Jeremy Smeltser: Yes. I mean, obviously, we’ve spent under the average category for where we play over the past few years. I think the strategy is a little bit different by business and even within the business sometimes by brand. We have some premium brands in our global pet care business that play at the high-end of the price points in their various subcategories. But that’s the type of business where you’re not doing the traditional advertising that costs as much as what you do in some other CPG categories. So the spend is relatively modest, but it has led us to be successful in growing at or above category for a number of years. I think when you look at the Home & Garden business, it’s a bit of a different story. We have a value proposition play as part of our brand strategy.
So we don’t want to spend at 0, but you’re not going to see us spend at 4% of sales. That just doesn’t make sense for what we do and who we’re trying to be for our consumers. And in HPC, we have brands really across the price points, but the reality is we have a fairly significant amount of revenue at opening the mid-price point with the brands that we have. And so again, while we want to invest more than we did in ’22 and ’23, and we intend to, actually, we’ve already started, again, we don’t need to be at 3% or 4% of sales. I think — 1.5%, 2% of sales, I think even coming out of our business units. I think they would tell you that sufficient blended for what we’re trying to be brand by brand within our businesses.
Olivia Tong: Got it. And then just in terms of thinking about profitability by division, if you compare this year’s EBITDA margin to pre-covid levels by segment. We’re still quite a bit below, particularly on HPC and Home & Garden. But Pet’s actually not that different. So as you think about rebuilding that EBITDA, can you talk about the divisions, where do you see sort of greater progression early on versus those that will take a little bit longer to neutralize.
Jeremy Smeltser: Sure. Yes. I mean I think David just hit it in the last question on HPC, right? Where we’ve gotten down into this lower single-digit level, and we’d like to be back in the high single-digit, low double-digit level. over the coming couple of years. And I think that’s probably all the level of margin that the combination of those categories and our brands and where we play will allow I think you’re spot on, on Global Pet Care, Olivia, I think that’s really directionally the right margin level and the key focus is on actually growing the top line and dropping it down to the bottom line and continuing to invest in the brands and new products. And then in Home & Garden, look structurally, I don’t think there’s anything different inside our business other than the fact that we have had to absorb the inflation that we have, like everybody else has and had the price for it and the impact it’s having on our consumers.
But the last two years, overall production and our sales to our retail customers is lower than we think a normal season will be. And that naturally will leverage up. And Q4 is a great example of that. As I talked about earlier, Q4 came in stronger because of the late good weather for our particular categories and both our net sales and our margins over delivered expectations in the quarter. So I think that’s what we’d like to see as we get to a more normalized season whenever that might happen.
Olivia Tong: Got it. And then just last question around uses of cash and share repurchase. Obviously, nice to see the move there. But as we think about sort of continuing to deploy the cash why shouldn’t we expect you to continue to buy back shares if presumably right now, you’re still looking to put cash to work, your focus right now. It certainly seems to be more internally than looking to add assets, so just if you could talk a little bit about share repurchase and thoughts about cash allocation, that would be great.
David Maura: Yes. Look, I think we did a study. We returned about $3 billion of cash to shareholders in the last 5 years. We’ve just returned $5 billion — $500 million, almost wrapping that up we’ve got a dividend out there. So returning a lot of cash to shareholders this calendar year, we continue to think we’re materially undervalued. And so you can probably expect us to continue to buy shares, but we’ve got to finish this current $500 million ASR, and we’ll update you when that’s done.
Olivia Tong: Got it. Thank you.
David Maura: Thanks, Olivia.
Operator: Thank you. And this does conclude today’s question-and-answer session. And I would like to turn the conference back over to Faisal Qadir for any further remarks.
Faisal Qadir: Thank you. With that, we have reached the top of the hour, so we will conclude our conference call. Thank you to David and Jeremy. And on behalf of Spectrum Brands, thank you all for your participation.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating.
