Chris Peterson: Yes. Thanks, Brian. I think we’re very excited about the progress made. We’ve moved at incredibly rapid pace to do the capability assessment to launch the strategy to cascade the strategy. We’ve changed the operating model. We’ve upgraded talent. All of those things have gone, frankly, incredibly well and incredibly quick. I think the piece that is still ahead of us that I wake up every morning thinking about is how do we operationalize this and build it into the culture of the company, because and that’s the work that I referenced when I talked about the top priority heading into ’24 of operationalizing the new strategy and the operating model, because I think we now have an outstanding executive committee, which is my set of direct reports, that is driving the change, driving urgency in implementing the strategy.
What we need to do now is embed that throughout the entire 25,000 people that are working at Newell so that we are all operating in a consistent direction and we make the culture change to a performance-oriented outcome-based organization structure. We’re seeing good signs of that. I just want to see it more broadly across the company. And I think that’s what we’re trying to do as we head into this year.
Brian McNamara: And just a quick follow-up. Are there any categories you’re seeing shelf space increase at retail? And if not, what are you guys bringing to the table today relative to the competitors you have to displace?
Chris Peterson: Yes. We are seeing shelf space increases in a number of our businesses. And we, because the line reviews for 2024 have largely been completed, we have pretty good visibility to that. So as an example, and I keep coming back to the Sharpie Creative Marker example, but the retailer acceptance behind that initiative has been very strong. We expect to gain incremental shelf space as a result of that initiative. We’re also working with a number of retailers on category reinvention that we believe can trigger not only market growth, but market share growth for Newell at the same time. The new business development program, I mentioned is coming online, and we’ve got some good examples of gaining incremental distribution.
One that comes to mind, for example, is we have a terrific product on Rubbermaid Brilliance, which is a food storage product. Well, the new business development team went and sold that product into the container store. So we’re now listed at, the Container Store. We were not doing business with The Container Store previously as an example. And I could go through 15 or 20 of those types of examples where we’re starting to get on the field with a broader set of retailers and gaining shelf space, and we think that trend is going to accelerate as our new business development capability improves, as our category management capability improves, as our innovation pipeline improves and as our brand-building capabilities continue to accelerate. So that’s the goal.
And I think we’ll talk more about those examples as we go forward here.
Brian McNamara: Thanks very much. I appreciate the detail.
Operator: Our last question today comes from Steve Powers of Deutsche Bank.
Steve Powers: Hey, thanks. Good morning everybody. Two questions. Mark, just one for you, just to clarify. You mentioned international, the expectation in international will be up this year. I guess was that just a core sales comment? Or is it, is there a prospect of U.S. dollar growth being positive to kind of offsetting FX, number one? And then Chris, maybe for you. Just, you talked about the sequential improvements relative to the starting point in the first quarter through the year. I guess trying to figure out how steep that curve is and what you contemplate as an exit rate on the year, at least at the high end of guidance, is there a prospect of you exiting in positive territory exiting the year? Or are we more expecting declines all the way through the year and therefore, exiting at a lower rate as we go into ’25? Thank you.
Mark Erceg: So real quickly, as it relates to the international business for fiscal ’24, yes, we expect core sales to be up mid-single digits, and we would expect net sales to also be up when all is said and done. One quick thing before Chris takes the back half of your question that I think is important, because we are as impatient for progress as the investment community is, but we really believe that meaningful progress was made during the course of ’23. If you go back and look at our gross margin and our Op margin in ’22, they’re both down 180 and 160 basis points, respectively. During ’23, our gross margin inflected in the third quarter and during ’23 our op margin inflected in the fourth quarter. And during ’24, both gross margin and Op margin are going to be up strong despite the fact that the remaining sales compression on the top line.
