Kimberly-Clark Corporation ($KMB)

All right, everybody. Welcome back. Thank you. For our next session, we have Kimberly-Clark Corporation back to the conference. It's a lot of...

Thank you for having us, Steve.

We have Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Hsu.

He told me right before this, this is like #21.

We're getting there. We're getting there. And Chief Financial Officer, Nelson Urdaneta. So thanks, guys, for being back.

Thanks for having us.

There's a lot going on. So Mike, I'm going to start with you just to frame what you've talked about as a generational moment for Kimberly-Clark, both in terms of business momentum and the Ken view transactions. So maybe we just start there and maybe expand on what you mean by that.

Yes. Well, Stephen, thanks for having us. We're really excited about our base business performance. And probably even more excited about having the opportunity to build a -- what we're saying as a preeminent health and wellness leader. I think embedded within that, what's driving our base performance and what we think we have, is a powerful value creation engine with our power and care strategy, right? And I think that's driving consistent volume and mix growth, consistent share growth. And I think you've seen that through the first quarter and probably for the last 9 quarters from us. And so we feel great about that. And then, in terms of building a preeminent health and wealth leader, together with these companies combined, we think we can really elevate the standard of care for all consumers. We tend to play in the same life stages. So if you take our portfolio, Baby, can obviously has a portfolio that lines up against baby, women, family and seniors. And so I think it's a powerful portfolio where we can really serve all these life stages more effectively. So again, we're really excited about the opportunity.

Great. And you have -- I mean, we focus on the base business for a bit. I mean, you focused -- you've delivered multiple quarters now of volume-led growth in categories that historically have been volume challenged. So I think -- what do you think has structurally changed the most in the model, whether around innovation or brand investment execution? Just what's driving that? And what gives you confidence that, that's durable?

Yes. The -- Steve, the idea is superior product equals superior value, and that drives volume mix, and that's kind of how we approach it, which is we're a company of engineers. We invented most of the categories we operate in. We believe there are real differences in performance that exists. And I think that's different than maybe what outsiders perceived back when I joined the company. I think many viewed these categories as commodities. And I said, well, gosh, mom and dads trust their most important thing in their life to us, their real things that we can do to take care of maybe better, right? And if you extend that through our portfolio, I think we've demonstrated that. And so I think going back over the years, the opportunity that we saw was an opportunity to really elevate the category or the category by adding better features and benefits that maybe consumers had it envision that would be valuable, but turned out to be very valuable. So we've really, Steve, premiumized the business, and that's really driven a lot of our growth over the last 5 years. The example I'll give you is when I joined the company back in 2012, maybe 65% of our Huggies business in the U.S. was in the value tier. Today, we are 80% premium, right? So that's a big move. But I think what's also driving our growth in the last couple of years is that we said, hey, we're not going to be just a niche premium player. If we want to lead our categories, we need to serve all consumers. And so we've really sharpened our offering, particularly with the value consumer. And I think that -- in China the last 2 years, in the U.S. last year and this year, I think that play is really working hard for us, and we really made some significant improvements to our snug and dry line, which is the value tier Huggies in the U.S., and you can see that impact on the volume.

Yes. Okay. Great. Let's stay on the U.S. for a second. Nelson, there's been volatility between consumption trends and your reported shipments. So maybe just walk us through some of those disconnects, and how that's going to map out? But also just what -- and Mike, you can jump in on this as well, but just what you're seeing in the North America consumer in general? How that's impacting your balance of your expectations?

Sure. Let me unpack a little bit what we saw in the first quarter. But we've seen, Steve, over the last 2 years and even in the first quarter of this year, sustained momentum in both our global business and our North America business with consistent volume plus mix-led growth from very strong pipelines of innovation and activations across all of our categories and across all of our value tiers. As it pertains to the first quarter of the year, we saw shipments lag consumption by around 200 basis points. In fact, consumption grew by 3.7% in our consumer categories in North America versus shipments, which grew 1.4%. And there were a lot of moving pieces in the quarter, but 1 to highlight is the fact that we have strong programming in the club channel at the beginning of the quarter for which shipments actually took place in the latter part of Q4 of 2025. As a reminder, in our April update of Q1 earnings, we highlighted that we still expect the second quarter to see a similar trend. And there's 2 factors at play in the second quarter. In the case of North America, we are foreseeing headwinds of around 70 to 80 basis points on our shipments related to the recent L.A. distribution center fire. And also, for the second quarter, we're going to be lapping the strongest comp versus 2025. Because as you'd recall, last year in this quarter, our North America business grew volumes north of 5% from a very strong pipeline of new products that we were putting out, particularly in our baby and child care business. For the second half, we expect shipments to accelerate, firstly, because our innovation pipeline remains strong. And then secondly, we will be lapping a lot of the stronger comps from the first half. And then lastly, for the full year, and I'll let Mike chime in on the state of the consumer. For the full year, we stated that we still expect to have growth that's at or above our categories, weighted average growth of the categories, which trailing 12 months as of the end of March was right around the 2.5% range.

Yes. And maybe just to tack on state consumer. My view would be that consumer in North America figure, which I think you're asking about, resilient, resilient. And I think maybe -- my lens may be colored, Steve, by the categories we operate in. And as you guys are familiar with our categories like diapers and bath tissue, Kotex, like they're pretty stable categories, daily use categories, and consumption doesn't change much based on pricing, right? So I think -- so that's kind of maybe 1 aspect of it. And it's reflected in our Q1, where I think our volume mix was up about 3%. Organic overall was up 2.5%. We grew share in, I think, 90-plus percent of our business. And so I think we feel good about that. But we're also cognizant since the start of the war that the elevated fuel and fuel prices have an impact, especially on the consumers at $100,000 income and below, which is 90% of U.S. households. And so that really kind of plays into the strategy that we've been on, which is we pivoted to strengthening value within the value tiers in addition to premium, and I think that's working hard for us.

Great. So if we pivot overseas -- international personal care, IPC, just standout performance, both in terms of growth and margin expansion. I guess, talk first about your confidence that, that in the sustainability environment of that because I think you are confident in that but then also any watchouts given the same macro context.

Yes. Great momentum. I'll remind everybody that in our categories, D&A or developing emerging markets are still very early in the stages of development. And, however, in the quarter, you may have caught like -- Steve, like I think double-digit growth in Brazil. I think our Indonesia business was up 30%. It's a business that we had been challenged for a few years. Vietnam was up 40%. Even Korea, the diaper category in Korea was up over 20%. There's a baby boom because as you know, the births have been declining in Korea for like 15 years. And last year, the births were up 6.5%, which is driving a bit of a bit of a boom in some of our categories. So we feel good about that. What's driving it? I do -- I would say the power in care strategy. And the core elements are, we kind of mixed -- made up our minds. We have to have product superiority. We really invested to create differentiated product offerings. I think we've really improved, and we think we have some of the best digital and social marketing methodologies out there. We're excellent at managing data and mining data and then marketing consumers directly through social channels. So that's driving it. And then the last thing that makes it all work is we said we're going to have best product at the lowest cost. You can see the productivity flowing through, and that gets us on this virtuous cycle of growth. .

Yes. Yes. Great. In many markets, I think this history in Brazil is true, it's true in North America. So I'm going to focus the question there. And you mentioned this, like with the Snug & Dry, you've been pushing essentially premium features into value tiers, which is enhancing the product offering. You've also been promoting to drive trial against those innovations. And that's created some concern from among investors as to is this -- is it trial driving activity only? Or is it going to be a structural pricing stance? And does it risk creating competitive situation that is not productive for the category? How do you think through that?

Well, one, our strategy is consistent, which is we're growing by driving innovation and innovative features. We're advertising to support those features and to grow the category. We're activating in-store with great execution, but promotion is really only the support trial of the innovation. And so -- and I know like some analysts or other companies view us as promoting more. But if you look at the math, we haven't even returned to 2019 levels of promotion. And we promote less than all the other branded competitors in the category. So -- and part of that is because I don't like to promote from a trade promotion perspective. I think it's at best dilutive; at worse, it's unprofitable. And I think it gets you into this doom cycle where you invest too much to promote, and then, you end up cutting the product quality, which drives the category into a downward smile. So I -- we'll never go that way. And so despite the rhetoric, I would urge you to look at the facts.

Okay. And Nelson, I think that dovetails into what you've been consistent about for a while in terms of the positive PNOC, price net of commodity costs. And that being a core principle for you. Just given what we're seeing in the cost backdrop, how are you thinking about the balance of pricing, productivity investment to maintain that PNOC as we go forward?

Sure. So Steve, the environment promises to stay quite volatile, and we will remain very agile and disciplined throughout it. In the past few years, we've gained a lot of experience in how to manage through this type of volatility and disruption as shown in the super inflationary cycle that we just went through in 2021, 2022, when, as you know, we faced about $3.4 billion of incremental cost headwinds in the course of 2 years. And because of our discipline, our agility and our focus on our playbook, we were able to quickly recover our margins to prepandemic levels. And in the past 3 years, we've actually been expanding them. Our teams are very clear that we expect them to manage the pricing net of costs of at least neutral over time. And they need to leverage all their tools within our integrated management framework, integrated management framework -- margin management framework to ensure that we recover those costs over time. Right now, we don't have any update versus what we provided back in Q1. Our teams are diligently working through identifying what the exact impacts are going to be. And more importantly, what are the actions that we're going to take, leveraging all the tools at our disposal. The 1 thing that I will reassure you is we're not going to cut back investments behind the innovation and behind the brands. We have a very solid pipeline of products we're going to put into the marketplace and solutions, and we will be balanced in our approach, but we will ensure that our teams remain fairly disciplined.

Okay. We're talking a little bit about this before we got on stage, but back at your Investor Day, you targeted $3 billion of stand-alone Kimberly-Clark cost savings over time, which is a big number. And so I guess maybe where are you in that journey? How much left to go, especially in the areas we were talking about in terms of network optimization, value stream simplification and some of the manufacturing platforming that you're doing across facilities.

Sure. We're actually tracking ahead of plan on the $3 billion 5-year productivity program, and we have line of sight to continue to deliver strong productivity over the next few years. Through the first quarter of this year, we've actually delivered 56% of the target. And every segment has contributed its fair share. If we look at our continuing operations made up of North America and our international personal care business, the average delivery program to date has been 6% of gross productivity. Now, peeling the onion into the 3 components of our supply chain strategy, the sources of the productivity, the value stream simplification has delivered roughly 50% of that number -- program to date, whereas the network optimization and the digital scalable automation have each delivered around 25% of that target. And we expect those to ramp up, particularly the network optimization over the next few years as we stepped up the capital investments in 2026, and that will remain very near that level for 2027. We're very confident about the size of the productivity pipeline looking forward. And 1 thing to keep in mind is that you're aware of the $2 billion investment that we're making in the North America network that productivity -- in fact, you were at Beach Island last year visiting the facility. That's 1 of the places where we're making a very big investment in distribution on top of our greenfield facility. We -- that productivity is going to kick in starting 2027. Hence, our confidence in our ability to continue to deliver on strong productivity over the next few years.

Steve was commenting before we got on stage, that he were reflecting on his visit the Beach Island, which is our largest facility in the world, and we make almost every product that we offer in that facility. And so it's a big complex operation, and so I think you're commenting, well, it may be hard to kind of drive the productivity because there's so much to kind of get your arms around. But I think the thing that I said is a couple of things happen, which is, one, bringing on some very good outside perspective, starting with Tamara Fenske, our Global Chief Supple Officer, joined us after a long career at 3M, just got a different lens on how manufacturing should be done. And then, she's brought in some other people from the outside. So I think they could take an objective look, Steve, at like how K-C did things and really kind of found a lot of good opportunities for us to simplify. So that, I think, is a good starting point. And then the other side of it is we are a company of engineers. We're kind of nerdy. And so because of that, people like to get stuff done, and they execute really well. And so even though it looked very complex, I think there is structure in kind of how people are organized.

Yes. The other thing, I mean, there's the raw cost-out efficiencies, but also a lot of what you're doing is going to enable faster speed to market and more and more commonality in terms of what you bring to market, which I think we're already seeing the early signs of in this wave of innovation. .

Yes. Actually, we kind of refreshed some of our manufacturing assets over the last yes. We did this restructuring back in 2017, if you recall. And part of that was to update the fleet of assets. And part of what we're doing is, one, commonizing them so that like all of our diaper assets are the same around the world now, but the other thing that we were doing was increasing the flexibility of each, right, so that we could run value tier and premium tier on the same asset and make feature adjustments without increasing capital cost. .

Yes. Okay. Ken View.

Yes. Let's talk about that.

Let's talk about ken view. So I mean, you've been clear that this is about a broader health and wellness platform -- and so let's just kind of start there. And I guess as you've gotten further into this process, updated thoughts on why you think this is -- this combination is going to be uniquely positioned to win? And I guess, how you've been viewing recent progress at Kenbian?

Yes. We had a global town hall with the Ken view organization 2 weeks ago up in New Jersey, and Kirk had me out there. And so that was kind of their question like you're 6 months in, what are your thoughts? And I said, like the headline is, the closer you look, the better it gets, like on our side, the K-C side, and I think increasingly on the Kenvue side, we couldn't be more excited. And so what are some of the things about why is it better? Number one, I would say -- and I didn't realize this as closely, even though we do a lot of due diligence, but we've been doing these category deep dives in each of the Kenvue categories. And I will tell you, the state of development of these categories, they're very early in the journey. And even though a lot of these categories have been around, like Conal, I think, launched in 1954. So it's been around for 70-plus years. But I would say -- the reason I would say the categories are early in the stage of development is I think there's a huge gap between incidence of a health issue and treatment. And this is in almost every category that Kenvue operates in. The example I'll give you is allergy. When we're doing our deep dive on allergy, and when we do these deep dives, we kind of assess the structure of the category and all the subcategory components. We interview consumers, and we understand kind of what the big unmet needs are and how they think about the category. Well, allergy alone, Nelson, I think of the number is 100 million allergy sufferers in the U.S. alone that don't treat, right? They're not even aware they have an allergy, right? And so I think that for us says, there's a big opportunity for, I would say, a company and our approach with a more traditional CPG mindset is to come at these categories and say, how do we systematically develop them. And so I think that's part one, which is we see, one, these are the biggest categories in CPG among the fastest growing, and they're underdeveloped, right? And so I think that's one big thing. The second area where I say, oh, the closer you look, better it gets. And I think you wouldn't see this in what's available publicly. But since we're doing our monthly trading updates with Kenvue, and we do the business reviews, I would say there's a lot of good performance in that business that you all cannot see. And why can't you see it? It's because they tend to report by category, Steve, right? And so you just see the overall. But there's a lot of markets and a lot of -- particularly in international, where I've seen very good performance across many brands. And that's reflected in the appointments that we made. We announced our senior leadership team for the future company post close back in April. And people were surprised that there's a pretty good mix, balanced mix between K-C and Kenvue. Well, when I was interviewing some of the Kenvue executives, let's say, Carlton Lawson, who runs EMEA, and Leo, who runs Latin America, I said, hey, your performance is as good over the last 5 years as anything that we've got on our side, right? And so -- and I was super encouraged by that because international has more of the complexity than North America, right? And the Kenvue portfolio overall is a little more complex than ours, right? And so however, they've been managing that pretty well. So I think there -- so that's the encouraging thing. And then as we get further into it and as we meet with the Kenvue management side and so forth and do our category dives, everything that we're doing in powering care, right, which is like, hey, make the innovation better, differentiate the product through value-added innovation. Kenvue is spectacular on the science front. The big thing that we did at K-C that they told me to go through is when we did our market structure, we understood where the biggest consumer unmet needs were going to be. And then, we just said, we're going to pour all of our R&D resources into those things. And that was a little bit different than how K-C used to it, which is kind of like self -- you guys self-determine what you want to work on, right? And so when you concentrate your firepower, that's where you get the breakthroughs. So that's one area. The second big area is the marketing and where we have made a ton of progress, and that's evidenced by our surge to market leadership in China is I think we're one of the best companies and our customers would tell us that we're among the best at digital marketing and social media marketing and e-commerce marketing and all those things. And so we've really invested in a lot of capability in that. We're very good at it. We tend to index higher on e-commerce. I think we're, on average, 700 basis points higher share on e-commerce than offline. Kenvue is the other way, right? So that's going to be a great opportunity for us. So I think there's going to be a lot of -- we're really excited to apply kind of our value creation model to the Kenvue portfolio.

Got it. Is there -- I don't know if you're prepared to do this, but is there a way to take us underneath the covers a bit and talk about how the integration office is being structured in terms of just the work streams that you're kind of putting on papers because I think there's a big concern that once the deal gets regulatory approval and closes, then the complexity really kind of hits home. So how are you getting ahead of that?

Yes. So the integration management office is up and running since we announced the deal. It's being headed by our Chief Operating Officer, Russ. And we've got over 40 work streams underway with over 400 people involved. Obviously, no gun jumping and following all the regulatory requirements, but we're not wasting time in getting ready, Steve. I mean these work streams are allocated to each or organized to each of the functions, organized within the segments and with the new segment leaders that have been announced because we've got to focus on multiple elements of the integration. One is obviously a work stream around people and culture. That's plowing ahead and moving forward. And you've seen that Mike already named the leadership team, and we will keep progressing on that element of the integration. Secondly is on the cost side. We have very ambitious cost synergies that we feel very confident in our path to deliver them as committed. And we have been working very diligently on that. I mean, we started on this as we were doing the due diligence, but obviously, we've wasted no time in ensuring that everyone within every function is clear on what the plans are and what the cadence is going to be between year 1 and year 3 to accomplish the task. And then the most important and exciting aspect of the entire integration is the revenue side, the growth because this transaction, above anything else, is about growth, about really leveraging the potential that the categories have and the potential to serve consumers across all life stages. So that's up and running, up and going and more to come, and it's not going to be a day 1, wake up, see what you're going to do.

Good. As a follow-up on that, so the cost synergy target, nearly $2 billion, $1.9 billion. Are there areas where you're gaining conviction or seeing potential upside? And then, I guess the other side of that coin is as we've seen Kenvue make margin progress. One of the concerns, questions I've raised I know investors are thinking the same is, is Kenvue -- it's good, but is Kenvue kind of getting ahead of the synergies? Is it -- so how do you respond to that?

Yes. So a few things. First, as I mentioned just now, we continue to gain clarity and confidence on our path to delivering and/or beating the synergy and earnings levels objectives that we have for the transaction. The sources of the cost synergies are areas in which we, Kimberly-Clark, have been building significant execution capabilities over the last few years. Our results in the last 2 years and even in Q1 are proof points that we can drive sustainable volume-led mix growth, that we can drive record levels of consistent productivity level, that we can drive overhead efficiency all at the same time. There's 3 sources of productivity that we shared on November 3 when we announced the transaction. And we continue to gain more confidence in each of the 3. On the overheads, it goes beyond duplications. The approach of plug-and-play, as we call it, is going to allow us to rapidly leverage capabilities like revenue growth management, global shared services, areas in which we've been investing over the last few years. That will drive over 1/3 of the productivities. We're confirming that over the last 6 months. Secondly is on costs. Mike talked about transportation, just a few minutes ago. We're seeing those opportunities, particularly in a market like North America, which will be $18 billion out of the $32 billion in revenue, give or take. We tend to cube out a truck at about 50%. Kenvue tends to weigh out at about 50%. And we tend to deliver at almost the same drop-off points. So that's a key source of productivity. But it goes beyond that. If you look at procurement, we're going to be having a much bigger scale in many materials that are shared. And on top of that, we'll be able to drive efficiencies through standardization, leveraging the tools that we've been deploying, which, by the way, has been one of the sources of the productivity we were just talking about a few minutes ago. And then lastly, it's sales and marketing. Again, beyond duplications, we see opportunities on agency consolidations, things we've done at Kimberly-Clark 2 years ago. We see opportunities on driving efficiencies on nonworking media, on trade spend. Again, things we've been doing. In terms of the recent actions that Kenvue announced in their organizational structure, we're encouraged by that. We feel that that's a great move. And frankly, if that drives acceleration in earnings and efficiencies sooner than what we planned for, all the better.

Yes. And maybe just right, what we're focused on for both companies, I mean, what Kirk is on his side and we're doing on our side, we're trying to expand the earnings capacity of both companies. And so the last restructuring, they did reorganization. I would tell you, we were excited because it moves their operating model closer to how we operate. And so we think we'll link up at some point as we close, and it will be a very smooth transition.

Good. What about on the growth side? Because in addition to those cost synergies, there are revenue opportunities, too, Mike? Just, I guess, your increasing understanding and optimism around that potentially.

Yes. I'm a bull on the revenue synergies. But Steve, I was told that investors don't care about revenue synergies until they make it into the algorithm. So I'll temper, but I'll just tell you why I'm excited, right, which is, hey, there's a lot of stuff near term that's very obvious. And what's obvious is like distribution opportunities where one company has either channel or market strength and the other doesn't, right? And so I talked about e-commerce. So e-commerce in North America, we're 700 basis points higher share than offline. They're the reverse. They're under shared on e-commerce and below what the category development is for some of their categories. And so we've developed outstanding relationships with the big e-commerce retailers in this market here in the U.S. and we're confident our capability can help accelerate that. So that's kind of one near-term one. If you get into like markets where Kenvue has scale and we do not, right here in Europe, there are over $3 billion in Europe. After our IFP transaction, we'll be about $100 million, right? And so -- and we used to have an over $1 billion personal care business in Europe. And certainly, that may be an opportunity for Carlton and the team to consider going forward. And they have great strengths across retailers in Europe, but also healthcare provider networks and other channels that we wish we had back when we were a stand-alone company or before this. The other area where they have strength is India. And I think they have about distribution in about 3 million points of distribution in India. We're primarily an online player, and we've struggled with physical distribution. And so we think Huggies will be a good opportunity for the Indian market. If you go to the flip side, where K-C has strength, Mexico, a $3 billion business for K-C to Mexico, where Kenvue is very relatively small in Mexico. We're well over $1 billion in Korea, where they have a small business. And so again, I think just through sheer distribution growth, that provides significant near-term opportunity. And then longer term, I think the combination of our engineers and their scientists to put together some of these products. The examples I'll give you that are obvious are they're great at skin care. Our diaper products, whether it's Depend or Huggies are in contact with skin 24/7. And so there's certainly some things that I think both teams can bring together to really improve the condition for consumers in that space. So we think there's great opportunity. And then, probably the biggest one goes back to this underdevelopment of categories. And again, it may be an artifact of kind of maybe the pharma approach to -- which is more product-centric, I think, and we tend to be more a category growth centric. And so the example I'll give you is with 50 shares in Kleenex across most markets, it's our responsibility to grow the category. And we hadn't done a good job with that for a while. But over the last 5 years, we put dedicated effort. And so household penetration has been growing, especially in our biggest market, the U.S. for the past 3 years because we put effort into that. It's also why in the U.S., if you're familiar, you'll see Don Sanders on the Pen and Catherine Higo on Poise, it's because we're trying to help consumers understand that these categories -- these products can help serve needs that they weren't thinking about.

Yes. Great. And maybe lastly on this, just confidence in the path back to 2x net debt-to-EBITDA leverage post close, Nelson. That's a big focus for investors.

Yes, sure. So firstly, Steve, we remain committed to having strong cash returns to our shareholders as we manage through the 2 transactions, forming the JV with IFP middle of this year as well as closing the Kenvue transaction. As we've shared, we -- as we go through it, our commitment is to remain or to keep a strong balance sheet as well as flexibility. And firstly, when we close the transaction, our expectation is to be at around 2.9x of leverage, 2.9x of EBITDA. And we expect this to reduce to around 2x EBITDA within 24 months through a combination of growing earnings as well as reducing our debt. Importantly, I'd also like to highlight that we made the decision when we announced the transaction that we're going to deploy the cash proceeds from the JV formation to fund part of the cash consideration for the Kenvue acquisition. Beyond that, our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged. First, we have tremendous confidence in our science-based proprietary technologies, and we will continue to invest behind our business to drive profitable, sustainable growth over time. Secondly, it's our dividend. We are committed to our dividend to growing it over time. This year marks the 54th consecutive year of growing our dividend, and we intend to continue doing that. We will preserve the Kimberly-Clark dividend policy as we merge the 2 companies. And then lastly, we will deploy any excess cash to purchase the share repurchases on an opportunistic basis.

Perfect. Perfect. In the couple of minutes we have left, Mike, maybe paint for us a picture of your end-state vision for the combined company and maybe highlight maybe the 1 or 2 things that investors should be focused on over the next year as we approach close.

Yes. Yes. I mean I'll finish where we started, Steve, which is our focus is on building the preeminent health and wellness leader. And we're really excited about that opportunity. And first of all, there is a multi-decade demographic tailwind for health and wellness. The aging population isn't just a trend in developed markets, it's a trend in every market. And as the population ages, there's going to be more need for health products, right? And so we're excited about the built-in tailwind there. And then, when you click on and understand that these categories still have a huge opportunity to be further developed, right, through communications and marketing and partnership with retailers, we're further excited about that. And we feel like we have the capability to kind of accelerate the Kenvue portfolio on that journey. And then the last thing I'd say is with respect to the synergies or efficiencies, we're very proud that we're able to deliver world-class productivity and a couple of years consecutively of 6%, which is probably the highest in the industry right now and to be able to apply that to the Kenvue portfolio, we're very confident in the synergies. And so I think in the near term, we're focused on improving the base execution of our business. We're watching closely with Kenvue, not managing, but we're encouraged by the progress that I think Kirk and the Kenvue team are making on parts of their portfolio. And I think our integration team is working very well together to bring this to hopefully a very boring close, right?

And I'd just add to Mike's point, when we complete the integration and we're through with the process, we should expect to be in a position to consistently deliver leading organic growth in the industry with top-tier gross margin and EBIT margin, all resulting in double-digit returns to shareholders through a combination of earnings growth, a healthy dividend as well as share repurchases.

Perfect. Well, we welcome you back here next year to talk about how we're going to realize that vision. Thank you so much.

All right. Thank you.