International Flavors & Fragrances Inc. (IFF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Okay. Hi, everyone. So up next, I have the honor of welcoming back International Flavors & Fragrances to the CAGNY stage. Joining us today are CEO, Erik Fyrwald; Chief Financial and Business Transformation Officer, Glenn Richter; and SVP, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations, Michael DeVeau. Now first off, I'd like to congratulate Erik on his recent appointment to CEO. Erik joined IFF just over 2 weeks ago, where he brings more than 4 decades of experience, driving innovation and profitable sustainable growth at leading companies. IFF is a global leader in high-value ingredients and solutions to the CPG industry, partnering with customers, many of the presenters who are here this week, to help build solutions that win with their consumers. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Erik, who's going to make some introductory remarks, and then Glenn's going to take you through the presentation. Thank you.

Thank you, Bonnie, and good afternoon, everybody. Given that I've only been CEO for 2 weeks, I'll just make a few brief comments and then turn it over to Glenn. But I want to tell you that after 8 years as CEO of Syngenta, a $33 billion agriculture technology input company that's helping drive the regenerative agriculture movement across the world, which is really important to many of our customers here, I'm thrilled to join IFF and be here with many of our key global customers that we work hard to bring leading innovation in flavors, fragrances, food ingredients, enzymes and other bioactives, so that they can improve the taste and health of food products, the smell of cleaning products and fragrances, fine fragrances and many other things that we do with our technologies. I joined IFF because I am absolutely convinced that although we've had a challenging performance record in recent years when we brought together the historic IFF and the DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences businesses, I believe we have a set of great businesses that, as we focus our full fanatical attention on better serving customers with our leading innovation technologies, we have tremendous profitable growth opportunities ahead of us. And we can add to that profitability and the growth by further accelerating our productivity initiatives. And I know we can do this because in the last 2 weeks, I've spent time with top management at arguably the world's largest home and personal care products company, together with our team and their teams, seeing how we work together seamlessly and with complementary capabilities to bring our technology to enable them to create superior products for consumers that enable us both to profitably grow. I've also spent time with the CEO and leadership team of the leading, arguably, beauty care company in the world, and I saw the same collaboration with our people and their people, bringing great innovation to the leading scent products for the world. So we can do it. We just need to do it in many more places with many more customers and unlock this growth potential for this company. So with that, I'll turn it over to Glenn. Glenn?

Thank you, Erik. As you can see, he's full of energy. He's been on the job technically 16 days as of today. He's go, go, go. He actually joined us 2 weeks prior to his first day. So not being on the payroll, he was our highest return investment we've had this year, by the way. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to be with here today. Like Erik, this is a great conference for us to tell the IFF story. I always like CAGNY. The great thing about CAGNY, all the free goods. In fact, I will be finishing my 42nd Twinkie sometime later today. So why don't we talk about kind of where we are? I'll allow you to read the cautionary statements at your convenience as well as to refer to our non-GAAP to GAAP financials, where you can basically look at our Tuesday press release relative to reconciliations. The agenda today is actually pretty straightforward. I have a total of 12 slides. The intention is to make sure there's plenty of time to take your questions today. Those 12 slides will basically cover 3 subjects, very quickly give you a snapshot of who we are as IFF, very importantly, talk about our key financial drivers, so how are we going to accelerate our performance to drive shareholder value? And then last, I'll give you a snapshot of our financials last year as well as the guidance that basically we provided earlier this week for 2024. So I'll start with a summary in terms of our investment thesis. It's very important to start when you talk about IFF to talk about the industry in which we compete. It is an extremely attractive sector. There are natural growth dynamics, given the nature of the innovation what it's driving. It speaks to the consumer trends today, in terms of health, wellness, sustainability is increasingly important factors relative to the consumer product. It's also a business in which we are a relatively small portion of the finished good. And as a byproduct of that, with innovation, it tends to be very sticky, from an organization standpoint is very helpful relative to our customers' resiliency as well. IFF, secondly, is a very diversified business, that's product and geography, and as well as our customer base. And as Erik had mentioned, we really are proud to have some leadership positions across the industry, and we'll talk a little bit more about where we have our strengths in the business standpoint. And importantly, innovation, as Erik had mentioned, really is the lifeblood and the core of the business, and we have one of the largest investments in platforms across the globe in our space, and it's an important differentiator and driver of growth. And then lastly, we recognize that a lot about what we need to do is actually intensify our commitment and success to basically execution. So a lot about what you're going to hear today is we know what we need to do. It's not rocket science in some sense, but there's a lot of hard work, and we are committed to accelerating the performance of the company in order to drive better results for our customers and ultimately, our shareholders. So a quick snapshot of who we are. So this is a quick overview of IFF as today. We are 21,000-plus colleagues across the globe. We are serving 27,000 customers in over 175 countries. We have a platform that includes 190 manufacturing, R&D and creative centers. Importantly, we're very diversified globally. 30% of our business is in North America. We're basically 34% in Europe, Africa and Middle East. We have great presence in APAC at 23%, and our LatAm business is 13%. The statistics for last year were $11.5 billion of revenue, $2 billion of adjusted EBITDA, and we delivered nearly $1 billion in free cash flow. Going a little deeper in terms of where we serve or who we serve, the left side are our business segments. So we are divided into 4 business segments, and we have leadership positions in each of them. Thinking about our Scent business in orange, we are a leader in both the fine and consumer fragrances across the globe. Our Health & Biosciences business is basically a -- we are number -- we're basically in the top 2 players in all spaces that we compete. Enzymes, our probiotics business as well as our Cultures business as well. And that backbone in terms of the technology platform is helpful to other parts of the business as well. In Nourish, we're one of the strongest players in the Flavors business. We have a leadership position in Food Designs, and we're the #1 in terms of Protein Solutions. And lastly, our smallest business, Pharma Solutions, we're a leader globally in terms of pharmaceutical excipients as well. Importantly, we're well diversified. So the left, you can see in terms of markets, we are roughly 55% developed, 45% emerging markets. And then to the right of that, you can see basically global-regional, about 50-50 in terms of the split of the business as well. So it allows us actually to grow in many ways and also to be very resilient, relative to shifts in the market either regionally or between large global nationals as well as regional competitors as well. Looking at our investment in innovation. As Erik mentioned, this really is the lifeblood of who we are. We're one of the largest in the industry in terms of the scale and the spending investment levels as an enterprise last year. We spent nearly $650 million or about 5.5% of sales in terms of our total innovation budget. That includes over 3,700 associates across the globe. And within those 3,700, we have hundreds, literally hundreds of specialized flavors, scent design specialists and hundreds of engineers and scientists in our biotech platform, and we have over 50 R&D and creative centers across the globe in terms of serving our customers. Importantly, in addition to innovation, sustainability is an important component of our value proposition for our customers, and we are very strongly committed to ESG in everything we do. Fortunately, we began the journey over 10 years ago in terms of our ESG program. And today, we believe it is absolutely critical on multiple fronts. Number one, ultimately, from a consumer and customer, there is the -- part of the solutions that we provide have to deliver sustainability. So it's not just important to deliver a fantastic product that basically tastes good, it needs to actually be healthier, add more wellness benefits. We have to know the origins of where it is produced. It has to be in a sustainable culture, et cetera, and labeled as such. Secondarily, we believe that sustainability and having a premier ESG platform is a differentiator in the future. It's becoming increasingly a minimal table stakes for many of our customers, and we believe over time, the investment we're making will allow us to differentiate versus competitors. And that, over time, will lend itself actually to the larger scale players of being better in the space. And lastly, it's also very important for our organization. So a commitment to ESG and sustainability is important for our culture, and it's important for our people, in order to recruit and retain the right individuals in the organization. Fortunately, as you can see from the slides, we have a strong set of progress, as exemplified by being validated by a number of independent institutions in terms of the ranks we've achieved and the ratings we've achieved in ESG. So let's now turn from the snapshot of the company and talk about where we're going in terms of driving performance. As you know, if you look back the last 3 years, while we have made some progress since the combination of legacy IFF and the DuPont business, we have not met full expectations of potential of the combination. And as a byproduct that we are fully committed to actually accelerating our progress and accelerating our delivery for our customers and ultimately for our shareholders and performance. And the way we think about this is aligning the organization and ultimately our resources to the most attractive businesses to drive growth, with the goal of basically growing market share, expanding sales and expanding margin in the business. We have 4 major focuses from a finance standpoint. Number one, by far, is accelerating our revenue growth. We have a number of strong businesses. We have some businesses that there's some remediation, but we're very focused, as Erik mentioned, in exceeding expectations for our customers, leveraging innovation and our global platform to accelerate our top line. Secondarily, delivering on an accelerated productivity agenda. We've made very good progress over the last couple of years, but there's more to do. More to do in terms of what we're currently delivering and expanding that productivity program across other areas of the business to drive efficiencies, simplicity and use productivity to do 2 things: to enhance our margins, to make sure that we're delivering best margins in class; and secondarily, freeing up dollars to fund the top line growth. So bringing that money back to innovation, back to commercial resources, back to digital and technology to enable growth. Third is a disciplined approach to cash flow and capital policy. So we'll talk a little bit about our changes this week on dividend, but we are very, very committed to continuing progress in growing our earnings, being very disciplined in terms of our working capital and capital CapEx allocation and really delivering better returns in terms of our cash flow. And finally, portfolio optimization. As you know, we've been on a journey to streamlining our business. There's been 2 objectives of that. One is to help delever. We're very committed to maintaining our investment-grade rating. But secondarily, we want to focus ourselves on our core businesses in order to continue to enhance our discipline by making sure that we're very laser-focused on where we want to win and where we want to compete. So if I can just very quickly sort of drill a little bit down into each of these. You may have seen this chart before. So as we think about our business, we actually have a host of very strong businesses. We have a number on the far left we would call the best and the winners, where they're very strong growth businesses. Secondarily, they actually have attractive growth prospects from an industry. And third, they're extremely high return on invested capital, generally in the mid- to high teens in terms of the businesses. They include our traditional Flavors, also the Fragrances business, Health, Cultures and Food Enzymes within the H&B business as examples. But we also have our core business, some very, very strong business as well. They may not have the same growth dimension and return, but they're very strong leadership positions, with potentials to further grow, including Grain Processing, Animal Nutrition, as example, food systems, et cetera, and then we have businesses such as Functional Ingredients that we're working on to basically get better performance. It's important to note that those first 2 boxes represent 75% of our revenue, 85% of our earnings. So really turbocharging, notably the far left, putting the organization's focus and resources against those big opportunities, where we have a strong market position, the markets are growing strongly and they have high returns on invested capital. We'll talk a little bit later today in this presentation, but on the Functional Ingredients, we have taken very concrete actions to improve both the top line and the margin performance of that business as well. Secondarily, productivity. We are on the second year of a multiyear productivity program. We announced this a while back. We have -- are targeting 3 years net cumulative benefit of $350 million to $400 million. So that includes some investments back in commercial, R&D technology, et cetera. That's roughly $150 million, $170 million per year. We delivered $185 million last year, so we over delivered that. You can see from the chart on the side it's across every aspect of the business, it's operations platform, supply chain, procurement and also, importantly, our back office as well. I would say we've done extremely well on the operations side. We're just beginning to ramp up on, I'll say, the back office within our administrative functions. That's a major focus as we go into this year of actually accelerating. So operations is hitting their stride. They have a very good program for this year. There's additional opportunities. And behind that, we're really looking for opportunities to leverage our global shared services centers from efficiencies and effectiveness standpoint. And really, as Erik said, to sort of squeeze out nonproductive bureaucracy and sort of work from the enterprise as well. So third, if we talk about our dividend policy update. Well, first of all, we're very committed, as I mentioned, to our capital structure and getting our balance sheet right. What that means is 2 things. One is to maintain investment grade, which really means getting to 3x or less credit adjusted EBITDA to total net debt. As a result of that, we have been in the process of doing several things. Obviously, portfolio has been front and center. We have either divested or will be closing one additional business, a total of 5 businesses since the deal was closed. We will close the active cosmetics transaction at the end of this quarter. That will bring in another $800 million of gross proceeds. All of that is directed to delever our balance sheet, but we also have other portfolio actions as well. Secondarily, focus on our operating cash flow for the business as well or free cash flow for the business as well. We made very good progress in terms of working capital. We delivered over $0.5 billion of improvement last year. We have more work to do on that front. We're very disciplined in terms of our CapEx budget back to that previous chart, putting the dollars against the best return, highest growth businesses. And we're on top of that. Also we want to continue, obviously, to drive our day-to-day operating profit as a way to deliver more cash flow as well. And we did announce this on Tuesday of this week, a reduction of our dividend. We have taken our dividend down by roughly 50% to $0.40 per share. There's been many questions in terms of why we have done that. It's fundamentally because our dividend has gone out of whack relative to the share price, i.e., the yield and the overall cash flow. So we wanted to rightsize the dividend to make sure it was consistent with our competitors or peers in the industry and also to make sure that dividend is at the right level relative to our free cash flow. So it's roughly a 2% yield, puts us in a competitive position, and it's roughly around 65% of our normalized free cash flow as well. So it's basically resetting it to make sure that we have the right level of dividend, and it gives us flexibility relative to our balance sheet. So lastly, let's talk about financial results. I'll start with a snapshot of last year, 2023's results. Obviously, it was a very challenging year for us, for many in the industry fundamentally because of very soft volumes. So there's tremendous destocking. We had a progression of downward negative volumes first quarter, second quarter, improved in the third quarter, improved significantly in the fourth quarter. But overall, that resulted in a significant reduction in terms of currency-neutral sales, down 1%, which basically was all pricing, and the unit volume or volumes for last year were down 7%. Despite some success on the productivity front, despite some positive impacts in terms of our pricing programs, it resulted in a 10% decline on a like-for-like basis in terms of earnings. Now there's some onetime items. We had to take into some idle mill or negative absorption in order to deliver very good working capital. So we took inventories down by $600 million last year as an example of the byproduct of that. So that was a right trade-off in terms of where we are as well. But I will say, as we exit the year, we feel very good about moving into a better place in terms of the overall trajectory of the business. And what I would say by that is the third quarter was negative 7% in volumes. The fourth quarter was negative 3%. I would say within that negative 3%, Functional Ingredients was down around 10%. Pharma was a little bit down, but H&B and Scent business were up mid-single digits in terms of volumes. And as we've moved into the beginning of this year, that progression has continued. So we're feeling good about the start of the this year. We do think that destocking is largely behind us at this point in time, with the exception of Pharma. We also think we are increasingly delivering better results on some of the efforts from last year. So if you take that and take a look at 2024, on Tuesday this week, we basically provided our guidance. I would say that we are cautiously optimistic on the year. The optimism stems from several things. One is, first of all, destocking, we believe, is fundamentally done, which was a big wildcard for last year. Secondarily, the progression on volumes quarter-to-quarter are getting better. The start of the year is solid, as an example. Third, we're counting on productivity. We've consistently overdelivered that. And fourth, generally, it feels like the inflationary environment is stable, to maybe actually some additional deflation in the market. That's the optimism. The caution, as all of you know, is the recovery is in the early stages, and we live in a very volatile world. So there is risk in terms of the volume environment as many of the consumer product companies have said. The consumer hasn't come out yet in full strength at this point in time. So that's the caution that surround it. That translates into revenue guidance on a currency-neutral volume of 0% to 3%, and pricing at negative 2.5% and an overall guide on revenue of $10.8 billion to $11.1 billion. On the earnings profile, we have a range for the full year EBITDA of basically $1.9 billion to $2.1 billion. That's directionally midpoint around 7% year-over-year comparable growth in terms of our earnings, and FX impact, which is included in that number, is a negative 2% to 3% in the full year. So we are very focused on delivering against this. Again, we feel good, and generally in the revenue trends in the business, pricing actions have been fully implemented. We have a very good productivity program in place. We're delivering against that with the hope of additional upsides, and it's all about execution. So I'll end with a few comments basically where I started. Let me just summarize. First of all, we have the privilege of basically competing in a very attractive sector, very good fundamentals from an end consumer demand standpoint in terms of -- we're helping basically contribute to the major focuses of wellness, health and sustainability. And increasingly, there's more innovation and there's a higher content from us as an ingredients provider into the end product. So that promotes higher growth, and that also promotes great resiliency in terms of stickiness and relationships with our customers. Secondly, we have a very strong platform. We have misstepped over the last few years, but actually some very, very good businesses. We've made some progress against that. We have leadership positions in very attractive markets in which we serve across the globe. I would say that third thing is we are fully committed to accelerating our success, and what that means is really driving better financial performance, which will deliver better shareholder outcomes. And that's all against those 4 priorities. So revenue is number one. It's the biggest enabler and basically way to leverage the P&L. Secondarily, productivity, as a way to enhance margin and use those dollars to reinvest back to growth. Third is fixing the balance sheet, getting us to 3x or less net debt to its credit adjusted EBITDA and continuing to manage our cash flow. And lastly, being very, very thoughtful on capital allocation, making sure we put our money in the organization's resource against the highest opportunities. So with that, we'll turn it over to Q&A.

So Erik, I was just curious. Yesterday, when we spoke -- I'm [ Lauren ], by the way. So you talked a lot about end-to-end accountability as something you were thinking about in terms of business structure and approach. I was curious, I guess, what that means in concrete terms. I think you also talked about reinvesting needs to be self-funded by the business units. So to me, it sounds a lot like maybe running the business as a sort of siloed organization structure. And if that's not the case, I'd love to understand what it does mean. If it is the case, how do you then not lose the benefits of scale that I think were part of the industrial logic of not just N&B but also Frutarom, which is IFF getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

So what I mean by end-to-end is that the business units need to drive to win with customers, their customer set, from R&D, production, commercial all together, making sure that we delight the customers. Having various businesses that touch those customers, I think, is great because we can open doors and help each other and leverage for synergies. The challenge that IFF got into after the acquisition of DuPont and Frutarom was that, in my view, synergy became the goal instead of a tool. And when synergy becomes the goal, you bring in a lot of consultants, you spend a lot of time internally talking about things. You set up big corporate structures to try to leverage and you lose the sight of winning business by business. In my experience in many, many years, if you make sure that the businesses are run well, that they understand how to win in their business, so if Scent and Flavors understands how to win against Givaudan and other competitors, if H&B, Health & Biosciences, understands how to win against Novonesis, then -- and they're doing well, then synergies become a great tool to enhance the business. You collaborate, you open doors, you combine technologies to form solutions. So that's the way I see us driving to start winning by business and then across businesses much more than we have been. And I'll give you some examples. We decided to go with commercial excellence as a way to help grow faster across the company. We established a large group in the corporate headquarters. Rather than telling the business units, drive commercial excellence, we'll have a small excellence center, somebody in the center that can help leverage best practices, but you got to drive it by business and then share best practices and help each other across. Don't make it an internal thing, corporate thing, where everybody starts getting asked questions by corporate and it turns you inside. We have to get passionately focused on winning with customers in each business and then helping each other across businesses. By doing that, each business will be stronger and the company will be stronger because we have a broader set of businesses. I've seen it before. We're going to make it happen again here.

[ Adam ]?

Thank you. So if we think about the Functional Ingredients business, it's probably the most challenged part of the portfolio. Can you talk about the growth versus the market over the last 2 or 3 years, where you think the gap in terms of volumes, in terms of pricing, in terms of your own profitability is today, and how you actually plan on restoring that over the course of the coming 1, 2 or 3 years?

Why don't you give a historic perspective and I'll share some thoughts on the future?

Yes. So we -- it's a great question, Adam. As you know, it's been a little bit of our biggest challenge business by far. Our volume losses, we've gone back and have looked at sort of -- this starts back in '22, and looked at our volume loss. About half of our volume losses were, in our view, just simply market destocking related to our consumer pullback. About half of our other volume losses were basically we lost share, and that could be split into 2 pieces. About half of that was really the service levels. As you recall, when the DuPont deal was put together with IFF, there was a lot of chaos, frankly. Inventories were very low. Our service levels were at 65%, 70%. So literally 1/3 of our customers were not getting, basically, deliveries on time in a very important period. And then on top of that, we priced ahead of the inflation. That -- part of that was explicitly because we were having a hard time reaching demand, but customers obviously were able to dual source and sort of walk away. So that explains about half of our volume loss versus the competitive set. And with that, that volume loss has actually produced a several hundred basis points decline in margin, in part because of volume, in part because we've had to basically fix our inventories and have idle mills. Where we are relative to some of the improvement efforts we've talked about in the past, we have picked up our pipeline a lot. So that team really has been focused over the last now 18 months. We're about 50% higher pipeline at the end of last year versus a year ago, so really getting a focus on winning business. We've been more thoughtful on deflation and using that to basically price down. But to Erik's point, some of the original pricing was top down. You got to get this pricing, which made no sense for geographies. And now it's basically bottom up. Each of the regions, basically, have pricing baskets. They sort of think about that are competitive from a standpoint, and that is actually showing results. Service levels are great. They're 95% plus. They have been so for over 18 months. Services there were more competitive in the market, local commercial teams are well. The last lever really is around productivity for our margins. To your last point, about the financial statement, is we will probably have circa 150 to 200 basis points of margin improvement this year in the business, but we're still probably -- even with that 200 basis points, we still probably have another 300 basis points to get back to. A lot of that's going to be accomplished through sort of restructuring, a lot of cost of goods elements in terms of what we need to do. Good question. Erik?

Yes. So it's a little bit, for me, like coming home, joining IFF, because I used to run DuPont Agriculture & Nutrition, which included a significant part of the DuPont piece of N&B that's now part of IFF. And I really, really like our food ingredients capabilities. I mean our ability to go to customers and help them, first of all, have great tasting products, great mouth feel, lower salt, lower sugar and bring various product capabilities and technical support to make that happen, I think, is very strong. And I think it's leading in the industry, and the industry is outperforming us. So we've got to get this business focused on what it takes for us to not only grow as fast or faster than the market, but have margins equal to or better than the leading competitors. And I think it's absolutely doable. We have the capabilities. We have the people. We just need to have a clear strategy. We need to have great execution. And that's both with customers, bringing the value to the right targeted customers and getting paid for the value, but also driving productivity. Our productivity -- our costs are higher than our leading competitors. We know what we got to do. Now we got to go execute well. And I think part of the challenge we've had in our food ingredients business is we've been defocused in trying to find synergies as the goal instead of what does it take to win in food ingredients, and then obviously, we can help each other with the Flavors business, with the H&B business, where we deal with food. But we've got to do what it takes to win in the food ingredients.

[ Mark ]. Mark [indiscernible].

I guess I want to play devil's advocate for a moment. Having covered the stock 15-odd years now, I feel like the last time it was well run was 10, 12 years ago when you had consumer folks running the top of the company. And with all due respect, Erik, your comments about meeting with leading beauty companies and HPC companies, it's not the same as coming from the industry in which your customers are competing and working every day. And I respect your background. You've had a lot of success within Syngenta and at DuPont, but you're not a consumer person. I guess the question is, as a company in the F&F space is at the intersection of both chemical and consumer, why do you feel like you can come in and change the direction of this company, where arguably the last 10, 12 years, with folks who came from other industries, it hasn't quite worked out? And maybe it's not as simple as that, but from the outside in, having an ability to sit there and pick up a phone call to the Head of Unilever, Proctor, Kraft, Heinz and having interacted with them for years have been a competitive advantage. So that's the first question. And the second is, the promise of putting DuPont and IFF together and buying Frutarom was to add capabilities to the business. It just seems maybe like it's been muddled a little bit over the years where it's now too complex or the promises of a full suite of offerings haven't materialized. And if you look at Givaudan and Symrise, who have done a good job of executing on what they've embarked on doing, which is F&F, have created a lot of shareholder value over the years. Is this too complex to turn at this point? As you sit there and think about portfolio construction, are there things that you think you can do kind of outside the box beyond what the path of this business was on prior to your arrival? So that was a lot to get it, but...

Okay. I'll try to take them in 2 pieces. I'll start with my background. So my background has been in chemical and biological businesses for 42 years, and application development that working with customers that has always led to consumer products. You said somebody else could call up the CEO of Unilever. I know Hein Schumacher very well. I saw Ramon Laguarta in the hallway the other day. I know him very well. I mean I have no problems dealing with top people at consumer goods companies because I've been in industries that have brought high-value application development to make their products superior. I think I know how it's done. And I think IFF, when we do it well, we do it very well. And we've got great people that know how to do it. We just need to get their focus on doing it every single day. Passionate focus on customers will turn this company around. Now the complexity piece, I agree with you that we have underperformed. Let's take Givaudan in Flavors and Fragrances. Lower margins and lower growth rates over the last 5 years. Why has that happened? I don't think it's happened because of nutrition -- because we have the DuPont Nutrition & Biosciences business, H&B business. I think it's because when that happened, we set a goal of $400 million in synergies, in revenue synergies, and everybody started chasing their tail around trying to figure out how to get those, rather than continuing to focus in Flavors and Fragrances on how do we beat Givaudan? How do we bring more value to the Flavors and Fragrances customers than Givaudan does? By being great at those businesses, and then where it makes sense, to bring in H&B for a new bio-based fragrance or a new bio-based flavor. Bring it in, then you have more strength than you had without it. But if your goal is synergy and you start trying to figure out internally with lots of consultants and advisers how to do that, it doesn't work. So let's see how we do.

I'll come back to you. I just want to make sure anyone else -- anyone else, [ Blaine ]? Perfect. Right. Can we go Bryan first?

It's a logical follow-up to [indiscernible]. So the thing with synergies is under -- a point very well taken and well made, of course. But -- and this is history, right? You didn't create this. You're walking in and you're inheriting and you're choosing.

Willingly. I had choices.

Right. That's exactly the thing. But the notion of synergies and the pursuit being problematic, is tough, I think when companies spend enormous amounts of money, time, effort, resource, all the things, to do M&A, right? The justification for M&A is not just be bigger and be the same, it's to grow faster, it's to be more profitable, and that by definition is the pursuit of synergy, right? Why is the reason we put these pieces together. So I'm struggling a little bit with the explanation of the past, which, again, you don't own, you just need to fix, is the pursuit of synergy or presence of consultants who are trying to figure out the best way to do it was wrong in and of itself. That's where I'm getting a little lost.

What I'm trying to say is I believe in the value of having these multiple businesses in one company. I think the way we've executed that -- the potential benefits of that have actually caused the base businesses to decline, instead of making sure that the base businesses are solid and then building synergies off of that. I saw the same thing at Syngenta. I was brought in to Syngenta 8 years ago, because the company was underperforming and was attacked by Monsanto. They wanted -- Monsanto wanted -- tried to do a hostile takeover. The Board said, no, we'll bring in a new CEO. We'll figure out what's wrong with the company. What happened at that company was the prior CEO merged together a number of businesses trying to get cost synergies and revenue synergies by having the businesses figure out better solutions. What happened was exactly the opposite. We lost our edge in seeds, in crop protection and fertilizers. We went back to business units, and we started winning again with the business units and then we said we're going to have a collaborative culture where we help each other better serve customers and it worked. And you look at the last 8 years of Syngenta, the growth rate has been significantly higher than the marketplace. IFF has the same situation. We have really great capabilities. We have really great people. We've got to unleash them to figure out how and drive and win in each business and then drive synergies that make sense to the businesses, but corporate is not the driver of synergies. The $400 million isn't the driver of synergies. It's the businesses that talk to each other, just like external collaborations. The benefit of buying a company is that you can internally collaborate, which should be better, and I believe we can get there.

And [ Lauren, ] if I could just add, I've been here for 2.5 years, so he's my third CEO. I'm looking forward to keeping him for a while, by the way. But so I have seen some of this. I've been around since the early days. The point, I think Erik is making is the primary nexus are the businesses and accountability, not looking across. There are opportunities to do that, but we've lost our way. We went through 2 reorganizations of Nourish. We're on the third boss of Nourish. The previous CEO talked about reshuffling all the businesses, so there's been a lot of chaos, if you will. This is all about these -- the fundamentals of these businesses remain strong, and getting the current business units really focused on optimizing. The synergies will come. They will come, but start with the nexus of being basically the execution and getting that in place. And I think we're primed for that, because I think a lot of the disruption has past, so we now have a lot of continuity from the business standpoint, just turbocharge that. So I think that's a little bit of what Erik's trying to say.

I would just note I think that captures it well. And I've given 6 town halls in different parts of the world in the last 3 weeks, and before that, I was listening to our people and listening to customers. And I just urge you, if you know IFF people, just ask them. Ask them if the concepts that we're talking about here are getting them excited to get back out there and focus on the right things to win.

Just don't stalk them, Lauren.

Bryan Spillane from Bank of America. So I think the perception is it's not the jockey, it's the horse, right? And I appreciate your -- it's a fix, right? Different jockey, different strategy. This horse can run faster. How much of a debate has there been between the management and the Board on that topic? And if it turns out that it's -- I mean, you're a couple of weeks into this, right? So you've got your perceptions, but you're going to get further in the weeds. So if that changes, right, if it turns out that there's parts of this business that just don't make sense being together, how much latitude do you have to do that? And how much is the Board willing -- basically [indiscernible] they approved a lot of acquisitions that they shouldn't have approved.

I think -- and Glenn can reinforce this. I think we've got full authority from the Board to figure out if there are pieces within businesses or businesses that are better somewhere else.

It's fundamentally a different Board. 2/3 of the Board is new. And it's water under the bridge. We bought DuPont and what we paid for it, obviously, we've written off a lot of that from a standpoint. That's -- where we are today, we need to optimize where we are.

But we do have great businesses that I firmly believe fit together.

[indiscernible], JPMorgan. So coming back on gaining back market share, I just wanted to understand, because when I see your competitors, they say that they can gain share and it's going to be sticky. So what does it take for you to do that? So I'm thinking about reinvestment or -- and the way you pay people. Can you talk about how you incentivize and how does that play out? And yes, whether -- I mean it's a great idea, but it's the journey, what, I don't know, quarters, year? Like how you feel about it.

Well, some of the application development we do takes a year. Some of it takes 2 years. Some of it is very quick, and it varies in different parts of the world. So you can have a new fragrance in the Middle East in 3 months and parts of Asia in 3 months. In France or the U.S., it probably takes 6 to 12 months. So that varies. But what I can tell you is we can quickly get our people reenergized and focused on customers. And what I've talked about in the company is, it's the job of every single person in the company, me, every functional person, every business person, to support our people to win in the marketplace, to profitably grow our market share. And one of the things that starts with is measuring market share. We haven't really measured and communicated market share. Maybe it's because it's been going down and you want to communicate good things. We're going to communicate good things and bad things. And market share and our gross margins versus our competitor by business are going to be very important metrics for our company, and we're going to pay people on those metrics. And I think that will drive the right behaviors, and I think people are very anxious or very eager to have those behaviors driven. And I had a call, it was very interesting, this morning. Our probiotics team was meeting and they asked me to just join the call and say a few words and get an update from them. So they were giving me an update, and then one person said that it's amazing. All of a sudden, the functional people that are supporting the business are acting faster or reacting faster to their needs because they're hearing the story that it's everybody's job to help win with customers. I don't know how long it's going to take before we see a material shift in our growth rates, but I can tell you we're starting now.

Come back here to Adam.

So maybe on the point of kind of winning with customers, a large part of your business, certainly with your multinational customers, a lot of it is core list and done on a green basis. Where are win rates today on the peers that you're actually competing relative to their high point, and if you could give any clarity by Fragrance and Flavor in particular, maybe on the Enzymes and Health & Biosciences business as well relative to where they were 3, 5 or 10 years ago, whenever they were stronger than they are today. And I don't believe the company has lost any material core list access in the past 5 years. So can you talk about where you think you're really falling behind? Is the feet on the street with small and medium-sized original customers that just has not been there?

I'll make a couple of comments and add in, but I don't think we've lost any core list either. I've asked about that and have not heard that, and we get lots of briefs and lots of opportunities. And the customers where our customer team and innovation team is really well connected, we're doing very well. In fact, in Scent, I've looked at a lot of data, 3-year, 5-year data in Scent, we've performed very well ahead of the market in the last 3 years or 5 years. And the Scent business, our Fragrance business is the one that's been the least impacted by the acquisition and the internal efforts on synergies, which tells you something. So we need the Scent business to continue to do that. Our other businesses, if you look at how we've done in Health & Biosciences versus Novonesis or Flavors versus Givaudan, we have not performed with them on either margins or growth rates, but I think we have absolutely the people, the technology and the production capability to do that. But we need to get our people focused on winning with customers. And I think many of our people do but it's going to be turning it up a notch. It's going to be -- this is what we're all about. This is why we exist as a company, to delight our customers so that they can make superior products that win with consumers.

Any additional question? Okay. We'll let Bonnie get back onto the stage.

Yes. Well, thank you very much, and we'll come back and talk about it next year.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you for a great presentation.