Newell Brands Inc. (NWL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hi, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome Newell Brands to CAGNY this year. They're our last presenter, so this is quite exciting. Joining us today are President and CEO, Chris Peterson; and CFO, Mark Erceg, Also, please join me in thanking them for sponsoring the break earlier today. So with the strong portfolio of well-known brands, Newell Brands is focused on delighting consumers by lighting up everyday moments. The company has been on a significant transformation journey since 2023 and under the current leadership team to unlock operational excellence while strengthening front-end capabilities to scale with a One Newell approach. They've made meaningful progress by simplifying the portfolio and rebuilding core capabilities, including automating a strong domestic manufacturing network. They expect to gain distribution in 2026 for the first time since the Jarden acquisition, owing to their renewed innovation momentum and disciplined execution. So I'm going to turn it over to Chris and Mark to hear more about the company's efforts. Thanks.

Thank you, and it's great to be back at CAGNY. I'm going to start with our forward-looking statement, which you can read at your leisure and start really with Newell at a glance. As Bonnie said, she couldn't have done a better job on the introduction. We are a portfolio company with leading consumer brands designed to delight consumers. We have a little bit over $7 billion in net sales, close to $900 million in EBITDA. Our top 25 brands represent 90% of the company's sales. 10 countries represent 90% of the company sales, you can see the top 10 brands and the top 10 international markets on the slide below. We organized the brands into 3 segments: Home and Commercial Solutions, Learning & Development and Outdoor & Recreation. About 60% of our business is in the U.S. with about 40% being spread internationally across the markets that I mentioned on the previous slide. The key messages for today, we have been on a multiyear capability based turnaround, and that turnaround very much remains on track. And in fact, we're excited about the progress that we're making, and we're excited about 2026 where we expect trends to accelerate, and we'll talk a little bit more about that. We also got started a couple of years ago on an early broad and deep executive sponsorship with artificial intelligence, a program that we internally call Quantum Leap, which is further strengthening our capabilities and accelerating innovation and distribution wins, and we'll provide a little bit of perspective on that. And finally, we've driven a significant simplification agenda. And when you look at that simplification agenda, coupled with a strong manufacturing footprint, we believe we're well positioned to get back to delivering on the company's financial algorithm and drive shareholder value. So as context, in June of 2023, actually, at the Deutsche Bank conference, we showed this slide. This was the capability assessment that we had done that looked at the 11 capabilities that are required to win in our industry. And at that point in time, you can see that most of the front-end capabilities we rated as we were worst in class in the industry. And so from that starting point on the capability set, we put a new strategy in place. The new strategy that we put in place has 5 very clear where to play and how to win choices. The, where to play, choices are: to distort investment to the company's largest and most profitable brands; to expand distribution, focusing on the fastest-growing channels and winning retailers; the U.S. is the top priority, but we wanted to get to a One Newell approach in the international markets, which we've made significant progress on; we wanted to disproportionately focus on mid- and high-price point segments where brands can add value with innovative products: and we wanted to disproportionately target millennial and Gen Z consumers who are increasingly becoming a bigger part of the market. On the, how to win, side, the how to win was all about improving the capabilities of the company. We got focused on rebuilding our ability to understand consumer insights more deeply to drive superior innovation. We'll talk a little bit more about that. We wanted to create compelling brand building and brand communications. We wanted to win with the shopper with outstanding go-to-market expertise. We wanted to continue to advance a global scaled and advantaged supply chain, which we have done, and we wanted this to be based on a high-performance organization. We got off to a very strong start. In 2024, based on the strategy that was put in place in mid-'23, you can see the rate of core sales growth improved significantly we put gross margins up dramatically. Our EBITDA, both in dollar terms and EBIT margin accelerated and we delevered the balance sheet at the same time. Although 57% of our U.S. business is domestically manufactured, 43% is imported. And in 2025, we got disrupted from the trade and tariff regime that is currently in the news based on the Supreme Court ruling that just came in the last hour, 1.5 hours. And specifically, in the case of Newell, in 2025, we paid $174 million of incremental tariff cost that was not in our plan at the beginning of the year. That resulted in a P&L headwind in of $114 million or $0.23 a share, which is a meaningful part of Newell's profitability. I will mention on that tariff headwind that the substantial majority of those tariffs were under the IEEPA tariff regime. And so the IEEPA tariff regime is the one that the Supreme Court just ruled 1.5 hours ago is not valid. It's too early to say what the implications of that are, because the administration has other authority that they can reimpose tariffs, number one. And number two, it's not clear whether companies will be entitled to a refund or not. And so I'm not going to comment more than that on the recent ruling because it's still too early to do that other than to say that the substantial majority of what we paid last year and the substantial majority of what's in our guidance this year are under that IEEPA authority that has been ruled invalid. Specifically in '25, though, to deal with this headwind, we did 3 things to adjust our plan in the year. The first thing we did was we adjusted our sourcing strategy to bring more sourcing into our U.S. manufacturing plants and to move more products out of the China market into other countries. The second thing we did was got focused on productivity, really focused on supply chain productivity and overhead productivity. And we drove significant cost savings, both in the supply chain and in our overhead levels. And then finally, we took 3 rounds of pricing. The 3 rounds of pricing we took were April 1, May 1 and July 28. Those -- that was pretty early. So we were one of the first people to price in our industry. And the reason we were one of the first people to price is because generally, our portfolio of brands are leading brands in the categories in which we compete. And when we're faced with a cost that affects the whole industry, we believe that generally, the leading brands are the ones that lead pricing in the categories. The result of that was we did pretty well at offsetting the tariff impact. Our gross margin was actually up 10 basis points last year in '25 versus '24 despite this massive tariff headwind, our operating margin was up 20 basis points despite this. And within that, we invested 50 basis points more in A&P spend as we've been rebuilding A&P behind our new product innovation. And our net leverage ratio ended the year at about 5x, which is where we started the year. But this came at the expense of top line sales because we got scrapped as competitors waited to price until they saw our pricing in the market in a number of categories. So when you look at the financial progression from '24 to '25, and you look at this chart on core sales, normalized gross margin, EBITDA and net leverage ratio, effectively, we went sideways in '25 because of the tariffs. The exciting part of this chart is we didn't go backwards. We went sideways. And so we sort of got delayed by years the way Mark and I think about this. But if you look at where we are in '25 versus the starting point in '23, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we're still dramatically better today than we were when we got started on the turnaround plan. Core sales trends have improved in '25 versus '23. Gross margins are up substantially in '25 versus '23. EBITDA is up in both dollar terms and as a percentage and leverage ratio is down in '25. What's more exciting though is that while we were dealing with these tariffs, we didn't stop the work on the capability improvement projects. And in fact, we have accelerated dramatically the work on capability. So as we stand here today, we now look at that same chart that I showed of where we were in '23. And you'll see that we believe we are green across the vast majority of the capabilities today that we need to get back to winning in the marketplace. Part of that capability build that we got started on because we were starting in a place where we were deficient versus the industry, we decided to take a leapfrog approach with artificial intelligence. And I'm pretty excited about what we've been able to drive across that with early broad and deep executive sponsorship of AI, the Quantum Leap program I mentioned earlier. And so I want to spend a little bit just giving you a little taste of what that looks like. So we got started with an operational approach. I became the executive sponsor. We put a steering team together. We put a dedicated Quantum Leap team together and we named functional navigators in every single function of the company. So there were 3 pillars that we got started with this work on. The first is foundational, which is how do we roll out AI tools to individual employees so that we can make them more productive in their individual work. The second was a functional view where for every function, we have reimagined what that function workflow and productivity should look like over a 3- to 5-year period, fully AI-enabled. And the third was looking at transforming entire end-to-end multifunctional value chain processes. The journey that we've been on in '24, we got started with what I would call sort of a grassroots effort as many companies did. Looking at a governance team, enabling teams to go and look at use cases, funding those use cases and getting started. In mid-'25, we made a strategic pivot to really focus away from a use case model to a how-work-gets-done model, looking at workflows and processes. And within that strategic pivot, we're using generative AI. We're using machine learning and we're using agentic AI today for workflow management. So all 3 forms of AI are prevalent across Newell. Today, under the Quantum Leap program, AI is fully embedded in the strategy focused on value creation. We're not doing AI for AI sake. We're doing AI to drive faster revenue, higher margins, more effective overhead and better cash and we're using it as an enterprise capability. Specifically, we have an AI steering team. We have workflow redesigns that have been developed across every function in the company that are driving productivity, improving outcomes and accelerating cycle time. I mentioned the AI functional Navigators. We have 33 of them that are focused specifically on their functions. We have over 2,000 employees in the company today that are using AI every day in their work. And we've got over 100 active use cases that are in use across the company. One of the areas that I'm most excited about is what we've done in improving our innovation process with AI. So on the front end, we have deployed AI in ideation, in design and in prototyping across our innovation process. We've also deployed AI to improve our consumer understanding, co-creation and testing. The -- it's not any one of these things. It's the combination that's driving significant improvement in what we're doing. And what it's enabling us to do is drive significantly faster cycle time from concept to launch across our innovation portfolio. We've also fully deployed AI in our marketing activation. So we are now creating digital content that's AI-enabled. Last year, the amount of digital content we created was up 500% in '25 versus '24 with no additional investment. So a substantial improvement in speed, quality and cost, and we're employing AI and marketing activation. When we couple this with the highest A&P investment in the company's history and strong retailer activation, we are excited about where we're headed from an innovation standpoint as we head into '26. We have a video to showcase a little bit about a couple of the use cases for AI that we're going to show now. [Presentation]

When we put it together, the innovation pipeline that we have heading into 2026 is the strongest in the history of the -- the modern history of the company since the Jarden acquisition. When we got started on the turnaround journey, we put in place a completely new innovation process. In 2023, we had on what we call a Tier 1 or Tier 2, which is a large consumer-oriented innovation that was launched in the market. And generally, we would define our innovation pipeline as having a lack of consumer-relevant innovation with a lot of small projects that generated churn but didn't generate any value for consumers and retailers. As we sit here today and enter 2026, we have 25 Tier 1 and Tier 2 innovations that are launching this year after 18 last year. These innovations are consumer-preferred. They are driving value. The retailer response has been terrific, and we are excited they're across every single one of our businesses. So every business will have a stronger innovation as we head into this year. So let's take a look at a couple of them, and I'll go through some of the highlights. On the Writing business, we launched Sharpie S-Gel and became a major player in the S-Gel, the gel pen market. This year, we're launching a style icon set of pens that have better fashion, better colors to extend that S-Gel line. On Expo, we've launched a better, more vibrant ink on dry erase. We've also extended into a new category, which is called wet erase, which is permanent until you want to wash it away, that is a completely new usage experience. And then on Sharpie Creative Markers, which was launched a year ago, this year, we'll be launching a set of metallic colors on that Sharpie Creative Marker line and 3 new tip sizes, so this is a good example of extending innovation into year 2 and year 3 of some of these launches. On Baby, last year, we launched the EasyTurn 360 2-in-1 convertible car seat. This was the #1 innovation in the baby gear category in the United States last year amongst all competitors. This innovation gained 860 basis points of market share in the turning car seat market. We're excited to have that in year 2 this year, and we think there's room for that to grow. But what we're more excited about is this month, we're launching the same thing in the infant car seat market with a SnugRide, Turn & Slide car seat to get into the infant car seat market with the best turning car seat that's available. Let's take a look at what this looks like. [Presentation]

In the kitchen category, we're getting bigger in the performance blending category. We're launching in the Extreme Mix blender across Latin America and into the U.S. which is a high-performance blender with a great feature benefit set at a compelling value. In Home Fragrance, last year, we launched the relaunch of the Yankee Candle brand in the fall. We returned the Yankee Candle business to 6% core sales growth in Q4, which is the prime season for Yankee Candle. In '26, we will be relaunching the Yankee Candle brand across Europe based on the same relaunch we did in the U.S. In addition to that, though, we're launching a Yankee Candle premium line, which you can see at the bottom, and we are relaunching the WoodWick as well as the Chesapeake Bay brand. So we have terrific innovation across all parts of the home fragrance portfolio. When it comes to outdoor & rec, we are relaunching the Contigo brand. The Contigo brand is focused on the young professional and we are relaunching this with a new modern aesthetic with premium finishes based on the iconic silhouette of the Contigo brand. We're also launching the bubba brand this year. This is going after a consumer segment we call expressive baddies, which has Gen Z females 18 to 25, who are always 40 minutes late for the party but always ahead on fashion and beauty trends. And it's an expressive fun and exciting portfolio of products that we're excited about. And finally, an outdoor & rec on Coleman, finally, but not least of all, we're launching the world's first collapsible cooler. This is a patent pending or patent-pending product. We'll showcase this a little bit, but we're very excited about this. So this is a hard-sided cooler that collapses to 1/3 the size for easier transportation and easier storage of coolers, and it still provides leakproof protection and days of ice retention. Let's take a look at the advertising on this one. [Presentation]

That's an exciting one. The combination of the go-to-market capability improvements we've made, the stronger innovation portfolio and our tariff advantage manufacturing wins that we've had has led us to winning more line reviews in '25 that are being reset in '26 than we've ever done before. As a result of that, we are forecasting this year for our distribution for the first time in terms of net total distribution points across Newell to be up in 2026, and we've got strong commitments from retailers to support this evasion with stronger share of shelf across most of our businesses in the U.S. and for the company in total. Finally, from a tariff advantage manufacturing standpoint, we'll see how this evolves depending that the Supreme Court tariff ruling. But this is a good example of what we're doing on blenders. We self-manufacture these blenders. We are not subject to any tariffs on these blenders. And we've extended our product line now to have a feature benefit set that spans from sort of a mid opening price point product at $22.98, which is a great value at that price point all the way up to the Extreme Mix on the right side. We are expecting to see, and we've got commitments for significant distribution gains on this across multiple retailers in the U.S. this year. So before I turn it to Mark, what I would say is I'm excited about entering '26. And as we enter '26, I believe that we are set up to have a significant improvement in the rate of core sales growth of the company. You're going to see us continue to grow operating margin, or guiding to get back to EBITDA growth and we're guiding to get our net leverage ratio down this year. And for the first time, I feel like we've got now a full slate of innovation with a full set of A&P to support that turnaround and showcase what we can do in the market this year. So with that, I'll turn it over to Mark.

Thanks, Chris. Welcome, everyone. Having shared how Newell Brands Quantum Leap AI program has been a catalyst to further strengthen and drive our capability-based turnaround. We will now discuss how the radical simplification agenda we've been aggressively pursuing the past several years, directly supports and enhances our AI efforts going forward and how those efforts along with a strong domestic manufacturing footprint, will be monetized to support Newell's long-term financial algorithm and shareholder value proposition. Over the past several years, we've reduced active SKUs by over 80%, rationalized our brand portfolio from 80 to slightly more than 50 consolidated 23 stand-alone supply chains, each with their own unique legal entity into an integrated and scaled operating company. We've also eliminated thousands of subscale suppliers and distributors hundreds of legal entities and dozens of office locations. These major interventions, among others, have provided clarity of focus and improved operational excellence as evidenced by a 96% global fill rate which in turn has driven a tremendously positive impact on excess and obsolete inventory levels and customer penalties. And perhaps the biggest and most impressive simplification effort of them all, which is a foundational predicate for our enhanced AI efforts, is the transformative work that's been done across our IT landscape. Immediately following the Jarden acquisition, Newell had an exceedingly complicated ERP structure characterized by multiple country and business unit specific localized ERPs. To make matters even worse, many of these individual country and business unit ERPs were running multiple instances of SAP. In total, only 35% of global sales were transacted on our core SAP platform. After years of hard painstaking work, Newell's ERP consolidation journey will end this fall when approximately 95% of global sales will be supported by a single instance of SAP. A dramatically simplified IT core establishes the requisite framework to leverage data effectively through a system of unified governance and data quality management. This, in turn, allows high-quality data to be rapidly harnessed to drive faster AI augmented cycle times across the global enterprise. As you can see from this chart, simplification efforts and more recently, AI enablement have allowed us to significantly reduce headcount while simultaneously improving underlying capabilities. Specifically, in Q3 of 2025, normalized overhead as a percentage of sales declined for the first time in 3 years, which was followed by a second decline in Q4 of 2025. Looking forward, we expect normalized overheads as a percentage of sales to continue to drop for the next several years as we monetize past and future simplification efforts and as top line growth rates accelerate. With overheads trending in the right direction, inclusive of the requisite work and investment required to dramatically increase Newell's capabilities, we can now match this up against a very strong end-to-end supply chain, which has benefited from about $2 billion of investment in the U.S., much of which was earmarked for automation since the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The network currently consists of 41 plants strategically located around the world that, in aggregate, provide Newell with about 57% of everything we sell. The remaining 43% is sourced product. Within that 43%, it's very important to point out that Newell's rebuild supply network has dramatically reduced its dependence on China over the past several years. For example, China sourced product in the United States now represents less than 10% of total cost of goods sold, and that number is expected to decrease even more in the years ahead. The dramatic increase in gross margin since 2023 has largely been driven by our fuel productivity program, which has consistently generated annual savings in excess of 3% of COGS. This high-performance organization, in addition to being scaled and highly efficient provides our retail partners with excellent customer fill rates. The United States was home to 15 of Newell's 41 plants, and we have 2 facilities located just a few miles south of the border that are 98% USMCA compliant. These 17 plants provide us with domestic sourcing across 19 tariff advantage categories. For example, we make all jars in Indiana, NUK baby care products in Wisconsin, Sharpie and Paper Mate writing instruments and Elmer's glue in Tennessee, Yankee Candles in Massachusetts. Coleman coolers in Kansas, Brute trash cans in Virginia and Rubbermaid food storage in Ohio to name just a few. Since Liberation Day, we've been actively leveraging the strategic advantage with key retailers. And while the line review process does take time, we continue to make good progress extending distribution across our domestic production base. Automation made our facilities more efficient and created incremental capacity, which is why our marginal return on incremental sales is now so compelling. For perspective, and assuming cost of goods sold is approximately 25% fixed and 75% variable, a 50% variable normalized gross margin rate across our tariff advantaged categories seems very reasonable. From there, and if we want to be somewhat conservative, we can assume $0.05 of every incremental sales dollar is reinvested back into A&P, which would leave us with normalized incremental operating margin of about 45%. Since we finished 2025 with a normalized operating margin of approximately 8.4%, this suggests that the normalized operating margin on incremental sales going forward to be more than 5x current levels. And while it might be obvious, it probably bears mentioning that if we were to use one of our higher-margin businesses like writing, the economics would be even more advantageous. In fact, let's take a quick look at how we've leveraged best-in-class proprietary automation techniques at our flagship writing plant in Maryville, Tennessee to improve unit economics on Sharpie. Just a few years ago, 6 workers could produce about 150 Sharpie Markers a minute, which translates into 25 units per minute per worker. Today, one operator routinely makes 500 units a minute which is a productivity improvement of 20x. And while this is just one example, we have many others all across Newell's reimagined and rebuilt in-house supply chain. Expanding the scope of our discussion, looking at abbreviated P&L, the rapid expansion in gross margin between 2023 and 2024 allowed us to do a number of important things. First, it allowed us to significantly increase A&P spending as a percentage of sales by nearly 20%, which is an important part of our top line growth strategy. Second, it allowed us to make critical investments in several overhead-related capabilities like consumer understanding, brand building and innovation, which are required to consistently win in the consumer products industry. And third, it allowed us to be both of these things while still expanding normalized operating margin by over 200 basis points. This past year, fiscal 2025 was characterized by significant short-term tariff challenges, but the team responded exceedingly well. And as a result, we were actually able to expand normalized gross margin despite approximately $115 million of incremental gross P&L tariff costs. A modest improvement in normalized gross margin and meaningful reduction in overhead spending allowed us to expand our normalized operating margin by 20 basis points while also funding a 50 basis point increase in advertising and promotion, as we continue to invest behind a portfolio of category-leading brands. As we enter 2026, tariffs will continue to put pressure on gross margins until their impact is fully annualized. So for modeling purposes, gross margin should be about flat. Relative to A&P, we have said repeatedly that we expect to invest more in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of sales to properly support Newell's strongest innovation program since the Jarden acquisition. As mentioned earlier, normalized overheads have been down for 2 consecutive quarters. And based on our simplification, productivity and AI enablement efforts, we expect overheads as a percentage of sales to decrease by about 80 basis points this year. Putting all this together, the midpoint of our 8.6% to 9.2% guidance range suggests normalized operating margin should expand by about 50 basis points to roughly 8.9%, which, if achieved, represent an increase of more than 50% versus 2023. We feel very good about the progress that has been made in a short period of time. and believe Newell Brands is a much better and stronger company than it was just a few years ago. However, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until the top line is consistently growing and normalized operating margins are meaningfully higher than they are today. 2.5 years into Newell's turnaround, we believe there's a clear line of sight, incredible path forward, which will result in normalized gross margin in the 37% to 38% range. A&P of approximately 6% to 7% and normalized overhead somewhere between 17% and 18% and normalized operating margin in the 12% to 15% range. From a leverage standpoint, we began our journey at nearly 6.5x levered which by the end of 2024, we were able to bring down to about 5x. We expected to reduce that even further this past year, but $175 million worth of gross tariff cash impacts later, we are frankly happy to just hold the line. Looking at 2026, we expect operating cash flow to be up roughly 40% versus 2025 for a variety of reasons, including mid-single-digit normalized EBITDA growth, lower cash taxes, a lower cash bonus payout and a lower cash conversion cycle. This increase in operating cash flow in conjunction with less CapEx spending now that several large supply chain and ERP projects have been successfully completed is expected to fully fund our dividend, allow for a modest amount of debt pay down and bring our year-end leverage ratio down by about 0.5 turn. Ultimately, we aspire to once again be an investment-grade debt issuer. In the meantime, our long-term Evergreen annual financial targets remain unchanged, low single-digit core sales growth, 50 basis points of operating margin improvement and about 90% free cash flow productivity. And from a capital allocation standpoint, we continue to fund high return internal growth opportunities as we delever the balance sheet and pay a $0.07 quarterly dividend. To wrap things up, we hope you take a number of things away from today's discussion. First is the sharp focus we have placed on systematically rebuilding capabilities across a simplified AI-enabled platform with strong domestic manufacturing. Second, because we now have innovation at scale, improving distribution and competitive levels of A&P support, we have commercial momentum. Third, we have attractive marginal production economics and a multiyear overhead optimization glide path to fuel our disciplined financial algorithm. And finally, we see a clear path to shareholder value based on top line growth, margin expansion, strong cash flow generation and balance sheet deleveraging. So with that, we thank you for your time and attention. And if there's questions, we'll be happy to take those as well.