Okay, welcome everybody for our next session. I am thrilled to welcome back The Clorox Company to our conference. It is in Paris. With us today, Chair and Chief Executive Officer Linda Rendle. Welcome back, Linda. For the first time as Chief Financial Officer with us today is Luc Bellet. Luc, welcome and thanks for joining us. Great. We are going to use the entirety of our time for Q&A, and we will just jump in.
Sounds great.
Good. Linda, we'll start with you. I guess I've been starting most of the conversations this way, just to level -set. It's been an eventful start to calendar 2025. Lots of different cross-currents and really net pressures on both the consumer and on your retail partners. If we start there and just talk about maybe your assessment of consumer health broadly and how those dynamics have impacted your categories and your business effectively.
Perfect. I'll start with maybe just a little bit of an opening comment on that, and then I'll get directly to that question. As we entered our fiscal year, which started last July, we expected consumers to be under more pressure. That meant we expected our categories to be, instead of growing 2%-2.5%, which is what we typically see, growing about 0%-1%. We saw that through the first half of the year. Beginning in February, in the middle of our Q3, is really when we saw another layer of changes for the consumer that I'll get into. Maybe just the good news for our business is we continue to have strong fundamentals in this environment. We'll get more into that, I'm sure, Steve, through your questions. I just wanted to provide that backdrop that largely through our fiscal year, we saw what we expected.
Now, what are we seeing now? What are we seeing from the consumer? What do we expect? There are really two layers of what we're seeing from the consumer. The first is what I spoke about at the beginning. We expected consumers to be under more pressure, and we expected them to continue to increase their value-seeking behaviors. That can show up in a consumer buying a larger size because they want to get a better price per use. Sometimes they can buy a smaller size because they're looking to spend less in a shopping trip in a week. We have seen that pretty consistently over the last 18 months, that value-seeking behavior. Importantly, what we had not seen is consumers trading into private label in our categories or making choices to leave national brands. That has been pretty consistent.
We continued to see that at the beginning of this calendar year and are seeing it now. The extra layer of what we are seeing is this change in consumer confidence and a level of uncertainty that we, frankly, have not seen in those two things in combination in a really long time. What is that doing to our businesses and what are we seeing from a consumer perspective? Beginning in mid-February, consumers began to react to what they were hearing in the marketplace from a macroeconomic perspective, particularly tariffs. In our space in February, we saw a change in the grocery basket, people consuming or buying more edibles, less non-edibles as a result of thinking that things from Mexico and Canada with tariffs were going to be more expensive. That was what we saw in February.
In March, we saw consumer wallet change even more as they experienced a broader range of potential tariffs. We were seeing consumers spend more of their disposable income on things like phones and electronics and cars and other things like that. That resulted in a change in our category trajectory from the beginning of the quarter to the end of four points. They ended flat, but a very big change from the beginning of the quarter to the end of the quarter. Now, what we did not see at the same time was consumers fundamentally changing their consumption behaviors at home outside of those value-seeking behaviors. They did not stop cleaning their toilet. They did not stop changing their cat litter box.
What we believe is happening is consumers are really prioritizing what they have in their pantry and trying to use everything that they have at home while they're making these other choices to deal with tariffs. The question then is, when does this bounce back? If you think people are bleeding through inventories, we would expect to see an uptick. If you look at the last couple of months, these first two months of our fourth quarter, it's continued to be volatile. Our categories have been anywhere from flat to down 2%. We ended May about down half a percentage point. That is significant because we typically see about flat categories even in a recessionary time. We think this consumer behavior is still happening. We think they're still bleeding through pantries.
We haven't finished a purchase cycle yet in our categories, which is about 90-100 days. It's hard to say when those are going to start to come back, but it's something we're watching closely. We continue to not see a trade to private label, et cetera. What we feel confident in is we can manage this through the short term. We have built, obviously, stronger margin capabilities, which will mean we'll still deliver a strong year of earnings performance this year despite the fact that we've seen a top line slowdown. In the mid to long term, we remain confident. Our categories are essentials to consumers. We continue to see them want better experiences. They continue to buy innovation. Even in a time in value-seeking, we can capture many of those consumers through having the right size, price pack architecture, et cetera.
We just need to get through this period now, and we feel well equipped to do that and feel very well equipped to deal with getting back to growing when categories return back to that 3%-5% level that we target.
Great. Another layer on that we've been talking about this week is around what the retailers have been doing in response to that consumer environment. There's a lot of conversation around pockets of destocking in the March quarter. Some companies have talked about it who weren't impacted in the March quarter, who are now being impacted in the June quarter. What are you seeing in your categories from a retailer inventory level management?
Yeah, there is definitely noise in retailer inventory, and they're doing exactly what you would expect them to do. They have to manage through the situation as well. They are doing two things that we've seen. Some of it is continued great smart management of trying to reduce inventories over time, and we're doing the same work. Certainly during COVID, there was excess inventory in the system to deal with all the volatility. Many of us have put programs in place to try to reduce that over time. You are seeing some of that, better processes, better technology coming in. You are also seeing more day-to-day activity of, "I don't have space in a warehouse, and so I need to reduce inventory on this." What I would say is, to us, we're treating this as much as we can.
It's noise because both the manufacturer and retailers are focused. We can't have out of stocks for consumers. That has been a consistent principle in all of the inventory adjustments we've seen. We did have some impact in Q3, some we knew about. We had talked about that in our Kingsford business, and we saw an impact. There were some small impacts that happened that came up in the course of the quarter. I think that noise will continue as the environment continues, but we don't look at it as a structural change. Anything that's structurally happening, reducing costs and inventory in the system is a good thing as long as we meet consumer needs. We're continuing that work, and we would expect after we get through our ERP transition to continue to do that.
Okay. If we step back from it, do you feel your Ignite strategy has been effective through this period? Has it helped Clorox navigate the environment? If so, how?
Yeah, it has. I think it will continue to do that. Really fundamentally in our strategy, we set out to do two big things, and they're complementary. We wanted to accelerate the growth rate of the company, and we wanted to transform our company to be stronger for the future. We've made great progress on both of those. Although growth has been lumpier given the situations we've had over the last five years, we feel like we fundamentally built stronger capabilities to deliver growth in the future. We're looking forward to a time when our categories start to rebound and we can fully recognize the growth potential. Really, the transformation is the place I'll spend the most amount of time on. Really, the proof point would be in the margin transformation program that we put in place as part of that.
We fundamentally have changed and will complete a digital transformation over this period, and it is a significant digital transformation. This is not just an ERP upgrade to the next set of software. This is building a complete data infrastructure across the company, changing the way that we do global finance, changing our ERP, putting a suite of technologies around to do that in an effort to be more efficient and more effective across a number of areas that we create value in for our company. As I mentioned, margin transformation is the place you're already seeing some of that program come to life. We lost close to 900 basis points of gross margin during the inflationary cycle, and we've been able to recover all of that through the efforts that we put in place, through pricing, through all of the mechanisms that we've had around cost savings.
We delivered historic cost savings over the last two years. We expect to deliver another year of that this year. You are already seeing the transformation effort come to life. What we want to see is more of that against innovation, which we have plans to do. Innovation has gotten stronger, but we want even more of that in the coming years. We want to make sure that we continue to offer superior value to consumers because that is the way that we grow. Our superiority rating has increased over this last five-year period significantly versus what it was prior to starting that, even given several rounds of pricing and all of the activities that we took. We feel the strategy has been very effective. We want to get back, though, to more consistency, Steve, coming out of these periods.
The strategy will help support do that as we finish the transformation coming up here in the next 12 months.
Great. Luc, you are now a seasoned veteran, two-thirds of the way through your first quarter as CFO. I guess, what have been some of your key observations and learnings just generally since stepping into that role?
Yeah, I guess maybe let me first by saying that I'm really honored to be in this role. I've been with the company for almost 20 years. It has been a big part of my life. I love our brand, I love our people, and I really believe in our team and our strategy. I am looking to what's ahead of us. I think approaching this transition, which is now two months, as you just mentioned, I had two objectives. One was really balancing delivering both the short term and also thinking about delivering and building the future. Now, short term, we talked about it being very dynamic. During this time, the focus has been really on focusing what you can control.
The good thing, though, is on a relative basis, our fundamentals are strong, and I think we're well positioned to finish the fiscal year with another year of strong earnings. Medium term, coming in with a new fresh set of eyes, so to speak, I feel generally good about the opportunities for the company. It has to do with what Linda just mentioned, where we just undertook a pretty significant transformation behind the scenes over the last few years. One, we fundamentally changed our operating model, and we're now in year four of a five-year journey to fundamentally change the digital and data infrastructure of the company. That really creates an interesting foundation for us to fundamentally modernize our capability and strengthen our competitive advantage.
The thing coming into the role is some of it already paid dividend, but we are really just starting scaling some of those capabilities. I can see a lot of places where we can unlock additional top-line growth or margin expansion. I think Linda just talked about it. The other thing I would mention is I think we can improve our predictability and consistency of results. I think it is very important in the current volatile and uncertain environment. I certainly think a lot of the digital transformation and the tools we are putting in place should help us do that.
Okay. Very good. There's a very large ERP go-live coming, so well-timed.
He's been working on this for years, so it's really good timing.
Yes. I guess just talk to us as we get closer and closer to that switch, just your level of confidence and some of the preparations you've taken to ensure that that goes smoothly.
Yeah. Maybe just background for some of you that might not be as familiar with us. We're going live with a new ERP in our U.S. market in July, which is the beginning of next fiscal year. And we haven't upgraded our ERP in over twenty-five years. It is a pretty significant undertaking. Obviously, our goal is going to be to execute this transition with excellence and make sure that our consumers and customers have a similar experience. Now, we all know ERP transitions are a very complex undertaking, and they're fraught with risk. We took a very thoughtful approach in managing those risks, and I think we have very strong plans. Maybe let me share a few things that give us confidence. First is the fact that many of our peers have already gone through an ERP transition.
While we're not necessarily proud to be kind of last to the game, that gives us a lot of benefits. We've been working with very capable consultants. They've been working with many of those peers, and we've been embedding learnings from their past launches, from their past mistakes in our plans. We've also been working pretty closely with our retail partners, which had a lot of really good suggestions. That's one. Two, we had a pilot market. We launched the new ERP in our Canada market last summer. The launch was actually very well. There were no significant disruptions, but we got a lot of learnings that we're embedding in our launch. The other thing is we also already moved all our global finance reporting and planning to the new ERP.
We have been live since January, which allows us to really focus on the operational side in July. Third and last, we are building pretty significant excess inventory at the retailers in our own network to really act as a contingency and mitigate any risk of out of stocks. Net, we feel like we have a pretty robust plan. So far, everything has been going as planned. I am trying to knock on wood somewhere. That is good. Now, that is really managing the short term. Once we are past implementation and stabilization, we are quite excited about adding a new ERP because it is going to fundamentally modernize the backbone of our operations. Just that in itself means a lot more opportunity for productivity in supply chain and working capital and in admin.
It also means that we now have a new data and tech foundations to take more advantage of those capabilities that I was just talking about. Whether it's net revenue management, which requires a lot of data, and we feel we're really excited about what we're doing in net revenue management, or whether it's personalizations, those capabilities are now amplified with a new ERP. Net, going forward, we're really excited about what it might do for us over the next few years.
Do those benefits start to accrue in year one, or is it more of a build year two, three, and beyond?
It's more of a build, as you can imagine. First, when we're saying going live in July, we will change the order fulfillment and order management in July, but we're actually going to move our manufacturing facilities in a phase period of six months. If you really think about the six months, the first six months of next fiscal year, it's really a transition, and then there will be a stabilization. After that, you can work in optimization. The way to think about it is you will have a new data and tech stack, but you need to fundamentally change your process, change your talent to really get the benefit. Most likely, we'll see most of the productivities in fiscal year 2027 and fiscal year 2028.
Okay. Good. This is where I really subtly asked about '26.
That's the person.
Real subtle transition to ask about something you're not going to answer. But as we think about, I think a lot of investors are trying to kind of piece it together. You've got a lot of volatility that you're managing, kind of exiting 2025 in the operating environment. There's the ERP implementation on top of that. And then you're also closing out this five-year transformation. So as you approach 2026 planning, what kind of strategic framework you're taking into those planning sessions, number one? And to the extent that there are financial considerations you can kind of throw out there for us to keep in mind, that'd be great as well.
It's a really important question, actually. I'm going to start with some framing, but I think it's really important that Luc walk you through the noise that the ERP creates and how to think about that because it's really important. That's probably the most important part of the answer. Just starting with the framing, as we approach 2026, given there's so much volatility and change, we're approaching this in a scenario planning way, which we have, frankly, done a lot of over the last five years. We have a range of scenarios that we're looking at from consumer health to macroeconomic uncertainties. What we'll come out with in 2026, of course, will be based off of a scenario that we pick, and we'll give everybody what the assumptions that underlie that are.
What we think the range of outcomes could be on that, and that will inform the range. As we are just heading into planning, that is the approach, obviously, that we are taking. We are focused on a number of things, continuing to ensure that we deliver on the margin improvement that we have seen because that has been fuel for our business. While we have returned our gross margin back to the levels that it was pre-pandemic, given all the loss, we still have work to do on EBIT margin, and we want to continue to make progress there. From a top-line perspective, we need to be focused and are focused on delivering superior experiences. We have a good innovation program that we will launch in 2026 behind our brands.
We want to continue to invest strongly in our brands, working with retail partners to ensure that we have the right programs. We want to make sure that we're capturing those consumers as they continue that value-seeking behavior. We don't know to what degree that will be, but we feel confident in our ability to do that, and we have scenario plans around that. Our approach very much is understanding that we don't know exactly what the year is going to look like, but we are confident in our ability with the tools that we have to ensure that we are giving those experiences to consumers, maximizing value creation, continuing the work on margin, and then also making sure that we're being very clear. I'll turn it to Luc now on the noise that exists because structurally, the ERP has no impact. We're going to execute it.
We intend to execute it with excellence, but there's a lot of noise, and we'll come out of it, like Luc said, stronger. I think it's really important to understand the impacts it will have. I'll pass it to you, Luc, to walk them through that.
Yeah. As you mentioned, there's going to be a lot of noise in both fiscal year 2025 and 2026 associated with the ERP transition. Let me try to frame that a little bit. Again, as I mentioned, we're going live with the new ERP in July. One of the things we're doing to ensure a solid transition is that we're building inventory at the retailers' level. For perspective, we hold, on average, about four weeks of inventory at our retailers for our portfolio. We're going to build about one and a half weeks of inventory, so pretty material and significant. Now, from an operational standpoint, we feel great about this because essentially, this is really creating a buffer and protecting us from any out of stock, which would be really structurally impactful. From a financial reporting standpoint, it creates a lot of noise.
That retailer inventory build represents 2%-3% of annual sales. As retailers are going to build their inventory in May, June, fiscal year 2025 organic sales growth is going to be overstated by 2%-3%, meaning that it is going to be higher than the underlying consumption or retail sales. Inversely, in August, retailers are going to start decreasing their inventory and normalized. That means that our fiscal year 2026 sales will be understated by 2%-3%, meaning lower than the underlying retail sales. Year over year, you are going to go from an overstated fiscal year 2025 to understated fiscal year 2026. The impact of the ERP year over year will be anywhere from negative 4% to negative 6%. That is what you will have to add to whatever is the underlying performance of the company. A lot of noise.
Now, as Linda mentioned, this is just temporary. There is nothing structural about this. What we are really focusing on is the underlying performance of the company. Of course, as we provide our guidance, we will make sure that we provide as much transparency and clarity so everyone has a really good understanding of what is the underlying performance during this period. Fiscal year 2027, consumption, retail sales, and our sales are back to normal, hopefully with some productivity savings from the ERP.
Yes. Yeah. It's probably intuitively obvious, but just to be clear, the first quarter, you have the reversal of the fourth quarter, and then the fourth quarter will be a difficult comparison as well.
That's right. That is an important point, Steve. I mentioned the impact in fiscal year, and I mentioned it in sales. That is true for EPS as well. Where you see the most noise would be in the first quarter of next fiscal year because we would have the decrease in retail inventory and in the fourth quarter of next year because we will comp the inventory build in fiscal year 2025.
Yeah. Very good. Okay. If we pivot back to the business, but go down a layer and focus on some of your categories and brands, there's been a lot of focus, I think, firstly on categories like trash bags and litter and charcoal, where we've, in varying forms, but we've seen elevated levels of pricing and promotion and competitive pressures. If we take a snapshot today, how would you assess where we are? What's the trend line? And how does that influence your planning for next year?
In aggregate, if you look at our categories, we expected the promotional activity to return to normalized levels, so kind of pre-COVID levels. We have seen that. In aggregate, we have not seen a material change overall in our portfolio. As you note, in household in particular, we have seen some more competitive activity. I will walk them through because they are nuanced. Each one is a little bit different. Maybe starting with litter, which has the most amount of nuance. We had a cyber attack in 2023, and cat litter was one of the categories we had a higher impact as a result of that. You can imagine why, but I will give you a little color for those of you who have not heard this before.
If you have a cat—I do not know how many of you have a cat—and you rely on them using a litter box, and you want to transition them to a new litter because the litter they used, Fresh Step, which was ours, was out of stock, that can be a little traumatic for the pet parent. It can be a little traumatic for the cat. In addition, a lot of our business for that online is subscription businesses. If you are not available, what ends up happening is the retailers automatically sub another brand in. We had a lot of work to do coming back from the cyber attack to restore our distribution and restore our share. Part of the noise in the litter category is that we started promoting a bit higher in order to get those consumers back.
The category started promoting more, which is not a surprise. We have seen that. I would not say anything is out of the realm of what we would consider normal, but it is pretty competitive right now. The great news in litter, though, is it is one of our strongest growers still. Even despite all of the impacts that we have seen from the consumer in the last few months, it continues to be positive. It is a decelerated, but positive, category grower. It has great fundamentals. It is very attractive to play in. We continue to expect it will be noisy for a while as we continue to rebuild our share. We have made good progress. We have more work to do. I feel great about our innovation pipeline.
I would put this in the case of this is a reaction to a pretty material change in the environment, and it is a competitive category, and we feel good about the progress, and we think what we are seeing in the market is reasonable. Glad is a little bit different. Glad tends to go in cycles. We compete in trash and food bags. I will focus on trash. That is the biggest portion of the business. It is us, another branded player, and private label. This tends to be a category because it is very impacted by commodity prices, particularly resin, that when we see increases or decreases in resin, that can result in behavior. Also, when we see difficult economic times, one of the levers that people pull is price promotion. That is what we have seen in the category.
Price promotion went up at the beginning of this fiscal year and has continued to be elevated. We've put a bit more price promotion in place to deal with that, although we want to make sure we're balancing that with maintaining profitability. We've lost a little bit of share, but we look at this as a pretty standard cycle in the trash category that happens, and we are well equipped to manage through it. We have a great innovation pipeline. Innovation continues to do very well with the consumer. They continue to trade up in trash bags. It's also one of the categories that had the least amount of impact over the last few months because it's truly essential. You have to throw away your trash, and you use up trash bags at a pretty normalized rate. We would expect over time price promotion to normalize.
We're watching it really carefully. I would attribute that more to a normal cycle in trash bags. In our grilling business, we have the brand Kingsford. We primarily compete with private label and some other smaller brands. That's actually been a category that's done quite well. Grill penetration is up. We were growing share consistently in Q3. There were weather issues in Q3 and some timing on inventory that was noisy. Overall, I feel pretty good about that business and its ability to grow. We're just seeing, again, that's more of a weather and a timing issue for Q3. We would expect, hopefully, we'll see what happens for weather coming up here for major holidays, particularly in the U.S., but feel good about the fundamentals of that and our ability to continue to grow share.
Okay. Good. Hidden Valley, which we were talking about before the event, that's a business that historically has been very strong for Clorox, really for years. It too has softened. I guess what's your diagnosis there and what needs to be done to kickstart growth?
Yeah. This is a really interesting one. One of the most impacted categories over the last several months of that consumer behavior I talked about around switching was the salad dressing category. Steve, you're right. That's been a category that's grown low to mid-single digits consistently for years. We have grown share almost every single quarter for many, many years on that business. The good news is we continue to grow share. Our Hidden Valley franchise is very healthy. The category took a significant turn. We saw it as low as down 5% during that time. Again, we think it's as consumers were adjusting their basket. It has since rebounded to a better level than that, but still is depressed. We feel good over the long term, but I think this is just the result of consumers making different choices.
One interesting dynamic is we saw a number of consumers buy our very smallest size during this period. They did not want to go without their Hidden Valley Ranch, but they were really making sure that they could make those other purchases. We would expect that category to rebound over time. From our case, we have a terrific innovation program. We have launched seven new flavors. In this first half, we have partnerships with a number of restaurant partners. We are doing with Taco Bell. We are doing with one now in the retail space with DiGiorno and Hot Pockets. That is going very well. Consumers love Hidden Valley Ranch on those things. Partnerships with those brands are terrific. We continue to grow share. I feel very good about the business over the long term, but certainly one of the most surprisingly impacted businesses over the last several months.
On a more positively framed question, are there pockets of the business where you see better momentum that you can carry forward or the foundations of better momentum that you can kind of lean into and that can help lead the portfolio back to more algorithmic growth?
Yeah. We spoke about litter. We want to get more of that growth. It's very attractive, a strong grower, and we will. We're making progress there. I'll call out another couple. Maybe one to focus on, which is our actual largest business, is our cleaning business. That business is comprised of liquid bleach, which is in a compacted form that can be diluted, used in laundry and home care. We compete in a number of home care segments. We compete in the professional space in the cleaning business. Actually, it's a global business for us. We have it in countries all around the world. That has been a very consistent and strong grower for our company for a number of years. It is very attractive from a margin perspective. I mean, we cover the whole consumer kind of gamut.
If they want the best price per use, they can use one of our dilutables. We have a brand called Pine-Sol that's done very well, or they can use our jug form of bleach up to the most premium occasion, which is a Clorox Disinfecting Wipe, which is the highest cost per use, but very, very convenient and easy for consumers to use. We have been able to, regardless of economic times, trade them within that portfolio. We have consistently grown share over the last several years through all of what's gone on. If you look at what happened during COVID, we took significant pricing after COVID, three rounds of pricing on that business. Our volume is still higher than it was pre-COVID. That gives you the idea. You usually have a significant volume impact from pricing, but that business is materially bigger.
We feel great about it. That is an area we will continue to grow. It has one of the strongest equities in our portfolio, which is the Clorox equity. That grew household penetration significantly over the last year and has been a real star. That will be one we continue to invest in on the professional side, which delivers accretive growth to the company internationally, which is accretive to the company. Of course, in the U.S. retail business, which is performing strong. The category was impacted in this period, so it decelerated, but it was still one of our stronger growers from a category perspective if you looked across our portfolio. It is a great example of one where we want to continue to lean in. I would call out other ones where they have strong fundamentals. You mentioned Hidden Valley.
As much as it's going through times right now, it is a very strong, very attractive financially. We have other businesses we want to get more out of. Burt's Bees is a great example where we think innovation and good marketing can play a stronger role in ensuring that innovation works. We have had some bumpiness given the last few years. We had a supply issue with a plant fire from a third party. We had the cyber disruption, but that's another one that we want to get back on track from a growth perspective and feel good about the category dynamics.
Great. Linda had mentioned margins as a key source of recent past success for Clorox, and it definitely has been. Luc, what is your perspective kind of looking through the noise we talked about, just sort of the trend line on margins? Because it's been both a gross margin story, but also points of leverage on the SG&A line as well. As we think about the medium term, just the runway you see from a margin perspective.
Yeah. Just as a reminder, our goal is to grow on average annually EBIT margin by 25 to 50 basis points. As you mentioned, we had a pretty strong performance in the past two years. I think we had 10 consecutive quarters of gross margin expansion. Generally, we feel actually pretty strongly about our ability to expand margin over the next few years. There are always some controllable and some uncontrollable. We will see what happens on the cost environment. On what we can control, we feel like we have one of the strongest pipelines that we have had in a very long time. There are a few things.
One, a few years ago, we shifted from what had been a very robust cost savings program to a more holistic margin management, adding new capabilities like design to value, net revenue management, a lot of it empowered by new data and tech investments. This has been really working for us. We just had last two years with two record level cost savings. This year is going to be another extremely strong year. The pipeline is actually looking quite strong as we continue to just really scaling those capabilities across our businesses. You add to that the ERP. We talked about it. It's probably going to take another year or so before we start seeing some of the productivity.
We see a lot of opportunity from a productivity standpoint in our supply chain, in our working capital, and of course, in SG&A. In SG&A, there are a few things going on. There is the fact that we will reduce labor, just empowered by more automation. We will also be able to further expand our global business services because now we would have essentially a global data platform, which we did not have in the past. Between those two levels, we think that we will see some productivity benefit in SG&A. Again, probably starting most of it playing in 2027 and 2028. Net, I think as I look at the next few years, I feel like we have a pretty strong pipeline and runway for us to continue to expand margin going forward.
Okay. From that follows cash, I assume.
It's all about cash. You're talking to. Yeah, we have a pretty attractive business model that generates strong cash flow and pretty high return on invested capital. Now, our goal, our stated goal is to generate free cash flow between 11% and 13% of sales. We've been meeting that goal pretty consistently until fiscal year 2022 when we had a margin decline, and we've been rebounding since then. This year, we're going to meet that goal. Actually, if I exclude the impact of the ERP transition, which is really a tax from a working capital standpoint, we'll be slightly above that range. I think going forward, feel very confident in our ability to continue delivering at that level. There's a few things going on.
One, first, all the comments that I mentioned in our confidence in managing margin expansion, but also a lot of great work we're doing on the balance sheet. We do not talk about it often, but we took about $450 million of working capital out of the balance sheet over the past few years. Now with the new ERP, we feel like we have more opportunity to continue optimizing the balance sheet. All in all, feel really good about our free cash flow.
Good.
Maybe talking about capital allocations.
I was just doing my job.
Our capital allocation priorities have been really consistent over the years, and we do not expect them to change. First and foremost, I think we want to invest in our core and base business. This is where we can strengthen our competitive advantage, really drive profitable growth, and then really generate the best return for our shareholders. After that, we will continue supporting the dividend. We have a really long track record of consecutive annual increase. Third, manage our debt leverage. Our target is to have a debt-to-EBITDA ratio between 2 and 2.5. We have been on the lower end. We think it is prudent given the current environment. After that, we are committed to return any excess cash to the shareholders. This year, our plan was to return $250 million-$300 million.
We will probably be on the high end of that, if not slightly higher by the time we finish the year.
Okay. From a portfolio optimization perspective, Clorox has done divestments over the past few years to mitigate volatility and also enhance growth by subtraction, essentially. On the acquisition side, it's been quiet outside of the Saudi JV majority acquisition. What's the stance and the perspective on portfolio curation kind of over the medium term and the appetite for M&A?
We are always evaluating this, of course, as a management team and with our board. We really like the portfolio that we have and our ability to take the capabilities that we have and apply that. Given that, we would love to have another growth runway. We have been looking at that. The thing we demand is strong returns. We want to make sure that whatever business that we acquire really fits with the capability model that we have. That could come in the form of a tuck into a business that we own today in a category that we really like, or could be a new growth runway if there was something that we felt that the innovation and brand building capabilities, our margin transformation capability, really applied well to that business, and we could deliver growth or cost synergies.
It's a difficult time right now. It's been a difficult time off and on over the last five years on that work, given what's just going on and all the uncertainty now. We still were looking. We're very disciplined about it. The job, number one, two, and three is ensuring that our core, we're getting more out of that core. Our portfolio, as Luc said, from our capital allocation strategy, that should be clear. We think there's room on our own portfolio right now to get stronger growth and stronger returns. That's what we're focused on, at the same time being focused on what does the future look like and ensuring that we're doing that work. We're very open to it, but we'll be disciplined.
Got it. In closing, we have a couple of minutes left. If we look through 2026 into 2027, 2028, and we're envisioning what is possible in 2029 and 2030, and we're all back here talking about all the great successes that Clorox has had over that time, what are some of the one, two, or three most major accomplishments you want to be able to report back?
As a team, we really set out in this strategy period, and particularly as we got through COVID, to build a stronger company that delivered stronger growth profitably. I feel like we've done a tremendous set of efforts to do that, and we're starting to see those play out. Really, the goal as we move forward is to maximize the value creation coming out of the transformation that we put in place. We want to get as much as we can out of the digital transformation we've invested in. Of course, we have to execute the rest of it with excellence to do that, and we intend to. We see so many opportunities because we've taken a more difficult road on this to really fundamentally transform the company's data infrastructure, all the technologies, how we work, the capabilities.
We are laser-focused on driving value in each one of those transformation efforts that we've done. As Luc said, we quietly kind of did the operating model. We talked about it as a savings. We changed the way the company operates, and we need to really operationalize that. What should that result in? Hopefully, what we can look back with in pride in 2030, when you and I have this conversation on stage, would be faster growth. We really want to get more out of innovation and our brands through driving superior experiences. We think we put all the capabilities in place to continue to do that, continuing to drive margin performance that allows us to invest in our business and, of course, deliver great returns for shareholders. Luc mentioned the dividend is very important to us.
Hopefully, we'll be sitting on stage, and our commitment to the dividend remains strong, and we deliver returns for shareholders. Really now, this focus is on delivering stronger growth more consistently. We look back on that and say we've built just a stronger company with better capabilities that really delivers more value for our shareholders.
Great. And with that, the clock hits.
Zero. Perfect.
Perfect. Thank you, Linda. Thank you, Luc. Thank you, everybody, for joining us. Until next time.
Thanks, Steve. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.