Andrea Teixeira: Yes, yes. So I have two questions. First, on the deal, and if we step back, Tom, on this divestiture, you talked about strategic options for you now, as you have been, and now you’re going to be able to focus in the US. Can you think about, like, potentially bigger transactions, transformation of transactions as you had attempted in the past obviously with, you know, your largest competitor? Is that, like, this obviously puts you in a completely different position from a capital structure perspective? You’re going to have excess cash, no leverage. You’re going to have obviously additional free cash. I mean, it just looks a very little impact on your free cash flow. So from an LBO perspective or anything you can think of, I was just hoping to see if you — where could this company take in terms of next steps from a strategic perspective?
And then second on the underlying business, there are a couple of things that I wanted to clarify. One is the Water Direct and Exchange. Can you talk a bit more about the composition of the top line? I know this is something that investors and CPG have been asking throughout. Like, in terms of volume, customers, and pricing within the third quarter growth. And also, I mean, I know in the dispensers you had a very tough comparison in the quarter. I think you were shipping ahead of consumption, ahead of the price increase last year. But just a little bit of color there, if you’re seeing anything as it relates to any deceleration or anything that we should be aware of?
Tom Harrington : All right, Andrea.
Andrea Teixeira: I know it’s a lot.
Tom Harrington : Yeah, we’ll see if I, we’ll get through this. So let’s talk about our capital deployment strategy, right, which I think is important. As we see it today, we will invest in growth in North America, right? So that’s the organic triggers, digital capabilities, as well as investments against high profit generating projects. And that would be some of the plans that we’ve discussed in the past. As an example, continued development on our digital capabilities, so to support the growth of the top line from an organic perspective. We are focused on deleverage, so we will reduce the cash flow with the revolver to zero at the time of closing, which will get us, you know, in a position that we could maintain the 2.5 times leverage go forward on, for the foreseeable future.
That is our intended path. We have the ability with, because we have a robust pipeline of, think of it as Water Direct M&A tuck-in, that we will invest energy there because they remain highly synergistic and help us build both EBITDA, but certainly EBITDA margins as we leverage that, those incremental customers and revenue through inside the markets where we execute those. So that’d be a primary focus of ours. And of course, we’ve referenced share repurchase as part of our go forward capital deployment strategy. We don’t see anything transformative on the near term horizon. We will look at what I’ll call water adjacency. So are there other highly profitable areas that fit in water, because we are a water company, that we will consider there’s nothing imminent or actionable there, but this gives us the ability to further pursue adjacencies that fit with our model and that at the end of the day would, in order to our shareholders benefit.
So that’s the capital deployment, our current view of how we’ll use cash and responsive to your question about that biggest customer. I’ll skip the revenue. I’ll leave that one for David, but I’ll just touch base briefly on your dispenser question. Yes, we had a big comp. We were able to sell through roughly 252,000 dispensers. We’re confident in our ability to get to approximately a million this year, importantly, a million of sell through in 2023. Importantly, we’re very focused on brick-and-mortar as opposed to e-commerce and part of our cycle or the comp we have, it’s because of some activities we did a year ago in e-commerce. But we’ve really shifted to be focused on that brick-and-mortar because we have a clear line of sight to the connectivity.
When I sell a dispenser to a large retailer, I can see it translate into an exchange sale. It’s much harder for us to see that benefit in e-commerce. So I think some of the future work that the team will have to do is how do we improve that visibility in e-commerce? We’re not there today. And shift our real focus to how do we sell more in big box retailers and all of our customers where we enjoy a relationship where they sell dispensers. Hopefully that clarifies that a bit. And then I’ll flip your revenue question or component questions over to David.
Andrea Teixeira: Thank you.
David Hass : Yes, Andrea, within the quarter itself, again focused on the North America side as that’s our go forward business, we had a positive volume contribution of close to a percent with the balance being pricing. And so that obviously shows a sequencing that is how we had articulated the pacing would undergo throughout the calendar year. And that came true within Water Direct and Exchange being about a point of volume and the balance being price.
Andrea Teixeira: Very helpful. I’ll pass it on. Thank you.
David Hass : Thank you, Andrea.
Tom Harrington : Thanks, Andrea.
Operator: Thank you. Your next question comes from Daniel Moore, [BJS Securities]. Daniel, please go ahead.
Daniel Moore : Thank you. Good morning, Tom, David. And Tom, thank you again. Best of luck, I think you left this company with an exceptional collection of assets that’s poised for growth going forward. I wanted to —
