The Clorox Company (CLX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

December 2, 2025

US Consumer Staples Household Products Company Conference Presentations 39 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#1

Hello, everyone. I'm Dara Mohsenian, Morgan Stanley's household products and beverage analyst. Just before we get started, a quick disclosure. Please see the Morgan Stanley research website at www.morganstanley.com for important research disclosures and contact your Morgan Stanley representative if you have any questions. With that out of the way, I'm very pleased to welcome Clorox back to our conference. With us here today is Luc Bellet, Clorox' Executive Vice President and CFO. Thanks so much for being here today.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#2

So maybe we can start just with the fact that it's been a really tough U.S. consumer environment in the household product space, probably appropriate to start more short term here. Just what are you seeing from a category growth standpoint, particularly in the U.S. and in terms of consumer behavior?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#3

Well, yes, it's clearly a very challenging environment for the consumer. We see a consumer under stress. And we've been seeing -- I think they're reacting a lot to the volatility and uncertainty in environment. And we've seen typically value-seeking behavior for just the past few quarters. I mean stretching usage, also changing their shopping behavior to favor either low opening price points or just shifting and moving to channel like e-comm and club and purchasing larger sized products. So we've been seeing this behavior for a while now, and we expect it to continue for most of the fiscal year. Now what does it mean from a category standpoint? Typically, our categories historically have been growing 2% to 2.5%. And in periods when the consumer have been stressed, like, for example, the last recessions, we've seen a contraction of a couple of points and category on average for the portfolio growing 0% to 1%. Now that varies by business, but that's a good average. And that's the U.S. retail business. Our international and pro business tend to grow a little faster than that. And so that's what we assume for the year. And so far, it's been playing out in line with these assumptions. We were close to flat in the first quarter. This quarter, we're a little more on the higher end of that range, and we expect it to continue move between that range, but we think it's a good assumption for now for the remaining of the year. Now like everyone else, we're staying very close to the consumer. But so far, we think it's a good assumption.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#4

Okay. Great. And then maybe we can shift to the competitive front. We've seen promotion pick up in the U.S. in a number of categories. As you look at your key categories, how intense is that activity anything surprising from your perspective?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#5

Yes. I would say on aggregates, the promotional environment has been fairly rational from competitors. Now there are pockets and businesses where it's been a little heightened, and we talked about this in the past. We -- some of our businesses like Glad Trash or Lidl have seen a heightened competitive activity. And we expect this to continue, and we feel like we have the right plan to address it. But in aggregate, it's been fairly rational. And in the level of spend that we're seeing are in line with what we would expect. Now our first quarter, which we just wrapped up, tend to be the highest quarter from a merchandising event. So it was a little higher than what we had in the fourth quarter, but that's just driven by the merchandising we're doing rated to back-to-school, which is maybe important to remind that we really see promotion less as a price level, but more as a strategic lever. So a lot of our promotion and not to be priced in nature, but more high-quality future and display that we use either for peak period on the north side, they can be back to school. They would be the holiday season for Burt's and the Kingsford grill season and then bringing back people in the category and of course, for innovation, right, to drive awareness and trial. But again, to date, it's fairly rational. We'll stay close to it as well and see if it evolves.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#6

Okay. And as you look forward, now that we're moving past the ERP transition, what are the key strategies in place to try to reinvigorate organic sales growth in your portfolio? And as you think about doing that, is it more about executing the playbook you have in place? Is it more about tweaking the playbook and some of the different strategies might require a higher level of spend? How do you think about that?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#7

Yes. I think it's maybe both of what you just mentioned. For sure, it is about executing like the integrated demand plans that we have and the strategy. And of course, you want to be thoughtful and balanced as you think about demand investments. You want to balance the urgency of defending your market share with the discipline of growing the category and profitability over time. But on the playbook, I think -- I guess now that we have finally passed the implementation of the ERP and passed stabilizations, I think we're in a good place to -- we have a strong, I think a strong playbook in the back half of the year and then our outlook contemplates some improvement in the back half of the year. And so it's just a matter of really executing those. And I think we -- the playbook is pretty rich. We feel like we have a broad slate of innovations across categories and also in type of innovation. Some are like expansion on existing innovation platform. Others are like new platform and adjacencies. And also a lot of, I would say, good work from an RGM standpoint and price pack architecture, which is important, getting really sharp on price point in this environment. So it's really just about executing that playbook. And I think the other thing is to continue doing the great work we've been doing on margin. We feel good about the holistic margin management efforts that we have. We feel like we have a strong pipeline, and it's important because, one, it protects the margin and profitability but also give us capacity to invest if needed.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#8

Right. Okay. And as we look at your market share, we've seen a lot of volatility in recent years. Generally, there's been some share loss, if you look at versus pre-COVID periods. It's been different by category, obviously, just as you look at underlying brand equity strength, whatever tracking metrics you use, surveys, et cetera, what are consumers telling you about the strength of your brands as we try and parse through some of this volatility?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#9

Yes. So I guess first thing is, yes, we're certainly not satisfied what we had from a market share standpoint, and we talked about our plans to improve it in the back half of the year. But if you look at the fundamentals of the brand, they're actually quite strong. Household penetration has been [ our most ] brand has been really stable and some brands like the Clorox mega brand is actually growing. If you look at different equity metrics, including value metrics, we are generally at or above where we were pre COVID. So what it tells us is that the brands are healthy. They resonate with the consumer. And so it's really about taking advantage of that and putting the right demand creation plans behind it. And that's what we intend to do in the back half of the year.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#10

Okay. And could you talk specifically about strategies from a market share standpoint? It's probably similar to what you outlined in the back half of the year. But just looking out long term, as we look out over the next few years, what do you think are the key levers you're looking to pull internally to drive improved market share performance?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#11

Yes. I mean, the goal has always been, first and foremost, to drive value, superior value for the consumer. And we define -- we have framework is around 5 vectors. This product package, place, which is really where -- being at where the customer shop virtually and physically, proposition, which is really the brand and the brand building exercise and in price. And so as we look at driving -- the goal is to drive security across the 5 vectors. We expect this would drive normally the category growth, but also allows us to grow slightly above that from a market share standpoint. And then the levers to impact those are the ones we've been talking about. First and foremost, it's always been about innovation. This is what really drew, have been growing profitably in the categories for a long time. The new capabilities we're ramping up around RGM certainly are going to be a driver over the next year or two. I think there's a lot of opportunity and low-hanging fruits. And it's a lot of -- and then the brand building is also very important. I think one of -- we launched a new campaign in cleaning, which has been about shifting the view of cleaning being a chore to something that makes you feel good. And there's a lot of humor in it and it's just -- it's leveraging neuroscience and it's really resonating with consumer and then with -- especially with new consumers. And it's important to remember, it's not always about the innovations, but the brand building. And so that idea of bringing a little joy in cleaning is now showing up in some of the products. So we're launching a new scent in wipes that's much more fresh and very different than the old scent because the old scent tended to remind people of the pandemic, and I was bringing them down as an example. Or we stop -- in printing on the substrate of wipes, some fun words like [ who who and joy ]. And this is just the integration of the brand building and the innovation that can make a difference. So those are the levers. It's always been about innovation, brand building and of course, leveraging capabilities like RGM.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#12

Right. Great. And the 5 vectors you mentioned, where do you think you're executing best? Where do you think you need more work? Obviously, you're looking to have all 5 hit at once, and that's where you really get the benefits from give us a report card on those 5 vectors.

Luc Bellet

Executives
#13

Yes, I think it really depends by businesses. And just so you know, each business is actually measured themselves across all 5 vectors. And the goal is to be clearly superior on at least the majority of them. I'll take two examples, one where I think we're actually doing very well across 5 vectors and cleaning business is one of those. And it's been really resilient. If you look at Market share is above where we were pre cyber. We actually see good momentum even within the challenging environment, category and share have been growing and we feel good about what's coming in the next few years. And I mentioned it, this is one place where the product superiority is really making a difference. The -- both the placement, I think we're growing with winning retailers and the proposition and the brand proposition in the brand building is very strong. There's still some work, I think we can do on price pack architectures. If you kind of look at the cleaning portfolio, it's still relatively simple. You have the same bottle of sprays in most channels and in the same kind of wipes. So I think there's some structural benefit do there. On the other hand, one business where we -- we mentioned that we clearly weren't Superior has been the litter business, right? It's -- it went through -- it's probably the one that was the most impacted by cyber. We had supply issues. It took us a while to get back to full service and let them on full distribution. And during this time, competition didn't stand still. They kept improving. And so I think this is one where we feel we have a really good plan across the 5 Ps to actually improve. Some of it is innovation and really on the product. But there's a lot of great work being done on packaging, claims, something on brand and campaign and positioning. So the plan we have in the back half is actually fairly holistic, and we have a phase plan. There will be first phase that's happening in the back half of this fiscal year, and then we have another phase coming in the next fiscal year.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#14

Okay. And how do you think about the recovery phase for cat litter over time? Is it more big bang innovation? Does it play out gradually over...

Luc Bellet

Executives
#15

No, I think it would be -- what we'll have in the back half will be a series of, I would say, singles that together, will make a difference. And then I think we have more significant and more aggressive innovations after that.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#16

Okay. That's helpful. Maybe we could touch on Glad. We've seen a bit more promotional environment there from a category standpoint. Just can you touch on your competitiveness within the segment, category trends and your plans to drive that business from here?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#17

So yes, we saw heightened competitive activity now for a couple of quarters. And for background, this is a category where we've seen competitive activity ebb and flow. We're being very balanced and disciplined as how we're dealing with it. As context, there's limited expandable consumption in this category. So you have to be careful to not over promote because you could really drive a lot of dollars out of the category. So it's a balance. There's places where we made surgical investment on some SKUs and that's making a difference. And there's others where we're willing to be patient and take a little bit of share loss until we actually just address this with more meaningful innovations and improvement. And we have some coming in the pipeline. In the meantime, we also completely revamped our marketing communication, and we have a new campaign coming that seems to be very resonating with consumer and that should also help.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#18

Okay. Charcoal, we had a better summer peak season this year after prior pressure. How sustainable is the improvement you saw in that business? You've made some changes in terms of the way you managed the brand in the last couple of years. So give us an update on the outlook there as we head into next summer.

Luc Bellet

Executives
#19

Yes. We actually feel quite good about the next summer plans. There's -- a lot of it has to do with our merchandising plans, some have been optimized based on some learning from last summer, so we'll have to lap that. And there's also some incremental merchandising that we're doing, taking advantage of big events like the World Cup or just even the 250th anniversaries of the U.S. And so there's a lot of opportunities to take advantage of this. We have a little bit of innovation as well. So right now, it looks -- it's gearing up to be a good and solid season for us.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#20

Okay. And we've spent a lot of time so far discussing the difficult industry environment we're in. Just as the CFO, I'd love to hear how you think about balancing, trying to reinvest to drive sales, but also in a difficult environment, maybe the ROI isn't as strong, and it's not breaking through as much with consumers. How do you think about that balance in the context of this CPG environment?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#21

Yes. I think we kind of touched on it as we were talking about some of those businesses in -- maybe like stepping back and seeing what's always true, whether it's in this environment or not? I mean, again, the way we create value is by driving superior proposition for the consumer. And that's how we can strengthen our brand over time, that going to strengthen our competitive advantage and really grow the categories. And the way we do that is taking brands people love and then just adding and leveraging them through capabilities. So in a way, a lot of the investment that we made over the past few years were intended to really strengthen those capabilities and then strengthen the work that we do with the brand. In an environment like this one, if anything the bar goes higher in terms of superiority, and we've seen it, right? We just talked about a business like Lidl that kind of fell behind a little bit and you're really feeling it a lot more. And so I think what's changed is what's a little different is -- and Linda alluded to this, I think, in one of our last earnings call is, I think the speed and agility to which we need to make adjustment is higher in that environment like. And so on one hand, as we had to deal with the ERP transition implementation, that adds to the things that we have to juggle. On the other end is now that we pass this, like the modernized capability that we're ramping up actually help us just do that. And I think we pointed to the example of charcoal where we didn't adjust our plants fast enough and we felt it in Q4 and we're able to just recover in during Q1. So I think what we do is -- remains the same, and it's all about -- and we talked about those drivers around innovation, brand building, and it's more critical than ever. I think the intensity agility to which you sharpen and address your plan needs to be elevated in a period like this.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#22

Okay. And if you guys consider -- I mean, if we go back to the fiscal Q4 call, Linda talked about one of your sharpened focus in a number of areas. Have you sort of considered broader type of reset where you put a significant amount of investment behind the business. I know we've talked about there are some ways you can do it without spending a lot, but I'm just curious for if we think about sort of a broader reset within this environment, and we've seen a lot of restructurings throughout the group. So just how are you thinking about managing the business within this environment?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#23

Yes. I mean right now, I think where we said we made a lot of investment over the last few years. And we -- they stop bearing fruit, but there's still a lot more work to do. And so I think that's where our focus is, is really just ramping up those capabilities and getting the -- both the value, the growth accelerations and then the benefit from those investments as soon as possible. And so that's really the focus and of course, delivering with excellence the plan that we have in place.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#24

Right. And the benefits from the work you've done in recent years, spending on IT, restructuring, how do you think about those benefits layering in over the next few years here?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#25

Yes. Some of -- we started digital transmission about 4 years ago. So -- and essentially, there was 3 pillars, right? One was to fundamentally rebuild the data infrastructure of the company, which can be very important as you think about leveraging technology like AI and so on. Second was making a suite, an investment in a suite of technology and marketing personalization is one of the things we really invested in, created a -- a pretty sophisticated database to collect information by consumers as well as database to manage a lot of content. And so some of those investments, like marketing personalization, have already yielded a lot of benefits, both on the top and the bottom. And the last part of the digital transformation was really the ERP, right, because it's the most complex and then the riskiest. So this would just finish the implementation. We're still very much in stabilization, right? So when you turn it on. Right now, we're not seeing just value yet. You have to actually fundamentally optimize and reinvent some of your processes. And so what we said is it will take us -- we're going to stabilize in '26, and then in '27 and '28, we start getting the benefit of the ERP investments, both on the top and bottom line.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#26

And how significant are those benefits? How should we think about it? And does it give you more flexibility to reinvest? Does it drop to the bottom line? How do you think about it?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#27

Yes. I think the way we think about -- it's one more significant contributor to, I think, our margin management efforts. And I think if you end up -- they will be fairly material over the next few years, and I think it just strengthened the pipeline and strengthened our level of confidence in our ability to deliver our margin goal, which is expanding 25 to 50 basis points on an annual basis.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#28

Okay. And you've had strong productivity over a long period of time. So just as you think about productivity going forward, a, base business, can you keep up the level of productivity savings; B, what are the key buckets from here? And so, how does AI play into that and give you more opportunities from a cost standpoint.

Luc Bellet

Executives
#29

Well, I think the headline is, again, our goals is like -- we intend to grow EBIT margin, 25 to 50 basis points. And generally, we feel confident in our ability to do that. And it's -- and that would be net of any reinvestment that we make in the business. I think you mentioned some of the levers, one is our cost savings program, which has organically evolved to what we call holistic margin management. We always had a really robust and disciplined cost-saving program, but we brought new -- we made some investments, brought external talents and bring capabilities like design to value, RGM and all those have actually expanded the contribution and it's working for us. We had record level of cost savings in the past two years, and we probably have one of the strongest pipeline I've seen. So that's the base. Then there's the ERP. We just -- that adds and contributes to this. As you can imagine, having an ERP that was 20, 25 years old. They created a lot of operational inefficiencies. You had a lot of silo processes so now you have ability to see data real time across the supply chain. So that creates a lot of benefit on supply chain, from plant scheduling to waste management, to logistic optimization and inventory management. And so we'll see this over the next couple of years. It also creates some opportunity from an automation standpoint. And so we'll see some benefit on the SG&A from there. And then there's other drivers that are now start opening up and one that we mentioned in the past is Global Business Services. This is another place where we probably were behind our peers and didn't leverage it as much. Part of it is because we had a fairly old data and technology infrastructure. It was hard to just take care of those -- take advantage of those global business services, but we're now going to accelerate the path and to take advantage of this. And so that creates more benefit, especially on the SG&A line. So kind of look at there's 3 levels together that gives you a good road map. And so we feel good about the pipeline. And just right now, we'll have to see what happened with the cost environment when in general, over the next few years, we feel like high degree of confidence in our ability to deliver the margin goals.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#30

Okay. And maybe we can shift to fiscal '26 guidance. Your guidance does imply a return to low single-digit organic sales growth in the second half of the fiscal year. We talked about earlier some of the drivers behind that. What's your level of confidence there just given it's been a difficult industry environment in recent periods? Scanner data is kind of lingered a bit weaker here, some of that's related to ERP over the last few months of the transition there. So just give us an update on sort of level of visibility for the back half. And then also, you mentioned some of the margin drivers and productivity and holistic margin management. So do you think you have some margin flex to sort of cover top line volatility, you've pointed to the low end of the full year earnings range. But do you think you have a pretty good visibility there with some of the margin drivers?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#31

Yes. So if you look at our guideline and outlook, expect for the current quarter expectation was organic growth to decline in low single digits. And then as we look at the back half, we expect organic growth to grow in the low single digits, excluding the ERP transition. From a category standpoint, we talked about it, we still expect category to be below historical but stable around flat to 1% and so that means that we expect, on average, U.S. retail business to grow slightly ahead of that. And so implying modest share gains as you look at the back half from aggregate. The levers are the ones we talked about. We feel really good about our innovation plans. We have also a series -- we talked about places where we've been sharpening execution, like charcoal merchandising. There's also some good change and gain that we're doing on distribution and assortments and also some innovations on revenue RGMs. And we talked about how it all comes together in a business like Lidl. So there's just a lot of drivers coming together, they all contribute. The other thing is we will be lapping a period of headwinds that we had from competitive activities. So that's -- right now, the plans are like progressing as expected. Selling and conversations with the customers are progressing as expected. So continue to feel good about our plans. Of course, that's U.S. return. We still expect the professional business and international business to continue being outsized growth drivers in the back half. And then from a margin standpoint, we -- on what we can control, which is the holistic margin management efforts, we feel good about the progress in the pipeline. We're obviously staying very close to the cost environment which has -- and especially what may or might not happen from a tariff standpoint. And so we'll have -- that will remain to be seen. But on what we can control, I think we're making good progress.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#32

Okay. And then innovation. You've talked a lot about innovation that's part of driving acceleration in the back half of the year and obviously, an important part of the long-term strategy. Can you talk about how your innovation process has changed in recent years? And what's driving this greater pipeline of activity. And as we look at the back half and maybe out to fiscal '27, is it the amount of innovation? Is it the big bang nature of innovation? What's actually driving this acceleration?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#33

Yes. I think over the past few years, the intent was always to accelerate the contribution of innovations. And some of it had been just doing a bigger focus on platforms, a bigger focus on unmet needs. So that has been in place for a few years. Of course, it's been -- we have to deal with the disruptions associated with cyber and the happy transitions. But beyond that, we've really been also focusing on accelerating the what we call a discovery process and our early pipeline. And this is where some of the investment we made on the digital front have been really helping. You were talking about AI, but that's one place where actually AI has been meaningful in terms of increasing the contributions of bringing better ID faster. If you think about what AI can do, and we've been leveraging AI to analyze a lot of data, whether it's on social, a lot of data on consumer review and feedback. It's actually really great in identifying patterns, finding unmet needs or potential improvements. And so that has been a real contributor. If we look at the -- if we look right now at what I call our discovery pipeline, which is like the emerging project. It's probably the strongest it's been in a very long time. So we feel good about the innovation that we are launching in the back half, but we also feel good about the pipeline that's supporting potential future years.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#34

Right. Great. And you've completed a lot of hard work in recent years in terms of the investment in technology, restructuring ERP. As you look going forward out longer term, what are you most excited about from a growth standpoint as you think about top line growth for the portfolio, whether it be brands, categories, geographies, however you think about it?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#35

Yes, I mean, a few things. First, you mentioned, we completed a lot of work. And so looking forward to reaping the benefits of those capabilities. Some of it is new ways of working that we just talked about, better leveraging technologies real, right? We talked about -- and especially with the advent of AI, getting all the hard work be done on creating a really robust data infrastructure will be really helpful. I'll give you an example. We've been on the journey of personalization, made great progress. 60% of our marketing is now personalized, and we've done that by really investing in technology, but investing in new process and new teams. And then generative AI come. And so you -- over the last few years, you kind of moved from doing one national campaign day to maybe targeting 10, 20 different customer groups. And now you can leverage the same data in the same process and because you have the infrastructure and able to just do hyperpersonalizations. To the point where we think in a couple of years, we'll be able to really do one-to-one marketing. That's exciting because we got the -- we basically achieved what we wanted to do with personalization, but because we build that infrastructure, we're able to fully leverage it beyond what we expected. And I think the same will happen on some of the investment we made on supply chain and so on. So that's one. Two, continue to feel really good about some businesses like cleaning. And it's -- I think this is a place where we continue to see it's performing very well, and we continue to see a lot of opportunities to grow. And keep in mind, the cleaning growth is also fueling what we're seeing in Pro and international because it's a big part of the portfolio. And then there's businesses that we have more in turnaround mode that we actually feel really good about the future. Lidl is a good example of them.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#36

Can you give us an update on professional and international and the growth opportunities in those businesses?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#37

Yes. International -- so international, for context, was a drag to the top line, just the prior strategy period. And what was happening is we had a pretty significant part of our portfolio that was in Latin America. In-country business performance was quite good, but you had to deal with a lot of headwinds from a currency and others. And so we had a very deliberate strategy to reduce the volatility and then strengthen the growth rate of international. And we did this through many different moves. One was the divestiture of Argentina, another was the acquisitions, the majority stake in the Middle East. And we placed also very targeted bets, including business like premium Lidl in Europe and in Asia that and then really taking advantage of like the pipeline and the great work we're doing on cleaning. I was talking about the Clean Feels Good campaign that's in the U.S., we're able to reap and reapply that in international. So net, over the strategic period, international has been contributed an outsized contributor to growth, kind of growing mid-single digits. And as I look at the opportunity for the future, we expect this to continue. Pro was an outsized contributor to growth. There was always plenty of opportunity. And a lot of it is really driving -- leveraging all these affecting capabilities. This is a lot of like technical cells that we're doing in health care setting and. Others. Then went boom and bust during COVID and after COVID. And so now that things settle down a little bit. We continue to start seeing really steady growth and great and promising plans as we look at the future.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#38

Great. That's helpful. Looking at the M&A environment, Clearly, there have been some challenges from an industry standpoint. There may be more assets out there available in theory. How important is M&A in your strategic lens as you look out over the next few years. And on the other side of that also, are you comfortable that the brands you have in your portfolio are a good fit? Or is there room maybe for some pairing of the portfolio over time?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#39

Yes. Maybe the M&A front, in -- first, job 1, 2 and 3 is managing and driving the cost, so that's always going to be the priority. But M&A is a strategic lever. And we -- the only thing is you have to find the right asset at the right price, right? And so just to be clear, while we haven't done transactions, we have been continuing to evaluating assets, and we are very active in doing so, right? We're obviously not having anything to share today. But just -- this is something we've been very active. The problem is there's no problem, it's just you end up saying no a lot because you have to find, again, finding the right asset at the right valuation can be challenging. So the good news is we have financial flexibility. We have strong balance sheets and we'll continue to evaluate opportunities, but we're also going to continue to be disciplined and only move if you can find the right asset at the right price. On divestitures, we -- of course, at this point, we like our portfolio as it is. We have a pretty disciplined process where we reevaluate our portfolio on an annual basis and we work with our Board. And this is a process that kind of led to the divestiture of both BMS and Argentina. But right now, again, we like our portfolio as it is.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#40

Okay. And on the M&A front, some more bolt-on opportunities you're generally looking at? Are you thinking about larger opportunities? And what's most important in terms of strategic and financial criteria as you look at potential...

Luc Bellet

Executives
#41

Yes. Yes. I mean right now, mainly we've been looking at bolt-on. We just -- I think the way we atticulated, we'd love to bring a new growth runway within the portfolio. Our criteria have been pretty consistent. So we would want something that's accretive from a gross margin standpoint, generally leading brands in mid-sized categories, and of course, something that can leverage our capabilities. So it would be either an existing category, adjacent categories or categories that meet a similar criteria. Geographically, we're open. But given that we have a lot of scale to leverage in the U.S., it's likely that there would be a pretty big U.S. presence. So that's how we think about it.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#42

Okay. And we've seen multiples compress in the CPG industry. So maybe let's take a step back and talk about capital allocation in general and just -- or share repurchase is something that's becoming a greater priority. Do you look more at stock price and ROI? Or is it more a consistent sort of balance sheet strategy and you're not as opportune necessarily on that front? How do you tie share repurchases and the broader capital allocation?

Luc Bellet

Executives
#43

Yes. So maybe -- two things. First, from a capital allocation, our priorities have always been pretty consistent. One, you want to go and invest on in the core business, both organically and inorganically; second, continue to support in the dividend, we have a long track record of doing so. Of course, third, we want to manage our debt leverage, and we have a pretty healthy balance sheet right now. We'll be on the low end of our debt leverage goal, which is 2 to 2.5x EBITDA. And we think it's the right place to be right now given the environment and also gives us flexibility if we wanted to make an investment. And then after that, returning the excess cash to the shareholders. Now we've been pretty active. We written about $300 million last year. For perspective, my dividend is about $600 million. So we're about half as much as what we've done in dividends. And we've written about another $130 million in the first quarter, and it will continue to be active in the market. So I think we're very principal, but we might be a little opportunistic in the timing and the executions, but it's always going to be a fourth priority.

Dara Mohsenian

Analysts
#44

Okay. Great. Well, with that, we're out of time. So we appreciate very much you being here. Thanks for coming here.

Luc Bellet

Executives
#45

Thank you, Dara. Thanks, everyone.

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