Ghansham Panjabi : And then just finally on your guidance, it looks like it’s low-to-mid single-digits throughout sales, EBITDA, EPS. Why wouldn’t operating leverage be higher in context of what you’re doing in terms of portfolio optimization et cetera? And then just separately Steve, congrats on your retirement announcement, best wishes for the future. Thanks so much.
Stephen Rolfs: Thanks so much. I would say maybe the guidance is a little bit conservative. We say low single-digits to mid-single-digits. There’s a bit of a change implied within each one of those. I think after the first quarter as has been our practice, we will kind of give you an update and a sense of things as the year progresses. But I’d like to set kind of the floor where we’re going to be and I feel very confident that unlike ’23 where there was a tremendous amount of volatility in destocking and all these other factors, our guidance kind of signals that we believe that, that is over and the magnitude of our new wins would be able to overcome any market dynamics. The degree of that ability to overcome, let’s see how the year progresses.
Many of our customers are very much driving for volume growth, that would be a really nice development. The new wins generate lots of volume, pricing is a fairly nominal thing for 2024. So, yes, the volume comes and to your point we should have really nice operating leverage in the businesses. But with respect to the portfolio improvement plan, much of that benefit will be obviously spread out over 2024 and 2025. We endeavor to get those things done as quickly as possible, but I’m realistic enough to realize that, you can screw those up if you’re not very, very thoughtful and particular about how you do those. We have a lot of experience here. We have a lot of lessons learned, Ghansham, as well going back to sort of 2017. I’m feeling very, very confident that this one will be executed quite smartly and I don’t anticipate any issues there.
But the savings will flow in over that say, two-year period. But yes, I’d like to be able to tell you next quarter, you know what, things are looking even better than I thought. But for right now, I think this is a pretty good start to the year and a pretty good guidance that I think we could all feel very committed to achieving.
Operator: The next question comes from Nicola Tang of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Nicola Tang: Hi everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. Actually, you’re just starting to touch on one of the topics which I wanted to ask about, which is, the portfolio optimization and you referenced learnings from 2017. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that and what gives you confidence that the portfolio optimization plan will run more smoothly this time? And also, just in terms of the areas that you identified, how did you sort of make that assessment around which specific plants or production sites to shut down and just tie another one on the same topic? Should we kind of take an even split in terms of the cost savings across Flavors and Colors?
Paul Manning : So, number one, we will periodically review sites, business units. We look at different dimensions of the business and we see what part is running well and has optimized production footprint, for example, or we’re able to achieve good synergies. And so, I think as we looked at the overall portfolio, we came up with the one that we did. It’s quite a bit smaller than anything we’ve done previously. So, I suppose to your question about, how do we think this is going to go and do you think we’ll do well here? I think it’s much smaller. In one instance we’re moving a plant in Europe. We’ve begun the consultation process there. And so that is a plant that’s very similar to one that we successfully consolidated in the past.
That gives me a great deal of confidence. In fact, most of the folks who were involved with that are running this one as well. So, that would probably be the biggest component of the project is a value, is that one plan in Europe that we would consolidate into the Americas? I think the other thing is just — there were lots of lessons learned from the previous restructuring and I was the CEO then and I’m responsible for the screw ups then. And so, I know what all the screw ups are. And so, we’ve made a very concerted effort to plan differently and evaluate those differently. And so, I think, we’ve put more resources towards this project and again, we can anticipate with a great deal of confidence that where the trouble areas would be on such a move beyond that one plant that produces products.
