J.D. Walker : I heard that as well. I did not hear them speak about specific categories, but I will tell you that we grew share in grass, seed and fertilizers and insecticides. And while it’s not tracked by syndicated data, we know that we also grew share in packet seeds. So, I didn’t hear anyone else claim a category, but I will tell you that in those categories we took share and we feel good about it.
Hale Holden : The second question I had was at the risk of sounding like I’m asking a fed watching question your consumer outlook is pretty dour and hasn’t changed in a quarter or two in terms of how you’re underwriting to the full fiscal year. And do think there’s some conservatism given how the consumer’s turned out? Or are you still sensing that there’s some reluctance out there?
Niko Lahanas : Well, we’re taking more of a wait and see attitude. If you look at our last two years, we did miss our guide, and if you rewind to November, we talked about being a little bit more conservative in our outlook. After missing guide two years in a row. So I think, we want to see how the weather plays out, how the Garden season plays out. I think the early signs, we feel good. We feel great about the business. Q1 came in to a solid start. I think, we took market share in like eight categories across pet and garden. We expanded margin, balance sheet is in great shape. So we feel really good about the business. We just need to see it play out kind of real time. And before that happens, we’re a little remiss to get overly enthusiastic about the consumer.
J.D. Walker: And Niko, just building on that point, you said in the script, 15% of the Garden season is Q1, so we 85% of the year in front of us, we’re not going to celebrate too early, but we do feel good about where we are right now.
Operator: Our next question is from Karru Martinson with Jefferies.
Karru Martinson: Some of the headwinds that you referenced was working through that higher value inventory. How long do you feel that it would get, will take for us to get through that? And kind of tying into that what should we think about the working capital benefits this year, on that front, given the benefit that we had this year?
Niko Lahanas : Yes, so great question. We’ve got a few businesses that are extremely long on inventory and we think that that’s going to play out through this year and even into ‘25 a little bit. As far as working cap, we did a great job last year of converting that inventory into cash. We are going to continue to do that. Our work is not done as far as really working that aspect of the business. So we’re expecting a nice free cash flow number this year as well. So work is not done. I think, anywhere from $50 million to $100 million of inventory that we can lower throughout this year.
Operator: Our next question is from Michael Copla [ph] with JPMorgan.
Unidentified Analyst : One thing that we wanted to ask about was that, if you think that the fair share of promotions that you guys are getting is making some of your product maybe priced pretty attractively and kind of how that stacks up versus the competitors that you see out there.
J.D. Walker : Michael, J.D. again here. I’d say from it is early to tell. We don’t know what all they’re going to do from a promotional standpoint. Like I said earlier, we feel very good about our promotional support that we’ve secured for the year. They’ve signaled a very strong second half of the year. So I think a lot of that, we will have to react to as we get into the season. But they haven’t tipped their hands fully in terms of promotional pricing things like that. I’d say that going into it, just based on the way the market’s been the last couple of years, we feel like we’re well-positioned. We feel like we’ve got great promotional and display support and we’ll have strong execution in the stores, but difficult to draw any conclusions. Here we are in early February with the season, still say 60 days away.
Operator: Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I’d like to hand the floor back over to Friederike Edelmann for closing comments.
Friederike Edelmann: Thanks everyone for joining our call today. Our IR team is available to answer any question you may have. Thank you and have a good rest of the day.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
