All right. Good afternoon, everybody. We'll kick start here on time. Thank you everyone for joining us. My name is Manav Patnaik, I'm Barclays' Business and Information Services analyst. We're very happy to kick off our afternoon session here with Christophe Beck, who's the CEO of Ecolab. Christophe, thank you for being here. Christophe's gonna do a presentation, and then, once he's done, I'll come back up and run through a few questions, but we'll open up to the audience as well, with any follow-ups or questions that you have. Christophe, over to you.
Thank you so much. Thank you, Manav. Thanks for everyone for being here. Sunny London, that's unusual, but we love it. We'll take it obviously when it comes, and always a pleasure to share with you the growth story of our company, where we came from, but most importantly, where we're going. A few things, obviously before I get started, you're familiar with the cautionary statement, especially when we talk about the future. Apparently I need to move on the right, for the camera in the back there. I'll do that, trying to not get too many in the chairs in here. Are you good with that in the back? All good? Perfect. We made it. Love it. Now that we've talked about the cautionary statement.
What we truly like, in our company, first what we do, and I'll share a little bit more with you what's the company all about. In substance, we're the global leader in hygiene, in water, and infection prevention. We have a strategy that we practiced for 100 years. We started the company in 1923, so it's been quite a while to say the least. It's a strategy that works, as you will see, which we call Circle the Customer, Circle the Globe, which is honestly trying to improve the performance in one unit and to do the same everywhere around the world, whatever industry we might be serving as well.
We're coming out of an inflationary environment, obviously, where margin has been a big topic for all of us, and especially for our company as well, which we see as always as an opportunity to improve our margins further. Which is a good thing in a growth company, where you see that you can grow, and at the same time you can get better margin coming out of it as well, in order to get to our longer term performance objective that we've talked about for 20, 30 years. They haven't changed, by the way, as you will see along the presentation. A pretty cool story. What we do, our purpose is to protect what's vital. It starts by protecting people from infections. That's been a pretty big topic over the past few years.
It's not just related to COVID. It can be from any infection that you could have, especially from what you might be eating as well. That's what we call food safety. It can be public health as well, in a public environment, making sure that you don't get sick. It can be animal health as well, making sure that the whole food chain starts as well, in a healthy way. That's the whole protecting people. The second part of our purpose is protecting the resources vital to life, especially on water. Making sure that our customer can produce better products, more products, in a way that's using as little water as necessary, and ideally to get to a net zero, like many companies have been promising as well. Last but not least, it's to protect business.
Many talk about the green premium, talking about the fact that in order to be sustainable, it comes at a cost. You need to make an investment. This is not our thesis. Not saying that others need to look at it differently when to invest behind new technologies. In our case, it's helping customers deliver on their ESG promise in a way that help the P&L along the way as well at the same time. Really protecting what's vital, people, planet, and businesses at the core of what we do. In order to meet those critical needs of our customers, the planet, and people, we have unique capabilities. We have 47,000 people in our company. Half of them are serving roughly 1 million customers around the world in 170 countries, serving 40 different industries.
We have over 1,200 scientists in various places around the world focused on infection prevention, on water, and on hygiene, which are the three big pillars of our company. We have a growing number in digital with over 1,000 people today. We started that journey 30 years ago, so it's not a new fashion for us, but it's something that is really gaining speed over the last few years. When we talk about reach, well, we are touching a lot. When we do something the right way for an industry, we can expand it everywhere around the world. As mentioned, we touch a million customer location around the world, which are all using water. Helping them use less water has a big impact on water usage, water scarcity, and the impact on the environment.
We touch a third of the world food production, almost a quarter of the world's power, that's being produced as well around the world. Power meant as, energy, electricity. We touch 1.4 billion people, preventing infections, as well, so for all of them. When you combine capabilities and the reach of the company to address those critical needs, well, there's a lot of good things that can happen, especially when you do it in a way which is good for the customer's P&L, which drives good things for us as well at the same time. We help protect, 80% of the large brands, as well out there in three major groups. One is what we call Institutionals.
Those are the hotels and the restaurants everywhere around the world, making sure they have the same standard, delivered the same way anywhere you are around the world. In our industrial business, which is mostly our water business, mostly industrial companies. In healthcare and life sciences, which in our vernacular, it's mostly the pharma industries that we serve, while we serve hospitals as well, but clearly, in that order. We have a business that's pretty balanced, both in terms of end markets and in geographies as well. We like that a lot. It came out of the customer expansion because we are working with customers wherever they work around the world. When we start with a new customer, we go anywhere around the world where they are. That helps us obviously create a footprint in each of those industries anywhere around the world.
That helps the geographic balance and at the same time our end market balance as well, as you can see. Half of the company is in industrial, and again, for us, that's our water business, the way we call it. A third is in institutional specialty. Those are restaurants, and hotels and, as you can see, healthcare and life science, for the balance as well. It's important to keep in mind we sell razor blades. We install razors and we sell razor blades. The consumable revenue is 90% plus of what we sell, and the balance of it are the products that are distributing, obviously. Those consumables, this razor blade, model that we've been practicing for, now over 100 years, as a company.
We've had a long history of growth for many, many years. Looking at 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, whatever is the scope that you wanna use. It's always delivering this double-digit EPS growth, which is something that we wanna stick to long term. Keeping that in mind, it's been underlying the truth for the last 3 years as well. Same time, we decided to make investments for our people, for our customers, and for our company in the meantime. That had an impact on earnings, and I wanna be clear as well on that. For the ones who didn't follow us in 2020, for instance, we decided to keep all our team during that time when restaurants and hotels were kind of closing everywhere around the world.
We said we'll keep our 10,000 people that are serving those customers because its expertise, its relationship, its capabilities that we are really happy we kept as well. We've been serving as well our customers during the whole shortages in 2021 as well because when we don't serve a customer, being a restaurant, a nuclear plant, a steel mill, whatever, they stop operating. That came at a cost as well, and then inflation, which was something that we wanted to help our customers absorb in a way that they could do it well and that we could keep pricing as well for the long term, and I'll come back to that as well. If you think just 2022, that's been an interesting year. For us, 2021 was a good growth versus 2020.
In 2022, we lost almost all our earnings to inflation and rebuilt 96% of it within the same years. That was triggered by the war in February 2022, as we're all familiar with as well. It's showing how the company can react to external events so very quickly in quite a massive way as well. We've driven very nice growth as well over the last few quarters, which is a combination of volume and price, obviously. Talking about price, it's interesting in our model where price never goes down. It's always a positive story. It's been year after year. You can see on that chart, so the gray is inflation and the blue is the pricing.
It's always a positive story, and when it needs to get much higher, well, it gets much higher as well, and always driven, and that takes a bit more time, by the value we create for our customers. It's the savings we help them generate in their operations that generate our share, that drives pricing, that drives growth, as well, so for the future, which is what we call EROI, which is basically how much savings do I create for the customer versus the investment that they're making, and we promise at least 25% return. Productivity has been a good story as well. SG&A, so for many, many years, and that's gonna keep continuing. Not gonna get to zero, obviously.
Digital technology, which is a big capability of the company, is used not only for our customers but is used for our own field operations as well to make sure that they are as efficient as they can be as well. That's why that's a journey that we believe is gonna continue, so for the years to come as well. That's driven strong earnings momentum.
If you look at the operating income of the last few quarters, Q2 last year was obviously the post-war start story in early 2022, and building up operating income, so 10% last Q4 quarter of 2022 and a 19% in Q1, driving good EPS as well on the right with the difference being FX and interest, which is a story that we all face obviously, but really so showing where we're heading towards the double-digit EPS growth that we've set.
By the end of the year, that's where we're gonna be as well, which is why I believe that the objective that we've set years back of 6%-8% top line growth, 20% OI margin, and 15% EPS growth are probably more true than they've ever been since we launched those targets 30 years ago as a company. Getting a little bit more in details on why we're growing and how we're growing, I'd like to start by the needs that we are serving, starting so with public health. Well, we'll be 30% more people by 2050. That's 3 billion more people out there. We will need more food for that.
Interestingly enough, we'll need 56% more food, which is much higher than the 30% because there's this move from cereal-based diets to protein-based animals. You need to feed the animals before the animals can be used, obviously. In the food chain, that requires way more protein to be produced in order to get there. That's a big number. That's by 2050 as well. By 2030, by the way, today, the world is more or less using as much water as nature can replenish. We're kind of ahead of it, where the supply is lower than demand. Last time that it was balanced was 2005 roughly. It's expected that by 2030 we'll need 56% more water than what nature can replenish.
That's gonna happen, obviously, so we need to reuse and recycle water in order to be able to produce that, as we're going forward. We'll need almost 50% more energy because of more people, a world that's growing, and diets that are changing as well at the same time. Those are the big trends that have been driving our growth as a company for the years past and that are gonna be accelerating as well, the demand for what we do going forward. In terms of position, we've been working really hard to make the pie that we serve as big as it can be and to grow the pie by adding new markets to it. One example is data centers, is an industry that didn't really exist a few years back.
We're all familiar with cloud technology that requires always more data, always more data centers that are requiring huge amount of water and energy, by the way. That's a new end market for us that added to our end markets, which are today is $152 billion, and we have a 9% share of that market. Compared to competition as well, there's no one that's exactly the same out there. We have competitor in all of the end markets that we serve. We have many competitors. That's what you see on the charts with blue being Ecolab and the gray being all the other competitors, adding so together compared to who we are in those end markets as well.
How we drive value, our promise has always been the same. It's to help our customers produce more products, better products at a lower total cost because they reduce the impact on the environment. Less water, less energy, less waste equal less cost. How do we do that? We have on-site expertise. Each of the end markets that we serve has dedicated experts. Experts in power generation, experts in pharma, experts in hotels, experts in restaurants, and so on. Those are people visiting those locations, understanding from A to Z how they operate, bringing technology, data, and expertise in order to help the restaurant operate better. The power plant to operate better and to deliver better outcomes at a lower cost because they use less natural resources.
Interestingly enough, you might say, "40 end markets, is that a complex story?" To a certain extent, it is, but we simplify it doing two things. The first one is each of our end markets is run by one person, which means that it's simple within that end market with clear expertise behind it. The second one is that we share a lot of technology across all those end markets. Chemistry, there's a lot that we can leverage between healthcare and refining and steel making and power generation. We leverage as well, all our engineering capabilities as well on how to reuse water, how to protect from the risk of infection. Our digital technology is the same.
Ultimately, we have one cloud, the Ecolab3D as you will see as well in a second, where everything is connected to that cloud as well. That's shared across all the markets that we have. Talking about the digital technology, we started in 1991, which was before the World Wide Web, by the way, that was done a little bit differently. It was to connect chemistry. We had that concept of connected chemistry, which we call Connected Water today, which is in real time you can understand how is your process working? What's the quality of the water? What does it need in order so to come back to its original state that you can reuse it as well? All those systems are connected to the Ecolab3D cloud.
Which means that ultimately we know what's the best restaurant on the planet. We know what's the best power plant on the planet. We know how to operate them the best way as well, and we can share along the way that expertise. Across our teams, across one company, across an industry, across industries as well, which is a very unique place to be because we have that knowledge on what good looks like and how to get there, as well at the same time. Last but not least, this EROI concept, so is something that has been developed during the years, which has been a very interesting journey. Which is not just to say, "How much do I save, and how much did I invest?
I need to have a return of at least 25%. I wanna know as well in terms of the three pillars that are creating this Total Value Delivered. How much are my products being improved? How safer is my milk? How much longer can I hold it as well in my fridge? That's obviously having an impact on cost. My operational drivers, what's the productivity do I have in my plant? How quickly can I do my cleaning? How quickly can I change from one product to another? Last but not least, it's the environmental impact, helping our customer tell them how much water they save, how much energy, how much waste, and you add that to the cost as well, which is what we call this Total Value Delivered.
That you divide by the investment, and you get the EROI, which is the return that we're promising as well. Our growth strategy, interestingly enough, this $152 billion market, well, we have $14 billion of annual sales. That's 9% of it. As you can see, the rest of the $150 billion split roughly into half is business that we could do with customers we already have today. We sell them something, and we could sell much more of what we do, and then you have the totally new customers that haven't discovered that we even exist up to now.
As you can see, we can multiply by 4 the size of the company by selling everything we can offer to our current customers that we have today, which is why that strategy of Circle the Customer, Circle the Globe is so important. If I give you an example here, 2 example. One in a food and beverage plant, can be a meat production or can be brewery, for instance, and I'll talk about life science, pharma as well in a second. Well, in a food and beverage plant, there is a lot happening in here. How do we do that? Well, we start with an anchor technology, as we call it. In a food and beverage plant is what's called clean-in-place. It's something we've developed a few years back.
You don't need to dismantle the whole production line. You keep it as it is, but you just let flow within the production line all the chemistry that's required in order to clean it, to sanitize it, to dry it, and to do it in a very efficient way. This is how we start. We get into the plant with that first technology. Once we're in there, we connect it to the cloud, and we add all the rest of the technology, which is water services. It can be hygiene, food safety, lubrication. It can be pest elimination. All the things that we do in order to ensure that the products are safe, that the quality gets better, and that our customers can reduce their costs because they reduce their usage of natural resources.
We always start with an anchor technology that we connect and then add all the services around it. It's pretty cool to see the results that those customers are getting. Taking that example, we usually say do not put names for our customers we serve. That's up to them to talk about it, obviously. You can see in that case so how much greenhouse gas has been reduced, how much gallons as well, how much energy, productivity. That plant have got $1.2 million of savings and got an ROI over 50%, which means you got in 2 years your money back of what's been done. Let's take a biopharma production as well. Think about bioprocessing, the new pharma to say, well, we start the same way.
It's how do we add this anchor technology of cleaning the manufacturing site, then making sure that the clean room is sanitized and sterile as well. We add technology like our latest technology to purify the drug as well to it. We add water technology. We add all the other services that we can to make sure that that plant is fully operational in a way that's as effective as it can be, then we do it everywhere around the world. In that example, for instance, it's been big deal of $16 million savings as well, which is also driven by productivity, by water, by energy. As you can see, the returns are good, which is why we can drive the pricing we've been driving. It's because it's backed by value that we create for our customers.
We take a share of it. We translate it into pricing, which is why that pricing is sticking as well down the road. Let me conclude on two things. The first one is all we do positions us as the world sustainability company. Most companies are coming to us when they have a hard time, which is most of them, unfortunately, to deliver on their commitments on where they wanna be by 2025, where they wanna be by 2030, whatever the date that they've picked out there, and said, "Help us understand what's the gap, where are we today, how to get there, what do I need to get done, you know, to get there, and let's look at that," on a monthly basis as well, how it's getting there.
For us, when we think about sustainability, it's first and foremost helping our customers get to their objective, but at the same time is making sure that within our own operations, obviously, we are best in class, and we've been part of many of those standards definitions as well out there and glad so to be recognized as well as such by the ones where we've defined the standards as well together with them. Interestingly enough, when you look at water and energy, many companies, you can see on that chart, so how many companies have been disclosing in the Carbon Disclosure Project their footprint of carbon. You can see, 38%, the last year-on-year growth. You look at the blue line is the disclosure on water.
Interestingly enough, in a plant, between 20%-80% of the energy that's being used is used to manage water, to heat water, to cool water, to treat water, to pump water, you name it, ultimately. When you reduce and reuse water, you reduce as well your carbon footprint. That shows how much the water needs is gonna go up, and it's the first issue that's gonna happen when you get the drought. Obviously, you feel it even more than when you get too much carbon around you, as we know. For us, it's been absolutely essential that from an ESG perspective, we deliver on our promise year in and year out, and we've done that for years. It's not a new thing. This is our view for our customer impact.
I just give you the example on water, we've made a commitment that we will help save 300 billion gallons of water with our customers. That's the drinking need equivalent of 1 billion people. It's quite a major thing, and you can see in climate, in food, and in health as well. As you can see, we're ahead of our target towards 2030 year in and year out as well. At the same time, we do it to our own operations as well, that we reduce water consumption, carbon as well, that we drive diversity and inclusion as well within our company is one of our big pillar in ESG. We've made remarkable progress the last 10 years as well.
Last but not least, safety, which is embedded in everything we do as a company, where we've made very good progress as well to save our own people's lives, when they're serving our customers in sometimes difficult conditions, to say the least. Let me close on our financial objective. I've mentioned that early on. They haven't changed and will not change. In terms of where do we want to go? Sales, 6%-8% organic. OI margin, getting closer to this 20% margin. I think if we're gonna get there sooner than what we had expected, an EPS growth of this 15%. That's been true for 30 years, and it's not gonna change anytime soon. Getting a free cash flow conversion, 90% plus.
We usually in this mid-90s number as well, sometimes over 100, sometimes a bit lower, but our objective is to be so north of 90%. To get to a debt-EBITDA ratio of 2, that's always depending on M&A, obviously that we're doing, but we've done that so many times that we know the practice, to get back to these 2. Making absolutely sure that our capital allocation priorities are clear. It's first dividend, second business, and third, buyback, and always in that order. Which leads me to the cash returns to shareholders, roughly $10 billion in the last 10-ish years, with dividend that's been growing for 31 years now. You can see share repurchase as well, something that we've done every year as well.
As a third priority of our capital allocation, as I've shared just before. Last but not least, we like where we are. The leadership positions that we have. We know that what we do matters for our customers and the communities around them, and especially when we can do that in a way that helps them make more money. We like the strategy we have as well. Circle the Customer, Circle the Globe, as shared with you in one plant or one restaurant, and done that around the world. Margin is something that has always been a point of focus. For us it's not a straight line to heaven. Times like that are times for us where we can expand our margins. As hard as it is, we like those times as well.
Last but not least, we like our longer term financial objectives as well, which have remained the same for a very long time, as well, at the same time. Cool story, and the best is to come. With that, Manav, let's open it to Q&A.
Yeah. Thank you, Christophe. Just a few questions here. The first one, we've talked about this before, you know, the value proposition of your business is clear.
Yep.
The TAM slide, the TAM only gets bigger every time you put up that slide, and it's a pretty fragmented market. The question is, with all that opportunity, you know, I think your sales force only grows around low single digits a year. Why not grow faster? Why not, you know, take advantage of what's, you know, right in front of you?
It's kind of a good problem, so to have too much opportunity in front of us and having to answer the question that you're talking about, how can we capture more quicker? The biggest challenge that we have is that there's a lot of work that needs to get done in order to make that work. When we need to sign certified restaurants around the world, well, we need to have a few thousand people having to do the work as well. When you need to transform a brewery from using a lot of water to get to net zero, there's a lot of technology that needs to be brought in. There's a lot of engineering. There's a lot of capabilities that needs to be brought in. That takes time.
we're trying to find the right balance on how much we invest in people serving those customers and done that in a way that returns as much money as we can as well at the same time. we're trying to optimize that.
Yeah.
It comes with a certain time as well.
Got it. I think historically, there's an addition, additional low single digits of productivity that, you know, you had on your sales force growth. You know, you talked a lot about data collection, you know, AI. You know, can you give us some perspective on, you know, how you can probably use that to maybe have the productivity, piece go up even more?
Love to. When you think about it, today, our teams need to go to the plants, go to the restaurant. They need to get prepared for it, bring all we do for them from all the different divisions serving that customer and having a clear view and presenting it to the customer as well. They need to go there in order to make sure that our equipment, our technology is operating the right way. That's done by human beings or was done by human beings in the past. This is something that can be done by the machine tomorrow. Going to a customer, this is if you truly need to. You can remote monitor that as well. We do that for 40,000 plants around the world.
Nuclear plants, airports, paper mills, you name it, out there. You can prepare as well all the visits for our customers because you have everything real time, on your phone, on that location, and how does it compare to other locations as well, which is what's driving the productivity of our sales force in quite dramatic ways.
Got it. You know, I think, you know, so far it's been a lot of data points I guess that help your sales force do the, you know, productively. Like, when can that become, you know, a pricing or revenue opportunity, you know, with your customers?
It's a great question, because applying all that technology stuff, well, on sales force, okay, it's driving the productivity as we talked about. The fact that we know, when we talked about those breweries, what's the best brewery out there? When I'm saying we know, it's too much knowledge, expertise, and competencies that are in our people's head today. It's that person serving that brewery in Indonesia, that knows best. We should be in a place where we know what's the best brewery on the planet, what's the best performance, how do you get there, and who do you need to talk to, you know, to get there? That's the whole idea of ECOLAB3D.
That ultimately we can tell a customer, "Well, if your best brewery would be at the industry standard, then you would do that in the 150 breweries you have out there. You could save $200 million." Well, what's the plan? What's our share? How does it get into pricing? That's the next chapter for us.
Got it. before we get to, you know, pricing roles in this year's guidance, for example, just step back a bit. You know, Doug handed over the reins to you at, you know, a great time, I guess. Just when you go back, you know, there's been a lot of challenges over the last three years that you've navigated very well, but just curious if there would be anything in hindsight that you would do differently or position Ecolab differently in terms of, you know, all this future opportunity that you talked about?
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I've been part of the journey, so before the transition, so three years ago now. There's nothing I can really look back and think, "Who the hell did that?" I was part obviously of the whole journey, and I'm quite proud of what the team has done during that time. I think the two things that come to mind, the first one is our digital capabilities are unbelievable, and how do we leverage those capabilities even faster and broader across industries and around the world? Everyone, every of our customers are having a hard time to find people today. We know that.
Unemployment is very low, which is kind of a good news and a challenge, for many of those customers not finding the folks to work in their plants. Automation that we can provide can help them operate with less people. That's good news for them. It's good news for us because we sell all that. That's for sure one. The second one, when I think back, the hotel and restaurant industry has been shifting in terms of how guests are interacting with that industry over the last many years. That has accelerated during COVID, where a third of people going to a restaurant today do not sit in the restaurant. They pick up the food or they get it delivered.
That's changing the way we deal with customers in quite big ways. That's true in hotels as well, where you have higher price for your rooms, and you need to do your own bed. That's great thing for our customers, but ultimately we need to think a bit differently. How can we help our hotel customers provide the same level of service or even better at the cost that they have today where they're providing much less? It's kind of adapting to new market conditions. We're getting to the right place. We could have done that even earlier.
Got it. Then just moving to this year's guidance and kind of outlook from a macro perspective. You know, I think you said Q1 was ahead of plan, but you guys still maintained kind of the full year outlook, and it was because you had, you know, just you wanted to wait and see what's happening on the macro level. Could you just give us, elaborate on that a bit more in terms of, you know, what are you seeing in your end markets, and what is it that's holding you know, back, in terms of that outlook?
First, we haven't given a formal guidance for the year. We've practiced in the last few years this so-called soft guidance, which is not something we love, to be totally honest, on that. We prefer straight guidance.
Yep
Which is a range with mid points, as we've always done in the past. We do that when we're sure we're gonna hit it. The last 3 years was hard with all the reasons that we mentioned, so COVID, shortages, inflation, you name it, the war that we all went through. I wanted to do that in steps and saying, "Okay, let's do that quarter by quarter," and making sure that in the Ecolab way, we deliver as promised or we over-deliver it. We've done that for the Q2 , which is gonna be a strong quarter as well with the guidance I've provided. For the full year, I haven't said it stays the same.
As a directionally, we're gonna keep improving, quarter after quarter, we'll exit the year on our traditional trajectory of low double digits or EPS growth. Can be better than that. I think that Q2 will tell us a lot on what's happening in the world. I'm not totally sure what's gonna happen on the Eastern European front. Hard to tell. I think the next months or so we will know, hopefully for the better. Not totally sure about that as well. How is inflation gonna look like? How is the US-China relationship gonna evolve as well? How is our delivered product costs inflation, the true cost that we have, that's gonna impact us as well?
I think at the end of Q2 we will know more and kind of, we can remove a little bit some of the unknown and say, "Yeah, we feel good or even better than what we had planned for the year and the years to come.
Got it. The margin outperformance is obviously, you know, better pricing, productivity, costs, and roles as well.
Yep.
Can you just remind us of, you know, how you're thinking about how, you know, which direction roles move in terms of, you know, how you expect to keep improving through the course of the year?
When I look at the raw material, our delivered product costs, which represent a quarter of our P&L, roughly, was in the Q4 , if you take a 2-year stack, 2021, 2022, our delivered product costs was up 44%, roughly. It went up another 9% in the Q1 of 2023. That's comparing quarter-over-quarter. Q1, from a cost paid perspective versus Q4, was roughly the same.
Okay.
You kind of see a plateauing like that, but not going down. I don't expect it to come down, anytime soon, and I hope I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, we'll all be more happy. Obviously that's an easy problem to solve, obviously, but I prefer having, all of us think it's not gonna go down, because I don't think it's gonna go down. We can talk about the reasons, and I wanna have our organization as well to kind of focus on the fact, well, we need to make sure that our margins keep rebuilding and expanding, after that.
The sales organization, when you tell them, "So everything is gonna be fine," You approach things a little bit differently, as well. The core element is I don't believe that inflation is gonna come down any time soon, especially not in our own delivered product costs.
Got it.
If it improves quicker than I have.
Yeah, that's better.
That's gonna get our results better quicker.
Got it. Similar question around pricing. You know, 13%, I think, in the Q1 . You said that was peak.
Yeah.
You know, how does that, you know, kind of phase through?
The way we look at it, we had 10% pricing last year, full year, in 2022. What I've said is that half of it will be carryover in 2023, and we will keep building on that. That's the general way to think about it. The math obviously saw a quarter-over-quarter we'll be decreasing in gross, but that's a comb question.
Yeah.
In terms of dollars, you can do the math very easily.
Just looking, you know, in terms of how sticky pricing can hold. You know, in the past, you've raised pricing, you know, 1.5% on average.
Yep. Yep.
Maybe a couple of years, 2, 3, 4.
Yep.
Never 13.
Yep.
Is 13 sticky, or does some of that have to, you know, come down? If, you know, the good scenario occurs and costs go down, do you bring that down as well?
I feel pretty good about that for a few reasons. It's taken us time because to get to that 13%, and it always taking time. You're familiar with our model that in usual times, which is not now, we compensate dollar for dollar the first year and the margin the year two. It's been way wider, obviously the inflation today, and longer as well, to make it worse, the model is roughly the same. Why does it take time? It's because we make absolutely sure that we create enough value for our customers in order to back the pricing up. That takes time. You can't just declare and saying, "So as of Monday you're gonna get a million savings because of whatever magic just happened." Something needs to be done. It needs to be delivered.
The good news is that once it's delivered, this is something that, well, you can discuss with the customer and saying, "You got $1 million pricing, but you got $2 million of savings as well during that time. It's a good deal for you. It's a good deal for us." Takes more time, but it's sticking.
Got it. Maybe just to wrap up since we're almost out of time, you know, that 1.5% of pricing for the last, call it, decade, I mean, going forward presumably it's gonna be a higher number than that. Just any parameters on how to consider that?
It will be higher. I'm not totally sure what the number will be. Interestingly enough, we've discovered two things during that whole time. The first one is, we create way more value to customers than what we thought. Because they were focused on how much value can I create to the customer, well, focused first on how much value did I create for us to begin with to build credibility to begin with as well, because that's what I did last year. For you, before we're talking about, the future. We've discovered value that we've created to begin with but didn't merchandise as well as we could have, as well, in the past.
Which brings me to the second point, is that we have 27,000 people today who are able, capable, have become experts at merchandising value that we're creating for customers, and getting paid for it as well at the same time. What number it's gonna be, I don't know, but it's gonna be north of 1.5% for sure.
Got it. All right. Cool. We're out of time, so thank you very much, Christophe, for being here. Appreciate it, and thank you guys as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.