We would ship them. We would force them to provide 23 orders. We’d ship them 23 different LTL shipments. It was confusing, chaotic, and we didn’t have one voice to that customer. And that’s — I could have picked any number of customers where that was the case. If you look at where we are today, we interface with them with one legal entity, one vendor number. We’ve converted our shipments from what was probably in the 20s, on 20% full truckload to now 80% full truckload shipments. So, we are a dramatically better supplier to retailers and they recognize that and seen the improvement that we’ve made. And we are the largest — in most of our retail customers, the largest general merchandise supplier to them. They want us to win. They recognize the journey that we’re on and they’re leaning in to help support us.
We’re not making any of these choices in a vacuum. When we make these choices to improve the structural economics, we have very open dialogues with our retail customers so that we don’t surprise them, we don’t leave them in a bind. But we’ve got to make the right choices for Newell, and we’re trying to do this in a way that’s a win-win partnership with them. And I think largely, the retail — our largest customers are very supportive of that.
Operator: And our final question comes from the line of Filippo Falorni with Citi.
Filippo Falorni: First question on the inventory side. You guys both mentioned that you feel like you’re at the tail end of the inventory reductions. I guess what gives you the confidence that that’s the case, in case the categories from a consumption level were to continue to be soft? Is there any risk of a further reduction into next year? And then, from a — second question on a pricing standpoint. I know your price actions were justified, but to what extent your worst market share performance was driven by competitors not following on pricing? If you can comment on that would be great. Thank you.
Chris Peterson: Yes. Let me start with the inventory. So one of the things that we do is we measure weeks of coverage at our top retailers. And we get the data directly from the retailers of how much inventory they have on hand. And as we saw their weeks of cover accelerate last year when the market shifted in Q3 of last year, we’ve now seen their weeks of cover come back down. And actually, as we’ve implemented Ovid in the U.S. market, our delivery times are much — are also much shorter, which has allowed them to reduce weeks of cover even more. And so, from our view of weeks of cover, we believe that largely the weeks of cover are in a good place and we think retailers would be taking significant out-of-stock risk if they go lower on weeks of cover.
To your question on if the consumption continues to go down, couldn’t that allow — because you maintain the same weeks of cover, could that allow another amount of inventory reduction? The answer to that is yes, but it’s not going to be anywhere near the magnitude of what we’ve seen over the last 9 to 12 months. On the pricing question, I think that we have largely led pricing because we are the market-leading brands in most of the categories in which we compete. I would say broadly, we’ve seen competition follow for the most part because everybody was dealing with the same input cost inflation and there wasn’t really an opportunity for them not to follow. However, there are selective cases and selective businesses where we priced and competition has not fully followed.
And we are monitoring those situations. And if we need to, we will react appropriately to make sure that we’re maintaining our market share.
Operator: Thank you. This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. A replay of today’s call will be available later today on the Company’s website at ir.newellbrands.com. You may now disconnect. Have a great day.
