Vincent Morales: Jeff, this is Vince. In terms of share repo, obviously, your numbers are accurate, in terms of the last several years. Again, we’ve gone — if you look over a longer time horizon, there’s been times where we’ve done minimal share repurchases for consecutive number of years. Typically, when we’re more active in M&A, there’s been times where we’ve done a large portion of share repurchases over a couple of series of years when the M&A market is not as robust, and we have excess cash or excess balance sheet capacity. When you look — we do calculate what we think is our intrinsic value of our stock price. We do feel that with the 10% growth rate we have going forward in our estimates, there are times where it’s an imperative for us to look at share repo as an option.
As Tim said, we have a prioritized list of cash deployment. And again, dividend, keeping the businesses healthy with CapEx. We look at M&A and then we look at the intrinsic value of the stock based on our assessment and that’s how we effectuate the cash deployment.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Kevin McCarthy with VRP. Your line is open.
Kevin McCarthy: Thank you and good morning. Tim, a few questions for you on the subject of Europe. I think EMEA was 31% of your mix last year if you do wind up divesting some or all of U.S. and Canada architectural, maybe that number will rise a little bit, moving forward. And it sounds like in contrast to China and India, which came in very strong, Europe did come in weaker than you expected. So a few questions would be, A, what is driving the variance versus your prior expectation in Europe exactly? B, maybe you can provide some color on the consumer-facing businesses that you have there versus industrial. And I’m curious to understand whether rationalization of your customers’ capacity is playing a role at all. We were hearing more and more about that from various chemical companies anyway.
So just a little bit more color on the region there and kind of what glide path of volume you need macro-wise to achieve that positive volume growth overall for the company that you alluded to?
Timothy Knavish: Yes. Thanks, Kevin. I’ll take the last one first just to kick it off here. We have not seen any significant — I can’t, frankly, think of any of our customers that have rationalized their capacity to the point that it’s affecting our numbers in Europe. In Europe, I’d say the two businesses that that probably affected us the most in Q1, one was consumer facing, and that was Deco. That was slower than we expected, mostly in France and in the Nordics. We did see green shoots in the East, where we’re also quite strong, so that’s given us a little optimism looking forward. The second business on the Industrial segment, Automotive. Automotive was weaker than we expected for the quarter. So that gives some insights there.
But as we look forward, we do — again, early days in April, we’re seeing a better order book and better shipments, we do see — we do believe that as we talk to our customers, that the Deco business is in those hard-hit countries is bouncing off the bottom. They’re not expecting it to get worse. And we do see recoveries beginning to happen in the East. And again, each individually, maybe not the largest Deco markets, but when you add them together, they’re important part of our portfolio. Places like Poland, places like Romania, where we have strong number 1 positions in growing, places like Hungary and Czech. So we do see some green shoots there. So we are not expecting Deco to get worse, but we’re also not naive enough to say there’s going to be a huge V-shape, but we are expecting incremental improvements.
And if you think about all the cost actions that we’ve taken on that continent, a little bit of incremental volume delivers really good leverage. Automotive. We’re taking a bit of a wait and see. Also, we’re not expecting it to get worse. But marginally, it’s a similar story, although a very different end customer base. We are expecting modest recovery, but we’re watching it closely. And at the end of the day, with Europe, this has been a benign macro environment for a decade, maybe more. But — and our teams have shown the ability to do what they need to do from a positive mix, a positive price and importantly, a structural cost standpoint to deliver earnings and cash even in that very benign environment. So, sum it all up, Q1 was worse than we expected in those couple of businesses.
We are expecting sequentially incremental improvements, which will give us good leverage and — but we are watching it closely, and if we don’t see what we need to see, we will take further structural cost actions.
Vincent Morales: Yes. And Kevin, this is Vince. I’ll just add a point on architectural. As Tim mentioned, lower than our expectations in Q1, largely attributed to March. If you look at our performance through the first two months of the year, so Jan, Feb, that business was on our targets. We do feel there was a bigger Easter impact that we’re seeing, again, a snapback at least early in April in that business.
Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from the line of Aleksey Yefremov from KeyCorp. Your line is open.
Unidentified Analyst: Thank you and good morning. This is [Ryan] (ph). I’m on for Aleksey. Just wanted to talk a little bit more about the targeted pricing you’re doing in Performance Coatings. Wondering if you can discuss some of the areas other than Refinish. And then just wondering if you guys are like having some more success in recent weeks following this uptick in oil. Thanks.
