll scale that out. I think it's a good example of leveraging technology into RGM. It's also allowed us to evaluate positioning in markets. We operate in the 200 countries and territories.
You go into some of these very small mom-and-pop stores in emerging markets, and we can use images to develop, okay, what is the right inventory level? What sells the most in this area? And it's a win-win. It helps the vendor be more successful, and it helps us be more successful and manage inventory. So I think those investments have paid off. I'm excited about the future of those investments and what they can mean. And that will go across the enterprise.
Great. Well, with that, we're exactly out of time. So thank you very much for being here, [crosstalk]
Thank you. Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.