Okay, let's get started with our next session for today. Thank you everyone for taking the time to join us. My name is Stephen Laszczyk, and I'm the Lead Entertainment Analyst here at Goldman Sachs. We are excited to welcome back to the Communacopia Technology Conference, Chris Cocks, the CEO of Hasbro, and Gina Goetter, the CFO of Hasbro. Chris, Gina, thank you for being with us today.
Steve, thanks for having us.
Thanks. Thank you.
Before we start, I think Kern has a quick safe harbor that we would like to read.
Yeah, thanks, Stephen. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that during this presentation, we may make forward-looking statements. There are many factors that could cause actual results or events to differ materially from those forward-looking statements. Please refer to our investor website and other public disclosures for additional information.
All right, great. With that, I think I'd like to start out high level. Chris, a lot's changed the past couple of years since you became CEO, and even over the last year, a lot's changed as well. Could you maybe help us refresh us on Hasbro's mission, its strategy today, and what you see as the biggest achievement so far and the biggest achievements still to come?
Great. Well, hey, first off, thanks for having us. Couple things. So let's talk about what themes animate the company, and I think there are three. I think the first one is everyone plays. That's new from, you know, maybe twenty, thirty years ago. People are playing well into their50s , 60s, 70s, 80s. They're not stopping and putting down playthings at the age of 10 or 12 like they did when we were kids. And that's a huge opportunity and a huge growth market for the business of play. I think what's really driving that is digital. You know, digital, I think, is probably the biggest thing that's happened to the industry of play since the invention of plastic.
It's aging up the industry of play. It's extending a lifelong relationship with play, and I think it's a huge opportunity for a company like Hasbro, and then last but not least, you know, we have... Sorry. We have everyone plays, we have digital, and then we have - Sorry. I'm pulling a little bit of a Department of Education on you right now, and then we have, you know, the whole... Gosh, I'm really blanking right now. That's amazing. Anyway, so digital is huge, so then we think about how we think about what our strategies - Oh, yeah, and partnership. Partnership is important. Duh.
You know, with everyone's playing and, play is exploding in terms of its potential, partnership is hugely important, because you can't possibly do everything by yourself as a company. So when you think about our strategy, our strategy really follows that. You know, if everyone's playing, that means, aging up is a hugely important aspect of, you know, being a toy company, being a games company. If digital is important, that means being digitally relevant is super important. You need to be, involved, in digital play, not just in terms of, you know, taking physical things and making them digitally relevant, but doing purely digital-based play, and then last but not least, you have to partner with the best in the business to do that, because no company can do it all.
You need to find the best in the business to help you extend into mobile, to extend into new screens, to extend into new markets and places. So, you know, when we think about what Hasbro's mission is and what our purpose is, our purpose is really play-based. We want to bring joy and community to as many people around the world as we can. Today, we do that with about one in 14 consumers around the world. Our aspiration is to get up to about one in five over the next, call it five to seven years. We're going to do that by leaning into each of those themes. We're going to age up, we're going to extend our demographics, particularly girls, where we under index today. We're relatively heavy in boys.
Emerging markets and value channels are going to be important to us, so making sure we manage our costs and drive better value, I think is important for us. Digital is going to be hugely important for us. We've been making a multi-year investment in digital games. We will continue to do that. You know, I think, like, we've had huge success over the last year with Monopoly Go! and Baldur's Gate 3. I think it shows the power and resonance of our game, of our IP brands, and then last but not least, partnership. We are the biggest digital games licensor in the world. We're the third biggest licensor, period, inside of the entertainment industry, and I think that'll be something we lean into more and more, so then, you know, you talked like, what's the proudest accomplishment?
Since I've been at Hasbro, I think there are three. And I'll also turn this over to Gina, I think, for her take on it. You know, I've been at Hasbro now for about eight and a half years. Probably the first one I'd tick off is the growth of Magic: The Gathering. When I started on Magic, it was about $400 million the year before I started on it. It's going to be, you know, close to $1.1 billion, maybe even more, this year. That's amazing growth for a brand that's been around for 30 years. That's not something you typically experience with a brand. And we did that by embracing kind of that concept of everyone plays. I think the second thing is digital. You know, what we've done with Monopoly Go!
And our partners at Scopely, what we've done with Baldur's Gate 3, I think, you know, shows that our brands have huge upside if we partner with the right people, and we execute with excellence, and we execute patiently.
Mm.
Because digital isn't for the faint of heart. It's huge capital expense, it requires massive expertise, and it requires very long timelines of investment. And I think we are, you know, certainly in the toy industry, years, if not, you know, close to a decade ahead of any of our competitors. And then last but not least, if we have to be relevant to more markets and more segments, particularly value-oriented segments and, emerging markets, we have to be very, very efficient, and we have to be very, very nimble. And I'm very proud of the cost, savings that we've driven, and the operational discipline we've done that. Now it takes a village to do that. It takes a whole company.
But I credit this gal right here, Gina, who's not just our Chief Financial Officer, she's also our Chief Operating Officer, for really being a key enabler for that.
That, that's a great overview. I want to dig a little bit deeper into some of the points that you just made. I think it's pretty clear on the digital side that Hasbro is leaning into digital gaming in a big way. Perhaps you could spend a little bit of time talking about your long-term strategy in self-publishing. You mentioned some of the capital intensity and the lead that you have relative to other competitors in the space. And as we, as investors, think about your strategy and how it takes shape over the next couple of years, what are some of the mile markers investors should be looking out for as you make progress against that strategy?
I think what we've done over the last year, certainly in showing... I think the first question everyone would have asked, you know, certainly they asked me when I did occasional investor outreach when I was running Wizards, is, "Gosh, do you even have brands that are relevant?
Mm-hmm.
Like, you know, "You guys aren't Call of Duty, you guys aren't Need for Speed, you guys aren't Flappy Bird." And you know, I think there was, like, a question mark on, could you even extend digitally into the space? And I think we've solved that, or we've stated that with an exclamation point over the last year. Baldur's Gate 3, you know, that's in the, you know, the teens in terms of millions of units that it's sold so far, and it continues to sell really well. It won five of five of the major Game of the Year awards, basically sweeping all of them. It's kind of like an EGOT, if it was an actor equivalent. And then Monopoly Go! is the biggest mobile game outside of China in history and continues to perform very, very well.
So I definitely think we have terrific brand relevance. I think related to that, I think we've also shown that we're adept at finding partners who we can work with, and identifying who can scale our brands, because we're making some choices about which platforms we're going after. So you know, initially, we chose a polyglot of partners in terms of platforms because we just didn't have a lot of development capacity. So we brought on PC and console publishers like Larian, we brought on mobile publishers like Scopely, and increasingly, I think you're gonna find, you know, we'll continue to be open for business for anyone who has a good idea, and we think can care about our brands and execute well.
But increasingly, we will focus on PC and console because that tends to be where we're going to be able to build our own development capacity and where we think kind of like our mid-core and hardcore focused brands, like D&D and Magic, and even brands like G.I. Joe and Transformers, have powerful relevance, and there's a lane for new publishers. In mobility, you know, that is a very, very high beta category. You have to spend tens of millions of dollars to even get a game ready to launch, and then you have to basically triple down on that in terms of user acquisition. So we're gonna continue to work with the best in the industry on mobile games. You know, I don't think you're gonna see a lot of mobile games from Hasbro. And you know, fortunately, we have the best partnerships there.
I think between a combination of our brands are relevant, and we've proven that, we brought on terrific talent to drive our own games. We have the right partners to drive games in other high-growth categories like mobile. I think you're seeing a smart, kind of balanced, approach to capital allocation and risk management that's gonna help us steadily build that revenue stream over time and be a big enabler for Hasbro.
Can I add one point on the milestone? So as we think about our business and how we segment our business, you know-
Yeah.
Chris just walked through our biggest growth levers, which are all really on the gaming side. In terms of your question on milestones as it relates to toy, I mean, there is no doubt that our toy business has been in a turnaround, and last year we spent a lot of time resetting that business, getting the complexity out, cleaning up the operation, getting smarter on our portfolio. This year, you can see kind of some of the fruits of that labor play through. You can see that in our P&L, where that foundation is getting set. As we turn the corner into twenty twenty-five, we're seeing this as we're back to growth on our toy business.
So even though the bigger bets, the bigger capital allocation, the bigger longer-term opportunity will be absolutely in everything that Chris has been just describing, just keep in mind that we've got a toy business that, as we enter into kind of our third year of this transformation, it's finally on its path to where we're back to growth.
That's great, and we can certainly dive deeper into.
Yeah
... the consumer segment, and the turnaround there. But maybe sticking with digital just for one more question. You've had this incredible hit in Monopoly Go! It's been incredibly top of mind with the investment community. Just two questions on this front. Since it is so top of mind, just be curious if there's any update on recent engagement trends, monetization trends, or expectations into the back half of the year. And then taking a step back, I'm curious what lessons you've learned from the experience you've had with Monopoly Go! over the last year, and any best practices or learnings you think are applicable to the rest of your IP portfolio?
Do you want me to start with the model?
Yeah, sure.
Okay. You can go to, you can do the strategery. I'll do the model. So at this point, we continue to stay on our guidance that we gave during Q2, where we think roughly $105 million of revenue will come from Monopoly Go! We have started to book revenue above that minimum guarantee, and in the back half of the year, we are still anticipating roughly $60 million of revenue coming in. If you, you know, everyone has this access to the same data that we have, so you can see that, from the Sensor Tower data, you know, as we've moved through Q3 here, August has been relatively in line with what we saw play through in July. So the game itself, the revenue base itself, seems to be settling out.
The big thing that we're anticipating, you know, the decay rate of 3-5% as we move through the balance of the year, but then marketing. You know, as we came out of Q2, we said that marketing percentage was gonna be in that 25%-35% range for the balance of the year. We now know more about the plan Scopely has for marketing in the back half, and we definitely anticipate that percentage is gonna be at the higher level of that range. So it still keeps us in that right zone of $105 million, but kinda no ups or downs from that at this point.
Yeah, I'd say, well, just a couple things. So Scopely, I think, is the expert, so you probably need to ask them about specifics around the game. I think they're learning a lot about the cadence of events and kind of subtle feature changes that they need to drive inside of the game to, you know, to motor the economy, and to optimize kind of like the user acquisition. So I think you'll see that play out effectively over the next several months. And I think that'll be for the benefit of the game. But I think we factored that into-
Mm-hmm
... our original guidance. So, you know, to me, Monopoly Go! is going to be a long-term annuity to the company that's gonna be very positive for us and last, you know, multiple, multiple years. It's not lost on us that the top 20 of the top 20 games today, you know, I think over 40, potentially over 50% of them, have been on the market for over five years.
Mm-hmm.
So this is gonna be a benefit and a tailwind for Hasbro for a long time. I think the other thing that Monopoly Go! shows us, and that, you know, to a lesser extent, but still a powerful lesson that Baldur's Gate 3 shows us, is the power of a brand relationship that's anchored in play. You know, when I came into Hasbro, probably the biggest pivot that we've had over the last three years since I took over the company, is we had this kind of concept called the Brand Blueprint. We still use the Brand Blueprint, but three years ago, we were really in love with this concept of storytelling. So let's tell stories, and if we tell the right stories, we can drive toy sales, and we can drive merchandising sales.
I still think we can do that, and we have, you know, a pipeline of over 35 projects in development with some of the biggest names in entertainment. But I don't think that's where the real magic is in our portfolio. Where I think the magic is in our portfolio is we build this relationship based on play with consumers, tens of millions of consumers around the world, and they understand how they play with these games. They understand how they play with these toys.
There's a community who understands it, and you can use that to either take an internal team or work with a partner like Scopely, who is best in class, and instantly people have familiarity with a concept of a brand and a concept of how a game might be played in a mobile space or in a console space, or, you know, any kind of licensing space. Like, one of our biggest tailwinds this year is a licenser called Kayou in China.
Mm.
They're doing My Little Pony trading cards. They're gonna do $1 billion of My Little Pony trading cards in China this year. That's massive, and that's all based off of familiarity with that brand, that anchored in play. And I think that's a powerful insight, and I think it really opens up the aperture of our portfolio in terms of what we think about can be billion-dollar opportunities, not just Transformers, working with Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg to do, like, a movie series that opens up kind of our blueprint. It's games like Monopoly that have ubiquity in every household in the U.S. and Europe. It's games like Magic: The Gathering, which have tens of millions of fans who really understand that game and understand how to play it.
You know, My Little Pony, which, you know, tens of millions of little girls the world over have had a relationship in play, and being able to watch and share with their friends. That collectibility, that play, that is super powering, I think, our portfolio and our opportunity moving forward.
Maybe to expand on that just a little bit, and beyond Monopoly Go! and Baldur's Gate, you have a very sizable licensing and other digital games business. Could you perhaps talk a little bit more about the other opportunities within that segment, the growth strategy in twenty twenty-five and beyond, and other extensions, you know, to license some of the core IP that you work with?
Yeah. I think there's three opportunities for growth inside of that space. The first is self-published games, and so starting in two thousand twenty-six, we will have a cadence of one to two new games releases per year, the first of which will be a game that we announced last year called Exodus, which is a new sci-fi IP. It's basically Dungeons and Dragons in space, so it's doing what Warcraft did with StarCraft. You know, it's not a super original strategy, but it's a very effective one. You'll likely see a D&D game that year as well. We'll be leaning into D&D a lot inside of that portfolio.
Then you have our licensing business, and, you know, our pipeline and our licensing business has grown, you know, at an average CAGR of, like, 15%-20% of new deals growth over the last three or four years. Obviously, since you've had something like Monopoly Go!, the interest in that has accelerated. So I think that will continue to be a very strong annuity for us. And then last but not least, I think something that we're starting to explore more seriously is this concept of JV and partnerships. So this is kind of a hybrid between licensing and our own development. It helps to defray risk a little bit. It brings on best-in-class partners, and I think you'll see more of that, but it also allows us to leverage the upside of economics more.
Mm-hmm.
And so I think you'll see us talk more and more about that over the coming years as well.
Got it. Let's talk about Magic. It's scaled to becoming a billion-dollar brand for you, and you've spoken about the robust pipeline you have ahead, and some of the content that's coming to market. Do you help us think about the long-term growth strategy of the Magic brand, and you think growth from here comes more from higher volumes, or is there also room to take pricing?
We haven't really taken much of any price increases on Magic. We've taken one maybe in the last 10 or 15 years.
Mm-hmm.
I don't think we think about, "Hey, how can we charge more for a booster pack?" I think we think more about: how can we bring value to the players based on how they're playing? So, like, a great example of that is this format called Commander. Commander's been around since, like, 2000. It was a community-based form of play. We were frankly scared of it because it seemed to threaten our core form of play called Standard. And I think that's always wrong-headed when a brand is scared of what their end users are doing with the brand.
Mm.
Instead, you should look at that as the opportunity it is. You know, if you look at the growth of Magic over the last five years, you know, that Standard format that used to be our bread and butter is basically flat. That Commander format has probably driven 70% of our growth, which the brand has more than doubled over that time.
Mm.
And so there's power in that. So we're constantly mining, you know, player trends and adopting new formats. I think, you know, the, the other side of the one-two punch is thinking about Magic as a play system. And, you know, I'll credit LEGO for this, 'cause that was kind of our inspiration, which is like, "Hey, we've got this play system. We've got cards that, you know, you could play a Magic card from nineteen ninety-three, and it works perfectly with a Magic card from 2024 .
Mm.
I wouldn't recommend it, because probably that 1993 card is very expensive. But it works perfectly well. So we've got this great play system that has over 20,000 play items in it. So what if we brought in outside IP, and what would that do to kind of rev up that play system and excite existing players and invite in new players? And I think that's gonna be another leg up for us. You know, next year we're gonna have Final Fantasy. We're going to have our first Marvel set, and then I think every year you're gonna see at least two major Universes Beyond, is what we call this initiative.
So I think between, you know, continuing to like, you know, work with our players and engaging the way they wanna play and giving them products for how they wanna play, and then working with some of the best IP in the world that we think is resonant with those players, there's a nice path of growth for Magic over the coming, you know, call it five, six years.
Yeah, this year, Magic will not grow. We've been pretty transparent that because of the big comp that we had with Lord of the Rings, which is, you know, kind of the first big Universes Beyond set, comping that, they did a huge Q2 offering, and then we had a holiday offering. But that will lead to a decline, but as we think about next year and kind of our midterm plan in the next few years, Magic, this combination of using our own IP plus the Universes Beyond, gets us back to call it a mid-single-digit range growth for that business. And it...
You know, for those that have followed us closely know that that business not only is big and growing, but it is our most profitable business, so that kicks off a nice, kind of margin tailwind for us as a company.
That's great. Maybe switching gears back to the Consumer Products side of the business.
Mm-hmm.
On the topic of the consumer, we've seen some fairly mixed data points over the summer, more broadly throughout the economy. I also think there's been a lot made about the impact of the timing of the election. I think there's a shorter holiday selling season coming up this year as well, and Gina, I'd be curious your thoughts on what you're hearing from your retail partners at the moment, state of the consumer heading into the holiday selling season, or any thoughts more broadly on sort of where we are on a segment-by-segment basis with the retailer at the moment?
Yeah. Yeah. And overall, our view of the holiday and our health of the retailer and the health of the consumer hasn't dramatically changed coming out of our Q2 earnings. We continue to be in a really good position from an inventory standpoint, both our owned and retail. All of our new product innovation has been resetting well. We're just starting to see kind of the early traction and results of some of the new innovation that's gone in. All of that is kind of performing on expectation. We haven't heard too much pushback on back to school. Like, that was a big theme last year when I think we were sitting here, is that there was...
Last year, there was that uh-oh factor of back to school didn't seem to be going very well, and retailers were pulling back the inventory. That has not been the discussion. As we look at the back half, I mean, there's always gonna be this element of, you know, the September and October toggle that I think every manufacturer deals with the retailers. They're managing their own inventory strategies. But as we look at our back half of the year, nothing significantly changed. The election, we knew the election was gonna happen in January, the same way that we know that it was gonna happen now. We knew the calendar was gonna be when the calendar was gonna be in terms of the holiday season.
So we just feel really good about what we've been able to do to date and the execution plans that we have coming up. You know, our marketing spend. We did a little bit more in the front half of the year than we did last year, and-
... saved our marketing power for kind of starting now to the, through the balance of the year, to be really smart about kind of turning on when the consumer is turning on their shopping. But nothing materially different.
That's great. And you mentioned something interesting on the innovation side, products coming to market. As you look into the back half of this year, and then more broadly, throughout 2025 and beyond, what are some of the key products on the consumer side, the innovation that you're looking forward to?
I mean-
Drive, yeah, sure, drive sales? I've talked a lot.
You over-indexed on your words.
Yeah.
The big ones that we're watching as we go through the back half of the year, you've heard us talk about, Beyblade. So that is a big one that just is really getting into market here, you know, call it the last couple of months. That's a partnership that we have. We saw it when our partner launched in Japan last year, and reset with this new product, did very well. So we have brought that here, kind of brought that activation plan here, and we are anticipating big things as we move through the holiday. Transformers is another big one, where, again, last year, the movie release that we had was in Q2.
We know now the movie is coming out here in a couple of weeks, the animated film, and that always has a good pull on toy volume. We're anticipating the same this year. Play-Doh continues to be an evergreen. I think it's our personal favorite of both, Chris and I. I am a user of Play-Doh. I have a young one at home, and the pipeline that we have, innovation-wise, is very sharp. I think that Tim Kilpin and his team have done a really nice job of cleaning up the portfolio and really listening to consumers in terms of what's gonna be relevant. We've got the Marvel Play-Doh, I think it's on shelves. I saw it in my Target this past weekend, on shelves.
We're excited about the momentum that we're continuing to see within Play-Doh.
Got it.
Those are our big ones that we would hit on.
I mean-
Yeah, I mean, I would just say, going to a Target or a Walmart, compare us year over year. I just do secret shopper trips throughout the year. I just did twenty stores in the Boston and Atlanta area shortly after Target and Walmart reset. I actually bought Walmart stock after that because, like, their stores are crushing it. And it's not just us, they're crushing it. But, you know, you look at, like, all the basics of our portfolio. Our packaging is better, our pricing is better, our innovation is better, the status of our promotion is better. I don't think we're the MVPs of the aisle yet, but I definitely think we're in the running for most improved player.
Yeah.
You know, Jumping in Muddy Puddles Peppa Pig is one of the best values for a giftable item in the preschool aisle. Dance 'N Crawl Spidey is amazing, and it's really been jump-starting Spidey and His Amazing Friends. Marvel Play-Doh, you know, look at Amazon in terms of top sellers, in terms of what's starting to hunt. That's doing well. Licensed products, you know, right now, D&D Minifigs, I think, are the number one new product release on Amazon right now. So it's not... furReal Friends from our partners at Just Play, Littlest Pet Shop from our partners at Basic Fun. Whether it's what we're executing or what our partners are executing, it's doing a lot better, and I'm pleased that it's on our plan.
Great. Before I get into margins and, and cost structure, a question, high-level question on, on AI. I'm curious, you know, to the extent that you're utilizing AI or seeing it used more broadly in the content industry or even in the toy industry, you know, what you're seeing in terms of what the technology is capable of and specifically around content? Do you think it has the potential to maybe bend the cost curve, either on the TV film side of the equation, or perhaps in your digital gaming business, to bring the cost curve down and maybe make that capital investment a little bit more efficient for you?
I think inside of development, we've already been using AI, and most major developers have been using AI for years. It's mostly like a machine learning-based AI or more of a proprietary-based AI, as opposed to a more general, kind of like ChatGPT kind of approach. You know, we will deploy it significantly and liberally internally, both as like a knowledge worker aid, as and as a development aid. I'm probably more excited, though, in terms of the playful elements of AI. You know, if you just look at a typical D&D going back to kind of like the theme I had around, you know, don't be afraid of what your players are doing, embrace what your players are doing.
If you look at, like, a typical D&D player, you know, I play with probably thirty or forty people D&D regularly, there's not a single person who doesn't use AI somehow.
Mm
... for either campaign development or character development or story ideas. That's a clear signal that we need to be embracing it. We need to do it carefully, we need to do it responsibly, we need to make sure we pay creators for their work, and we need to make sure we're clear when something is AI-generated. But the themes around, you know, using AI to enable user-generated content, using AI to streamline new player introduction, and then using AI for emergent storytelling, I think you're gonna see that across not just like our hardcore brands, like D&D, but across multiple of our brands, from kids to adults.
Got it. On margins, Gina, your outlook for this year calls for consumer products margins of 4%-6%, which implies a fair degree of margin expansion in the business in the back half of the year, year over year. On the Wizards of the Coast side, 42% margins, which implies some modest margin compression in the back half. Could you maybe just remind us and walk us through the puts and takes of that margin dynamic this year, and then perhaps comment on what you think it would take to see the consolidated business achieve 20% operating profit margins for this year?
Oh, for this, forever, or for this year. So on Wizards, you're right, it is a giveback of margin as we move through the back half, and it's really the two pieces that we've talked about on stage here. It's the Baldur's Gate comp. So even though we have Monopoly Go, it still is not completely offsetting the revenue that we got from Baldur's Gate. And then it's the Lord of the Rings holiday offering. We don't have a comp against those. So those two pieces just result in some natural margin giveback on the Wizards business. But let's not lose sleep because we're still at a very healthy margin profile on Wizards, you know, in the back half, and then as we exit the year. On the CP side, you're right.
There is a ramp in margin that's expected. Volume becomes our friend. You know, we've been talking about the first couple of quarters that volume deleverage is probably the single biggest negative detractor of our margin, and as we kind of come out of Q3 and into Q4, we're expecting growth. That helps to provide some margin uplift, and we also think back to last year when we were writing off inventory, cleaning up the portfolio. There's a lot of costs that we incurred last year that we won't incur this year, coupled with all of the costs that we were putting into market to move inventory, so given where our inventory positions are, we don't have to spend that heavy discounting, that promotion, those promotional dollars.
We will still have the appropriate amount of promotion and activity for the holidays, but we won't have to go so heavy like we did last year to clear things up, and so that also provides the margin kind of tailwind and the step change on the CP business.
Got it.
So to get to twenty, really, when you look at our margin, we would have to be on the right-hand side of both of those margin guides to get to twenty. So depending on, you know, I don't know that we'll quite get there all the way this year, but we are absolutely on the right path to get there as we move into twenty-five and beyond.
Yeah. Maybe looking longer term and thinking about the cost structure, I know efficiency's been a big priority of yours-
Mm-hmm
... over the last year. Where do you think there's still more work to be done? And I'm curious, you know, looking out 2025, 2026 and beyond, where you think margins can go, and I'm curious to what degree that volume component is an important part there.
Yeah.
Do you think there's enough levers on the cost side to really push margin higher?
In short, yes. I mean, margins will continue to improve. I think we've done a really nice job kind of getting after the low-hanging fruit over the past, call it a year and a half. There is still a lot of room to go on all of the levers. Well, our biggest kind of margin contributor has been the work that we've done within supply chain. Even so, some of the bigger boulders are still ahead of us. When we think about network, how we're managing our logistics, how we're managing our manufacturing supply base, that is still all ahead of us. I think on our managed costs, I mean, obviously, we've been talking about us taking down our overhead structure. We can see that some as we move through 2024.
There is going to be more or less on the people side, where we're trying to get all of those actions completed here in the near term, but it more becomes about all of the other, call it $700-$800 million of spending that happens outside of just the people cost-
Mm-hmm
... just getting smarter and using those dollars, either better or dropping them to the bottom line. You've heard us talk a little bit about Design to Value, so this is going all the way upstream to product design and making sure that the costs were designing the product at the right cost structure. We haven't really realized any of that in the P&L yet. That is all still to come as we move into twenty-five and beyond. And lastly, the last cost lever we haven't really kind of talked about or attacked wholeheartedly yet is all of the cost that sits between gross revenue and net revenue.
Mm-hmm.
That's about $700 million of cost. Some of it is just allowances in how you do business with retailers, but some of it is dollars that we can either reposition for better growth or drop to the bottom line. Oftentimes, that $700 million is all about just margin improvement, so it's not necessarily a pure profit pass-through, but it can help you secure better mix, it can help you secure better pricing, more effective pricing, better kind of revenue drivers with your retailers. So I would say all across the P&L, we continue to have opportunity to improve the margin.
That's great. Maybe just with a minute remaining on capital allocation, thinking through you reaching your net leverage target potentially the next year to two key priorities from there. Then on the CapEx side, $225 million of CapEx in 2024. Curious if you think that's enough investment to realize your top-line goals.
So first and foremost, we will always invest back in the business, and hopefully, this session today gave you some color of there are a lot of exciting things that we can invest into. So that's the first thing that we're gonna do with our money. Second, you know, our dividend continues to be very important to us and to our shareholders, so making sure that we're taking the actions to protect the dividend. And then third, it would be any other kind of capital allocation, like when you think about the debt reduction, share buybacks, et cetera. You know, we are committed to bringing our debt leverage down. It's in an okay spot over the next couple of years.
I think we'll definitely be in that right zone, and then that should free up the flexibility for us if we wanted to entertain share buybacks, if we wanted to entertain something different on the M&A side. In terms of capital, I think you might see us tick up a little bit over time, but we have been... If you go back and kind of watch our track record, we have been upticking our capital that we've been putting against our growth initiatives, so we don't see a significant uptick that we have to do here to achieve what we've talked about today. So we feel like we're in the right zone.
That's great. Gina, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you.
Thanks so much.
Thank you for your time.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you. Yes.