Good morning, we're gonna get started. Busy day, so we're kicking off this morning with Kimberly-Clark. We're joined by Mike Hsu, Chairman and CEO, Nelson Urdaneta, CFO, and Chris Jakubik, VP of Investor Relations. We're gonna jump right in. So we're about a month away from the formal transition into the new org structure that you announced at your Investor Day back in March, and I was just hoping if you could maybe give some color on how that process has gone, what the structure will look like versus what's been in place historically? Like, how much of the organization will have, like, a new remit, new reporting lines? And I believe that it was announced externally and internally concurrently.
Correct, yeah.
So, kind of, what was the response from employees as you went through that?
Okay. First of all, Lauren, thanks-
Good morning, sorry.
... Thanks for having us, and we're delighted to be here, and thanks for all of you for attending. Yeah, our reorganization, which internally we're calling Wire for Growth, I think is proceeding very, very well. You know, overall, I'd say strong organization support for it, and we're already starting to see the benefits. So I think the support yeah, it was awkward because obviously it's a big event. We announced concurrently, internally and externally. In fact, we invited our employees to dial into the Investor Day call, of which we had about, Lauren, five to six thousand lines dialed in. And I say lines, because what happens at KC is people gather in auditoriums and conference rooms, and then they all listen together.
What happened was, we had the Investor Day call with about 6,000 lines, and then that night we flew back to Dallas, and then we had our Asia Pacific call, which had another 5,000 to 6,000 people dial in, and then the next morning, we had about 10,000 to 12,000 on a global call. And so all, of course, with great interest around what's this reorganization about? I'd say we do a lot of polling, and I think we've already polled three times on how employees are feeling, but I'd say overall, strong support for the strategy. They understand the environment, the context, why we're doing it. I think they love the focus on the key markets.
They like this breakdown, and I think it's working for them, the difference between, you know, North America, you know, the Focus Markets, and then what we're calling Enterprise Markets, which is our long tail of smaller markets, right? And so they understand kind of that differentiation. And then I think they do understand that we need... And there's a good opportunity for us to bring more global scale to the local fight. And we're, you know, I think the important thing is, we've evolved from a really decentralized structure to one that I would call balanced matrix, right? A balanced between the local markets, which we're always gonna prioritize.
We're gonna really want, you know, I think our historic calling card, Lauren, has been local agility, local knowledge, all those things, and I think we're still gonna retain that, but we want to multiply that with the global capability that Kimberly-Clark has. So I think, I think overall that's going well, and as we poll our employees, I think, again, the vast majority in the high seventies around supporting what we're doing and confidence that we can execute all those things. I think the execution thus far is proceeding very well, and I'm not expecting many executional hiccups. You know, why do I say that? Well, we've been running what we call the soft cutover-
Mm-hmm.
Since April, and then in July. So I think with International Personal Care and Family Care, I think we started cutting over back in April to that new structure. The split between International Family and Professional and North America happened in July. And so we've been running under that structure now for a few months, and I think we're getting quite comfortable with it. It's not as automated, Nelson, as it's gonna be, because reporting is still a little bit more manual, but I think we're comfortable with the overall approach from an operational standpoint. And then I'd say where the benefits are starting to show up, things like our Powerhouse Supply Chain work.
We're really seeing the benefits of kind of the, you know, functional experts working with the local markets to accelerate our progress.
Okay, great. I'm excited to recast my model. That's what I'm most excited about.
Yeah.
Wait for the eight-
Yeah, that...
So I love that. I love that project. Just diving deeper into the reorganization, I did wanna talk specifically about North America.
Yep.
I was hoping you could discuss where the rationale behind bringing personal care, consumer tissue, and KCP together under one roof, because, you know, you've sort of got the retailer dialogue aspect?
Yep
... there's some supply chain aspects, and then I'm guessing back office, but I don't know how to weight those and how much is really changing and bringing them together.
Yeah, yeah, definitely, I'd say, Lauren, it's about creating and leveraging scale in both supply and demand. You know, I think, maybe tertiary benefit, certainly there's gonna be some back office savings, for sure, but that's not why we're doing it. I think. It was funny, I was out, Nelson and I were out in London, meeting with the International Family and Professional team, which also puts together, right, consumer tissue and professional. Same time we were meeting with them, they were all excited. They're like: "Oh, finally, this makes sense," right? Because it's the same supply chain. We use the same producing assets, we use the same materials, same processes, but they were always, I think, in some ways, sub-optimized because we ran them, you know, completely separately.
So I think there's gonna be plenty of scale benefits, and definitely in consumer tissue and professional tissue. Surprisingly, also, a little bit in personal care, too, because obviously there's a big wipers business, and there's some synergy there. So I think in North America, having that all under one roof is gonna really create some opportunity for us. So that's one part of it. And then on the demand side, you know, I used to work in the condiments category in the food service business, and the food service channels, right, having ketchup in restaurants was a great marketing channel.
For us, in the hotel, I wish we had Cottonelle in this hotel, and that's not, but, you know, again, it-- we're in a lot of hotels, and I think having Cottonelle, Kleenex, and those type of products, with end users in, you know, when they're traveling away from home or experiencing other things outside of home, I think is a great trial vehicle for us. And so we think-- and we haven't run it that way, and so I think there's a great opportunity for us to be more coordinated on kind of serving consumer demand better.
Okay, and what about retailer discussions? Anything on that front in terms of tissue and personal care changes?
No, you know, again, I think probably the biggest thing is, you know, how we manage our customer relationships. You know, again, I think we've talked a number of times, and we've evolved quite a bit over the last decade in terms of our ability to interact with customers and how we serve customers, both on the professional side and on the retail side. So I think, you know, for me, it's more about how we mine best practices and how we serve them better.
Okay, great. Let's keep going on supply chain. So one of the key aspects of the strategy you discussed at the Investor Day was reworking the supply chain, and, again, this notion of bringing scale to where it may not have been leveraged previously. Some of the opportunities you've spoken about, value stream simplification, network optimization, digital optimization, and gross productivity savings next several years totaling $3 billion.
Yep.
I'd love to get some concrete examples because they're very big, flashy words, but, you know, not saying they're fake, but it's hard, tangible helps kind of bring it to life, and then I was also curious on why now? You know, what is it that is making these opportunities more apparent now, or the organization more able to go after them than has been the case historically?
Yeah, maybe I'll ask Nelson to give you some more concrete examples 'cause he's more strict than me. I maybe I'll hit the why now. You know, first of all, I'd say, Lauren, and you should ask Nelson. I think our confidence in our ability to deliver these savings, gross productivity savings, is continually increasing, and I think that's, again, brought about by this reorganization we're doing. It's really the combination of our local market expertise in kind of running these plants and running these businesses, combined with, I think, the mix of great external perspective we've been bringing in. And what I've learned over the last few months, and Nelson and Patricia and I were up on a, internally we're calling it the Powerhouse workstream, right? So, Powerhouse Supply Chain.
But on value stream, you know, we had an update with North America Personal Care, and you know, I think what we learned, you know, part of it is we're really excellent product makers. We make great products, but however, we tend to focus a little bit too much on the SKUs, and that leads to excess complexity. And so we're great product makers, but I would say we're not great product system builders. And so that's an opportunity area for us. And I think people like Nelson, who came in from Mondelez, Russ, who built one of the big plants at Mondelez, who leads our North American business, Tamera, who came in from 3M, we've got these different external perspectives that say, "Hey, there's a better way to do this," and it's more about, for us, product systems.
I think that's kind of the benefit of the reorganization that we're seeing, but I'll let Nelson maybe comment.
Sure.
On specifics.
Sure. Thanks, Mike. And Lauren, there are, you know, as concrete examples, as we look at what's different, what are we doing, there are two factors that I'd like to highlight. And, you know, two things that I think are important that, to explain why they're working together to give us the visibility into the $3 billion of gross productivity over the next five years, and I'd also like to highlight the fact that, you know, we stated that we would be disappointed if our gross margins by the end of the decade were not at least at 40% and our operating profit margins were not at least in the 18%-20% range. Now, these two factors are, first, the creation of one global supply chain organization, and the second one is the adoption of integrated margin management.
Let me distill them a little bit more. This past July, we stood up our global supply chain organization under Tamera Fenske's leadership. This new global team is working hand in hand with local teams to ensure that we're not just driving lower costs, but that we're also driving, you know, optimized structures on how we operate at our factories and our distribution centers. That we are ensuring we're scaling innovation on a global basis much faster, and that we're continuously driving optimized customer service levels through the three strategies that you've highlighted. The first one, value stream simplification. What it entails is really looking at our product platforms and simplifying them and standardizing them wherever possible. This will drive a much more, you know, a much better approach to how we handle raw materials.
It will drive a much better way of simplifying how we handle our operational and manufacturing assets and processes, as well as driving simplification in product specifications. The second one is network optimization, and this refers to within the four walls of our manufacturing facilities and our distribution centers. We are optimizing, and we will continue to optimize our footprint, and this will, in turn, also drive lower costs. And then the third bit, as you mentioned, the third strategy within the global supply chain, is driving automation and really embracing a digital supply chain globally. We are deploying state-of-the-art software in procurement and in supply and demand planning, and we're also scaling up in an accelerated basis robotics. The second factor is the adoption of integrated margin management. You've seen how we've migrated to reporting end-to-end in terms of how we're optimizing margins this year.
Integrated Margin Management for us is an end-to-end approach, and it's something we're doing operationally across the enterprise to look at all levers at our disposal to expand margins and optimize them over time. It's about revenue growth management, which we've been building capabilities over the last few years. It's about looking at new ways of handling risks and risk management, proactive strategies on commodities and input costs. It's about a continuous focus on cost discipline, overheads, and then, of course, it's about having a very strong pipeline of productivity initiatives for years to come. Integrated Margin Management is not new to the world, but it is new to Kimberly-Clark. For us, it's a new operational rhythm that we're looking at it end to end. It gives us visibility, it gives us discipline across the entire value chain.
It gives accountability with our operators so that we ensure we're driving lower costs, but also flowing savings to the bottom line, and then on the gross productivity front, we have a very proactive set of initiatives over the next few years that we review on a monthly basis to ensure that we're not only driving lower costs, but we have the means to invest behind our growth initiatives for years to come.
I think just one thing to add on that. I think what we get excited about having been other places is that, you know, we call it Global Supply Chain 1.0. So, you know, we're just putting this into place now. We're building that visibility, and you're starting to, you know, discover places where we're not leveraging, you know, our scale as much as we could. So a lot of what you're seeing right now is the sort of low-hanging fruit in a way.
Yeah, because it's 1.0, Lauren, we feel like we have a lot more opportunity.
A lot more to come. Okay, I wanna keep going, but I'm gonna shift to top line because I gotta watch the clock. So at the Investor Day, you discussed the expectation that your categories will revert to growing in the 2-3% range, with the algorithm assuming that you can outpace the categories. I think commentary also suggested for the near term, this year, high end, right? Which I'm guessing largely due to some inflationary pricing that's still around. So can you just talk to your expectations for when you expect categories to revert to that kind of 2-3% growth, and what kind of keeps you growing above the category rate over time?
Let me provide some context, Lauren, on what are our category expectations in terms of growth for the foreseeable future, why we've laid that out, and then I'll pass it on to Mike, so he can probably provide more color on what is it that we're gonna do for us to be growing and leading category growth, so a few things. The targets that we've laid out, as we went out on March with our Investor Day, clearly indicate that we expect to grow in the future from a volume mix-driven, organic net sales growth, and our financial targets reflect this. Prior to two thousand and twenty, our categories were growing in the 2-3% range, and it was really led by volume and mix.
Between two thousand and twenty and two thousand and twenty-three, what happened was our categories accelerated to mid-single digits or the 6% level, give or take, on average, globally, largely due to the necessary pricing actions that were required to deal with the unprecedented level of inflation that we were facing. In the near term, we are expecting the categories to revert to this 2% to 3% level, and again, being led by volume and mix. In fact, if you look at the last few quarters, that's exactly what's been happening. We've seen volume and mix accelerate sequentially, quarter after quarter, and we've seen the incidence of pricing actually subside as we lap the necessary pricing actions that were taken in the twenty twenty to twenty twenty-two period, give or take.
But I'll hand it over to Mike so he can provide some further details.
No, again, we expect our businesses to grow, you know, faster than the category. And why do we expect that? You know, one, we still see huge opportunity to elevate and expand our categories and markets around the world. We're gonna do that through the pioneering innovation that we've talked about at our Investor Day. We're really excited about some of the technical platforms that we have in the pipeline. So, you know, that will continue to go. Things like the Two-Zone Liner that we just launched in the US, or the multilayer core that we have across Asia. So I think we're very excited about our innovation pipeline. You're gonna hear more from us about being better storytellers and increasing our advertising investment. So I think that's another area.
We already have great execution around the world, and that execution is gonna continue to get better, and then the last thing that we were just talking about on Powerhouse Supply Chain, that's gonna help us create a virtuous cycle, where we feel like that's gonna give us the opportunity to expand our margins, at the same time, give us additional funds to reinvest back in the business, so we feel good about kind of the overall play, and, you know, what we're trying to do is drive a virtuous cycle of growth.
Okay. And I think, you know, keeping with revenue, we've noticed a change, you just did it, too, in how you talk about top-line drivers, which is you've always discussed volume, price, and mix by geography, but recently it's been volume plus mix is the language. And we looked. That was not used before 2023, so it is actually a change. It's not just my forgetfulness. So just kind of wondering, what does this change in communication reflect in, you know, if there's a change in internal approach in terms of how you think about top-line growth, you know, and the importance of mix?
Yes, it's definitely significant. I'd also posit that we have a stricter VP of Investor Relations now. But no, actually, I'm just kidding. But part of it is, it's very intentional because, as I just mentioned, our employees are listening to this call and our earnings calls as well, and so we're talking to both the investor community and our employees. And, you know, we're emphasizing volume mix right now. I think, if you rewind, Lauren, and take maybe a past five-year history, you know, I'd say we made the turn from having to go on price and recover and offset kinda some of the input costs that were historical for us, right?
And, you know, what we're calling internally an Inflation Super Cycle that had to be offset, and that happened in 2020, 2021, that period, 2022. And so, having largely kinda navigated through that, I think successfully, you know, we knew we were gonna start to see normalization of the category in terms of the category volumes that, or growth that Nelson talked about 2-3%. And so for us, what we needed to see, you know, what's core to the strategy is volume growth. And I'll remind you that before COVID hit and before the Inflation Super Cycle hit, all of our growth was volume-based, right?
But I think what's shifted now and important for us as we talk about the Elevate strategy is we wanna see healthy volume, and we wanna see healthy mix, and they're both a reflection about our execution of the strategy. And so that's kinda how we're focused on driving the business. Obviously, you know, overall, we want a healthy mix of volume, mix, and price over time, but right now, I think in this period, we're really more focused on volume and mix.
Okay.
Yes.
So if we go a little bit deeper on how you get at the mix, right? You've discussed R&D and innovation efforts focusing more on problem areas, specifically facing consumers, so comfort, skin health, absorbency. I'd love to talk a little bit about absolute investment levels and if you think there's a need to increase R&D spending, or if the absolute spend is generally sufficient, and it's more about spending with greater focus.
Well, on R&D, I'd say, you know, I'm generally comfortable with our investment levels, and I think those investment levels should allow us to deliver the pipeline we're talking about, that we talked about in Investor Day. So I'm overall comfortable with that. But I think there's really two opportunities for us. You know, one, I think we still have an opportunity to get much more efficient with our spending, you know, and that's. We have a new R&D leader coming in, Craig, and, you know, he's an experienced leader that is not only an inventor, I think he's got over 70 patents associated with his name, but he's got a history of building R&D organizations.
An artifact of our historical approach is we ran R&D fairly decentralized in the markets. What Craig is gonna help us do is kinda bring the global R&D organization together as one team. They'll still be market focused, but we're gonna be more coordinated and make sure that our investments in technology platforms are efficiently doled out, and that we don't have, you know, two markets working on the same thing. I think that's one area, and that we're gonna have enough, I think, focus on both. He calls it three horizons, right? Near term, medium, long, and we wanna make sure that we have the appropriate mix of investments across all three horizons.
I'm expecting, you know, one, you know, for us to get more efficient with our overall spending, which I'm comfortable with at this point. I'd be delighted to spend more, especially as we continue to drive, you know, more funding through, you know, our Powerhouse Supply Chain. You know, but I'd be delighted to spend more behind great ideas that would accelerate growth.
Okay. And do you think that this yields a higher frequency of new product news, or is it more that the impact of innovation is greater? Like, so is it, you know, fewer, bigger, or-
Both. I think both. That would be my expectation, right? So certainly, you know, we feel good about the pipeline. I'd love to shore it up and, you know, I think innovation is what makes our categories grow. I think it's the lifeblood of our business, and so having, you know, more innovation, I think, is a good thing, but it has to make a difference. And it, you know, we're trying to improve the lives of our consumers, which is why we invented things like the Two-Zone diaper that separates the pee from the poo and all those things. And so, it's gonna deliver great benefit to the child, to the parent, and, you know, we have a team of scientists that are excited about inventing these kinds of things.
So again, we're looking for both, you know, more frequency, but also bigger impact.
Okay, and then how does advertising fit into this? You really ramped spending in 2023, so 5.3% of sales from 4.5% in 2022, so a really big increase, and pre-COVID averaging below 4%, and you've spoken, I think, about moving even higher in 2024, so what's the right long-term level of advertising spend and process for allocating across geographies and categories?
Yeah, let me provide some perspective on our overall brand support spend, which includes advertising, where we expect to be in 2024, and then Mike can chime in on what else, where do we go from here? So, a few things. I mean, first, we've been demonstrating our firm belief in building brands through strong investment behind them and strong fundamentals, and this is shown by the fact that we have been increasing, on a sustainable basis over the last few years, our investment behind the brands. If you look at advertising alone. We have pretty much doubled our $ spend since 2018, with very strong returns on this investment. We've seen that play out over the last few years. What we talk about is overall brand support.
That's the number that in the earnings calls we're talking about, and that is about a point higher than the advertising spend that we disclose in the Form 10-K, which is the number you're quoting, Lauren. And what's for this year, in our last earnings call, what we indicated is that we expected the year to be at around a 6.5% level of net sales, which is up about 50 basis points year on year. But what's going to happen is, in the second half of this year, it was gonna ramp up to about 7%. And we feel that it's the right thing to do for multiple reasons. One, because of, you know, our science-based innovation that's being launched into the market, which we're very excited about.
Secondly, because we've had a very strong first half, and it's the moment to keep investing, to strengthen, you know, the initiatives that'll come. With that said, there's a few things on the nature of our investment and our categories that I think it's important to lay out. First, it's business mix. If you look at our personal care business, we're actually investing more in the teams. But if you look at businesses like professional, the level of brand investment, brand support, is very small because you don't need that. It's not required for those categories. The second aspect to take into account in brand support and advertising is the highly targeted nature of our consumers, and that, in turn, drives, you know, effectiveness in our spend. It is very efficient in how we deploy the dollars to target our consumers.
And then ultimately, it allows us to also leverage, because of the nature of the engagement, digital mediums, which, you know, outright are much more efficient for us. Ultimately, for us, the key focus in how we're engaging with consumers through advertising and in-store merchandising activity, is we need to reach them at the right moments. Why? Because our categories are about driving recruitment, about driving retention, and ultimately about lifetime value. But I'll turn it over to Mike.
Yeah, I think I'm pleased that we've been able to increase our investment, and I think we're seeing great returns from it. I would be happy to increase it further behind the right ideas that would accelerate growth. So that's part one. I think the thing for us is, and when I'm looking at our organization to get better at, is what we're calling storytelling, right? Which is, hey, how do we talk to consumers? Not only to land the trial of our pioneering innovation, right, all the innovation that we're landing, but also to increase the affinity for the brands, right? And I think, you know, we've done this well over the years in some categories, but I would say inconsistently across the business.
And this is a big part of Patricia Corsi, our new Chief Growth Officer, her remit, and she's got a lot of experience in this area. You know, if I say, well, where we've done a good job, I would say fem care globally. You know, Kotex is a brand. You know, our campaign that we've been running for the last dozen years or so, She Can, I think has helped us in a market like Australia and New Zealand, which is a big market for us. You know, where our share has grown from seven to almost 40, right, over that time period. You know, Brazil, we took over market leadership. We're just under. I think we're right around a 40 share in Brazil. Much of Eastern Europe, what we've more than doubled our share over the last 5 years.
And so that's behind, really, I would say, primarily a strong advertising kind of approach to driving brand differentiation. And so I think that's a great example. More recently, I think in the U.S. on Kleenex, that's a different approach. We use data analytics to target light and lapsed users on Kleenex. You know, in the second quarter, I think our share was up about 400 basis points. That was also aided by being fully in supply, Lauren, on Kleenex. You know, so I think that helped, but again, I think we are excited about kind of where we're going on advertising, but I think the storytelling part, as we continue to ramp up our investment, is gonna get better over time.
Okay, great. Let me just shift gears. I wanted to spend a moment on some of the portfolio actions that you've undertaken over the past year or so. So it's not acquisitions, but it's actually been exits and divestitures. You know, Brazil Consumer Tissue, KCP assets in June of 2023, Canada Kleenex, the PPE sale to Ansell, Nigeria, and Bolivia, and there's a private label exit in-
Yeah
in twenty-five. So I'm just curious, what's sort of the internal process for evaluating the portfolio? How often are you going through this exercise, kind of key metrics to determine whether, you know, an asset fits and whether there's been a change in that in the last several years?
Yeah, there probably has been a change, and may- it's probably part of it is my emphasis. I'd say our portfolio approach isn't always on. It's like it's a constant assessment, and I'd say it on two dimensions. On the one hand, we're interested in adding geographies and category adjacencies that are gonna be long-term accretive to margin and/or growth over the long term, right? So that's one, and that's kind of why we did, you know, we acquired Softex in Indonesia, which is a market I'm sure we'll come back to that. So that's on the plus side and on the exit side, which we've had, you know, announced a few more recently, also always on.
Hey, you know, over the long term, if we feel like there is a market that does not have the prospects to be accretive, on a growth or a margin perspective, or has excess volatility, you know, we, we're gonna make a different decision on that, and that's real largely behind a couple years ago, we made a decision to exit Brazil tissue, just the tissue category in Brazil, because there were some structural factors happening in the tissue category alone that made it uneconomic for multinationals to compete in that sector. We made a similar decision that we just announced in Nigeria. You know, we had just made you know, a significant investment in Nigeria, but I think the environmental and regulatory conditions, I think, in our minds, changed.
It made it tougher for us to compete effectively in that market. So, I think, again, for me, it's an always-on approach, but we're looking, you know, I think, constantly to improve the overall portfolio.
Okay.
Yep, and just to add, I mean, what you're seeing, Lauren, is our strategy at play.
Mm-hmm.
As Mike said, we will be very disciplined and methodical in our approach to assessing the portfolio and where we're at. We're not gonna give value away, so we're always looking at if we're gonna exit, and the decision's been made. It's gonna be made in an optimal manner, and that's what you're seeing play out over the last year and a half.
Okay. Is there a bit more of a microscope on this? It's always on, but also with the reorganization and sort of thinking about Enterprise Markets, I mean, is there arguably even more of a microscope on some of those smaller, subscale markets? Is that a fair-
Yeah, I think that's probably fair, Lauren. You know, mostly because, you know, as we're going through the reorganization and working through Enterprise Markets, you're looking at your footprint, what the outlook is, and whether, you know, the kind of effort to kind of drive that business, it will have that return, right? And so... And again, as we're going through an organizational restructuring and an operational restructuring, it makes sense to look at those things at the same time.
Okay, great. I'm gonna squeeze in one more. I did wanna ask about Indonesia. So you haven't been very acquisitive as a company, generally speaking, but then the exception, of course, is Indonesia-
Mm-hmm
... which you acquired in 2020. I would just love maybe an update. I mean, we've heard, you know, from other multinationals that compete, either long-standing or newly in Indonesia, it seems like a rollercoaster at best, maybe?
Yep.
And then, of course, more recently, some backlash against American and Western brands. So just curious on the latest, state of play in Indonesia for you.
Yeah. Again, I think we still feel very good about investment in Indonesia over the long term. I think today it's the number five diaper market in the world. It's gonna be number three by the end of the decade. And so it's an important market for us. But I would also say, you may remember, that we bought it at a tough time. I think we closed right before COVID hit, and then I think the country itself was hit pretty hard by COVID, and the categories slowed down and haven't recovered yet. You know, I would say, so that's one set of things.
I think the other set of things is, you know, we had some growing pains moving from a privately held Indonesian company to a global multinational, and there's some practices that we had to evolve as a company, which we've done, and so overall, I think, you know, prospects are improving. You know, volume turned positive, you know, last quarter, so the business is starting to grow again. We feel great about the team that we have in place there and the plans that we have in place, but we also recognize that, you know, in developing markets like Indonesia, there's gonna be some choppiness.
But the reality is, we, we've navigated a lot of choppiness in a lot of markets, including a market like China, which, you know, there was questions for twenty years about whether that would be a good business for us, and today we would say it's a great business for us. And so, you know, I think KC's been in a lot of markets over a long time, and so have been able to navigate choppy waters successfully, and I think confident in our team there. With regard to what's happening today, yeah, you know, I think the thing about KC in Indonesia is, you know, we acquired this brand, Softex, which is, depending on the category, number one or number two brand in the categories that we compete in.
It's an Indonesian, you know, those are Indonesian brands, and so I think we have not, you know, experienced some of the things that you mentioned other companies have seen.
Okay, perfect. We are out of time, so I'm gonna stop there, but please join me in thanking the Kimberly-Clark team for being with us this year.