Jason English: That’s helpful. I appreciate that. And I think another headwind to volume this year, that you were talking about earlier in the year, but not talking about so much of late, were supply constraints. So, can you remind us where they were? How sizable they were? I assume the lack of conversation around them suggests they’re alleviated now. But can you confirm that? And I would imagine that cycling those supply constraints should prove to be a tailwind, particularly in the first half of next year. Is that right? And how large of a tailwind?
Mike Hsu: One could only hope, Jason. We could only hope that. But actually, I think, first of all, a couple of things. Yeah, we did have some pretty significant supply constraints in our North American Consumer business for the majority of last year, definitely through Q3. And that had to do with some supply conditions with external suppliers, for example, on packaging that made availability difficult across Personal Care. Also some in our Kleenex business, I think we’ve talked about a key ingredient that we weren’t able to get access to, that we developed a secondary source to during the course of the year. So, those were kind of the big factors, I would say. I think we mentioned that on the last quarter call, we didn’t make the biggest deal about it.
We were working through this challenge with our suppliers, with our customers, and they were fully aware of it. But it’s not something that we communicated publicly that often. But I would say for the better part of the year, that did suppress our share performance. I’m not saying that was the only driver, but I think it was a fairly significant driver. We have addressed those issues. I’d say our commercial execution is going to be stronger than ever. We’re really past all these constraints that I talked about. And our consumption is moving in the right direction. Our share has moved in the right direction in the fourth quarter as well in North America.
Jason English: Got it. Good stuff. Thanks a lot. I’ll pass it on and look forward to see you in March.
Mike Hsu: Okay. Thanks, Jason. Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. Your next question is coming from Anna Lizzul from Bank of America. Your line is live.
Anna Lizzul: Hi, good morning, and thank you for the question. I wanted to follow up on market share in light of your exposure to private label, since in your track channels, private label share has been creeping up in some of your categories. Just wondering, how are you thinking about brand investment with marketing versus promotions in order to maintain and grow market share? Thank you.
Mike Hsu: Okay. Yeah, great question, Anna. Core to our business, I’d say a couple of things. First of all, on market share, I’m confident that our market share performance this year is going to improve from last year. Definitely, I was not happy with our performance on share last year. For perspective, on a weighted basis, which we use as an internal metric, we don’t talk about as much publicly, but on a weighted basis, we are down globally about 40 bps, okay? So, not falling off a cliff, but not what we want. So, we want to be growing weighted share as well. On a cohort basis, which is the one we usually talk to you all about, we are up or even and just under 40%. And so that’s below our goal of 50% or more, of which I’d say we were kind of jumping over that bar back in 2021.
So, I think we are where we are today, what we’re going to build from here. I’d say a couple of things. All that said, probably the biggest challenge has been for us in North America related to the supply constraints that I just talked about. I did want to note. We’ve had strong gains and really, really strong market positions in most of our largest markets. Just for reference, in South Korea, which is our second largest business, we’re up probably about 20 share points over the last five years. And in Australia and New Zealand, we’re up somewhere between 10 and 15 share points over the last five years. Andrex, in the quarter, which is our number fifth largest business, was up over 300 bps on share just in the quarter. So, we feel very good — and one more on China.
