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The Clorox Company (CLX)

Q3 2015 Earnings Call· Fri, May 1, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to The Clorox Company Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Earnings Release Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of our prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Mr. Steve Austenfeld, Vice President of Investor Relations for The Clorox Company. Mr. Austenfeld, you may begin your conference.

Steven Austenfeld - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining Clorox's third quarter conference call. On the call with me today are Benno Dorer, Colorx's CEO, and Steve Robb, our Chief Financial Officer. We're broadcasting this call over the Internet and a replay of the call will be available for seven days at our website, thecloroxcompany.com. Let me remind you that on today's call we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures including, but not limited to, free cash flow, EBIT margin, debt-to-EBITDA and economic profit. Management believes that providing insights on these measures enables investors to better understand and analyze our ongoing results of operations. Reconciliation with the most directly comparable financial measures determined in accordance with GAAP can be found in today's press release, this webcast's prepared remarks or supplemental information available in the Financial Results area of our website, as well as in our filings with the SEC. In particular, it may be helpful to refer to tables located at the end of today's earnings release. Please recognize that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements. Actual results or outcomes could differ materially from management's expectations and plans. Please review our most recent 10-K filing with the SEC and our other SEC filings for a description of important factors that could cause results or outcomes to differ materially from management's expectations and plans. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. So with that, I'll start by covering highlights of our third quarter business performance by segment. Steve Robb will then address our financial results and updated financial outlook for fiscal year 2015. And finally, Benno will provide his perspective, and then we will open it up for your questions. Please recognize that all of today's commentary is on a continuing operations basis unless otherwise…

Operator

Operator

Thank you, Mr. Dorer. Our first question will come from Steve Powers of UBS.

Steve R. Powers - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Great. Hi, Benno, Steve, and Steve. I wanted to ask a question around the gross margin guidance, Steve. I'm not sure how you define moderate expansion. But if I take your full-year guidance of 1% to 2% in the top line and assume, just as a starting point, Q4 gross margin looks like Q3 in terms of expansion, that's going to put your gross margin performance for the year up about 40 basis points, if my math is correct. So I guess first does 40 basis points line up as moderate for you? And then second, is there any reason why gross margin expansion shouldn't actually accelerate in Q4, given the magnitude of the presumed commodity benefits and the continued cost saves? I know you flagged the higher trade promotion in your outlook a couple of times. And I'm assuming that's particularly focused on Glad, where you've got the price gap issue. But just how significant a spike in gross to net are you expecting in Q4, if you can size that order of magnitude versus Q3? Thanks. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. We are expecting a meaningful improvement in gross margins in the fourth quarter. Obviously, we're very pleased with the results we saw in the third quarter where we added almost a little over a full point of gross margin. And what we saw in the third quarter, and this is relevant to the fourth quarter, strong cost-savings programs, pricing actions that are working in the market. In the third quarter, commodity costs were flat. And so all those benefits flowed through. When you look forward to the fourth quarter, we feel great about the pricing. We feel very good about the cost savings. And importantly, we expect to get some commodity cost tailwinds, okay, and that will probably be the first quarter this year where we're actually getting tailwinds, so I would expect a meaningful gross margin expansion in the fourth quarter. Now for the full year, stepping back, we do expect EBIT margin to be about flat. And the reason for that is we are going to continue to step up our investments in consumer demand-building investments, and our SG&A costs are expected to be about 14% for the full year. So I think some of the benefit in the fourth quarter in gross margin will be offset by some of these other factors, but nonetheless you should see some pretty nice numbers.

Steve R. Powers - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

And I guess just to square that with moderate expansion and in terms of language of your outlook, if you're up meaningfully in the fourth quarter, sounds like at least as much as the third quarter, that's 50 basis points or so. That's going to be a sizeable – is that what you define as moderate gross margin expansion? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Steve, I'll let you do your math. I'll let you apply your judgment. Keep in mind, the first half was a bit more challenging for us. Second half, as we expected, gross margins are expected to do better. We're seeing it in the third quarter. We'll see it again in the fourth quarter. And I think, again, for the year you're going to see some good margin expansion at the gross margin line, but EBIT margins should be about flat.

Steve R. Powers - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. And is there any way to frame or – Steve mentioned a couple of times increasing trade spends. You got increasing investments throughout the press release. You talk about higher trade promotion in your outlook. You flagged the price gap issue in Glad. So how much incremental investment should we be thinking about relative to the Q3 run rate as we look forward on that trade promo line? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Well, let me step back and just talk about the full year for a second in long term. First, you might recall that on our 2020 strategy, one of the things that we wanted to do was to invest in incremental point of sales in consumer demand-building investment and to some extent in R&D. We started that in the fourth quarter of last year. I think we've continued it through this year. So I think what you should expect is a mix of both trade spending as we're looking to drive trial and repeat on new products, as well as just advertising as we keep those brands healthy. But I think you'll see us consistently do this over the coming quarters. But again, full year you should see a nice increase, consistent with what you've seen year to date. Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: And Steve, this is Benno. One thing I would add is that you should see the incremental dollars probably float around depending on where they deliver the ROI, depending on the strategic needs at any given point. Right now, it's fair to say that more dollars go into trade promotion, one, to support the price increases, but two, also to support fast distribution startup behind what is a really solid innovation program. Over time, that might change and the dollars might go into different buckets. But as Steve Robb said, this increase in spend is going to be here to stay and in line with our strategies.

Steve R. Powers - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll hear next from Jason English from Goldman Sachs. Jason M. English - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hey. Good afternoon, folks. Thank you for the question. I wanted to focus on your International business quickly. I know you've made a lot of investments in the recent years or taken a lot steps, I should say, in recent years to try to improve the profitability – walking away from Venezuela, the SAP investment. Yet looking at profitability I think from a margin perspective, this quarter marked a new all-time low. So can you talk more – I know FX is a pressure point here, but from just a profitability perspective, what's driving the ongoing erosion? What can you do to maybe fix it, and what's a realistic expectation as we think about the forward there? Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Jason, thank you for that. Well, our long-term aspiration in International is to grow 5% to 7% in sales but importantly grow profitably. And it's fair to say that at this point we're not meeting those expectations. I would say that operationally we're executing well, but we all know this is a very challenging environment that will likely continue well into next fiscal year. The key drivers, to your question, a lot of them are macroeconomic in nature around GDP, around cost inflation, price controls and FX. Again, these are factors that our peers are seeing as well, and they're pretty well established. Going forward, our focus will be on rebuilding margin. I'm not happy about the profitability, and rebuilding margin is our first priority. I would point at a few key tactics. One, continued pricing to offset inflation. Two, innovation where margin accretive that drives trade up, and we're seeing good results behind tactics like…

Operator

Operator

Olivia Tong with Bank of America Merrill Lynch, your line is open.

Olivia Tong - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Thank you. Good afternoon. I just wanted to talk a little bit about commodities because you obviously started to see that turn this quarter and just kind of get a better sensing of what you were thinking sort of for 2016 in terms where that can go. And then also on the logistics costs, I know there are a lot of factors that go in there, but just wondering if you could provide more color as that number moves around. Is that just continuing higher truck and rail costs, or is there something else that we should be thinking about? Thanks. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. So let me start with the logistics question, Olivia. What we have seen – and this is not unique to Clorox. As we've talked many times before, there's two fundamental problems in logistics that everybody is facing – simply not enough drivers and trucks. Part of that is changing rules and regulations. Part of it is probably a fallout from the economic slowdown. A lot of trucking companies went out of businesses. There's just not enough trucks on the road, and rail has been somewhat congested. And so that's been driving up overall logistics costs. I think this area may be impacting Clorox a bit more though than other companies because some of our plants are in more rural locations. We have longer shipping lanes, and we also tend to ship things like bleach and charcoal and cat litter, which weigh a bit more and so you pay a bit more there. So it's an ongoing pressure. It's something that we fully expect will continue through next year, which is why again we're focusing on pricing and cost savings to address it. In terms of the outlook for commodity costs, again as I said in my opening comments, we anticipate commodity costs to be about flat on the year. But we do expect to get some tailwinds in the fourth quarter. What we're watching very carefully right now is energy prices. Energy prices over the last four weeks to eight weeks have moved up pretty sharply. And one of the things we know over time is that commodity costs tend to come down slowly but they move up pretty quickly And so resin prices appear to have found a bottom. They're starting to firm up. I do expect that in the fourth quarter there'll be some tailwinds. And there might be some tailwinds going into early fiscal 2016. But we're just keeping a sharp eye on this because these markets have a tendency to swing pretty quickly. But we'll have a better update for you in early August when we provide our outlook for fiscal 2016.

Olivia Tong - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Got it. Thanks. And then on bleach pricing, you mentioned that you're gaining share but if private label doesn't end up following in the pricing, what's the game plan there? Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, Olivia. So for everybody, as a reminder, we took a 7% price increase in February. Our price increase was executed successfully. And on the competitive side, I would say at this point it's early days and we need to let this play out. Some accounts did follow on the private label side, some not yet. So it's not clear where this will end up. I would offer a few pieces of perspective. First of all, the price increases continue to be cost-justified. Our competitors see the same cost increases that we do. So again, early days, we need to let this play out. We do have a strong track record obviously taking price increases over the long term. We know how to execute pricing and we're certainly committed to growing our categories profitably. We had anticipated the need to spend some of the pricing benefit back in trade promotion. This is exactly what's happening. This is exactly what is reflected in our outlook. So we are staying the course on pricing on bleach, and also on Glad for that matter, but we'll also stay agile if needed. So if we need to course-correct down the road, we will. But at this point, my expectation is that this price increase will be executed successfully. We'll probably see, also as a disclaimer, volumes and shares over a few quarters be somewhat depressed. Again, that's a normal thing, and after three quarters to four quarters, once consumers are used to new price points, we should see that ease up and normalize. But overall I would say the price increases are on track.

Olivia Tong - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Analyst

Got it. Thanks a bunch.

Operator

Operator

We'll hear next from Joe Altobello from Raymond James. Joseph Nicholas Altobello - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Thank you. Good morning. First, I guess since we're on bleach, I'll start there in terms of a housekeeping question. You mentioned that Glad volumes were down 9% after the price increase. And I'm not sure you gave the bleach volume number in your prepared remarks. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Our Laundry business in total, and that includes Clorox 2, it was down, from a volume standpoint, mid-single digits. Joseph Nicholas Altobello - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. So as expected, I would think. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: As expected. There was no surprise there for us, as Benno said. Joseph Nicholas Altobello - Raymond James & Associates, Inc.: Okay. And in terms of Litter and Brita, obviously you guys have struggled in both of these areas of late. And it sounds like they're moving in opposite directions. It seems like Brita's getting a little bit better. And I'm curious, number one, has that business turned a corner, or is still a lot of wood to chop there? And two, how do you guys fix Litter? And I know this is a very tough question you've been asking for probably three years now. But it's not for lack of spending, and it's not for lack of innovation but that business continues to decline. So I'm just curious if there is something that we haven't heard from you guys yet that you're thinking about to try to turn around that business. Thanks. Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, Joe. Thanks. Brita first, Brita has been soft recently, and certainly on the share side we're…

Operator

Operator

Bill Schmitz from Deutsche Bank, please go ahead.

Bill Schmitz - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Hey, guys. Good morning. Hey, the first question, a couple of housekeeping items. The first is the corporate line in the segment data has been super bouncy, and I think a lot of that is incentive comp. But when you look forward, is the right number like $60 million a quarter? Is that about right? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: You're right in your first conclusion, which is incentive – it includes a lot of things, interest income and expense and other things. But incentive compensation is really what's causing it to move around, and you're going to see variability across the quarters. The simplest way I'd have you, if you're modeling this out, model this year SG&A cost at about 14% of sales I think is right. And I think again, as we've said many times, over the longer term we'd like to get that number below 14%, but that might be the easiest way to think of this.

Bill Schmitz - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Yeah. I mean, the reason I asked the question is I know you're not going to give us guidance for next year, but there's a really difficult comp on the corporate line in the first quarter. And I think if you look at the Street numbers, if you kind of normalize it to the regular corporate number, the number is like $0.10 too high. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. I haven't seen the consensus for the first quarter, so I really can't comment on that. Again, all I can say is that, for modeling purposes, you're going to see variability across the quarters in SG&A cost, as we previously discussed, and 14% is probably a really good number to use at this point.

Bill Schmitz - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. That's helpful. And then the net-debt-to-EBITDA now is like 1.5 turns, and I think that's fairly below where you guys kind of feel comfortable. So what's the plan on the sort of balance sheet utilization front? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. At the end of the third quarter, our debt-to-EBITDA came in at 1.9, okay? So it's certainly...

Bill Schmitz - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

(43:07) Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: I understood. Understood. Yeah. We look at – you've got to also remember some of that cash is overseas and somewhat trapped. So we like to think of it as about a 1.9 against the target of 2 to 2.5. In any case, our free cash flow fiscal year to date is up 11% versus year ago. So we're certainly feeling very good about our ability to convert sales to cash. And it gives us a lot of financial flexibility. We've started to use some of that money, as we've discussed for the last few quarters, to invest for growth and we've been putting more money into growth and it's certainly working. We're going to keep the dividend healthy. But you saw us in the third quarter re-enter the market for share repurchases essentially to start offsetting stock option dilution that's occurred over the last couple of quarters. I think longer term what you'll see us do is we'll continue to obviously support the growth of our business organically with investments. We continue to look for bolt-on acquisitions in the areas that we've discussed and we'll keep the dividend healthy and return cash that we don't need back to the shareholders. So we're certainly sitting in a very good spot with a lot of financial flexibility.

Bill Schmitz - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Got you. And I know some people complain that I ask too many questions on these calls. But the last one is it seems like finally like the scan to non-scan channels are aligned. Is that going to be the case going forward? So is the sort of Costco stuff lapped and now it seems like, by channel, things are kind of growing at the same rate? Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Should be, yes. So as you rightly say, Bill, the Costco matter, we're through. That happened in Q3 of last year. So we should see, barring any unforeseen events, scan to non-scan to be reasonably aligned, yeah.

Bill Schmitz - Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc.

Analyst

Great. Thanks so much, guys.

Operator

Operator

We'll hear next from Ali Dibadj from Bernstein. Ali Dibadj - Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. LLC: Hey, guys. Just wanted to go back to the cost justified-ness of the price increases. When I look at your gross margin drivers, at least in this quarter, the 140 basis points you got from price is significantly higher than the combo of commodities and manufacturing logistics. So I'm trying to understand why now was the right time, with the accumulation of all the impacts for the past year or so of commodities impacting you. And then as you look forward, clearly you have to invest back in the business to try to close some of the price gaps. But I guess I'm trying to understand the logic of why do this in the first place if you're going to try to spend back. Is it just because you want to get a higher lift price and hope the promo kind of eventually goes away, or is there another logic behind this around innovation or something else? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Let me start off and talk about the cost base, and then maybe I can have Benno weigh in with his point of view, the longer-term view of the business. Starting with cost, keep in mind we're not looking at this for a quarter or two. We actually look at this over a longer period of time. We tend to price to the long-term average cost of where we think these markets are going. And again, as we've pointed out, logistics costs are up, wage inflation is real, healthcare costs are up, commodities are actually still up in the first half of the fiscal; they went flat in the third quarter. But we have yet…

Operator

Operator

We'll hear next from John Faucher from JPMorgan.

John A. Faucher - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Yes. Thank you. I wanted to talk a little bit on Charcoal. You talked about increased retailer merchandising as a key driver in the third quarter. And I guess what do you think is driving that? Is that weather-related? And I guess what's your visibility in terms of whether that higher level of merchandising is going to be continuing over the course of the summer selling season? Thanks. Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. So first what's behind this is we've been on a strategy in Charcoal to encourage year-round merchandising for a while and that's certainly been very successful. We've seen particularly strong success this year. If you think about what's happened in much of the country weather-wise, there was pent-up demand and there was readiness also by retailers to invest in charcoal to get people back into the stores and encourage store traffic, and our merchandising program certainly anticipated that. We've worked with retailers to plan for such events and we've seen particularly strong pull. The good news is we're seeing quite a bit of that translate into share and category growth. So that obviously makes us feel good about the prospects going forward. We feel good about our start into Q4 on the business. I will say that Charcoal is more difficult to plan. A lot of it does depend on weather and we'll have to see it play out. But we are certainly very optimistic about how we're executing what we can control and the early success we've had this fiscal year behind merchandising programs, again, all planned and consistent with the strategy that we've had on the business for a while.

John A. Faucher - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. If I can ask a follow-up on that; that makes sense, I guess. But if you're getting incremental sort of counter-seasonal promotional activity, it seems like as you cycle into the normal promotional activity that the incremental benefit year-over-year should lessen almost by definition, right, because you're going up against a seasonal period when you're used to having more merchandising. Is that right? Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: We've seen particularly strong growth on the business in Q3. Do I expect those types of growth rates to continue? I don't think so. But again, on Charcoal one can be surprised at times. It depends on a lot of factors, including weather. But again, I'm looking at what do our plans look like and what do they look like compared to year ago and I certainly feel very good about those and we need to let Q4 play out.

John A. Faucher - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thank you. And then if I can just follow up on Ali's last question about advertising. The ad-to-sales ratio had come down over the past couple of years. There was a lot of discussion about International being the key driver of that falloff in the whole company ad-to-sales ratio going down. Is that something where you just talked about the profitable growth, I guess it seems like it was masking something that you had to go back and now you're saying you have to spend more. How can we get comfortable, I guess, that it really is the International piece that's driving that down when your stated need to increase advertising in the U.S. would indicate that the U.S. was also part of a driver of that reduction over the past couple of years, if that makes sense. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: So John, let me take this. If you go back and you look at this over the last couple of years, our U.S. retail spending has been anywhere between 9% and 10%. In fact, I think it's been closer to 10% than 9%. So what you've seen us do is shift more spending into the U.S. retail business. Keep in mind the Professional Products business, which has been growing fabulously for us, we really don't have any advertising expense in there. So you have to be careful with that number. International, I think as we've talked for quite some time, we have been making cuts in advertising. Back when we were in Venezuela, we had basically turned off the advertising. We're spending very little, if any, advertising in Argentina in some of these markets that have price controls. So we've systematically gone into those markets that are margin-challenged and have some issues and we're really pulling back on the advertising. By contrast, we've been putting it in the U.S., which is why we've been quoting I think for the last few quarters what we're spending in our U.S. retail business. So we feel good about the total demand-building investment. We feel good how it's building market share for us. Certainly it's driving top-line momentum in the U.S. business and I think you can see that in the numbers.

John A. Faucher - JPMorgan Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll move next to Chris Ferrara from Wells Fargo.

Christopher Ferrara - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Thanks. I guess going back to the share gains in the U.S., I think if I'm right, if I caught it right, the number was 30 basis points of gain, right? And that's despite a couple of price gap issues, right? So I guess the question is how sustainable do you view that level of share? And I guess where would you put the level of share gain needed to meet your growth objectives over time in the U.S.? Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So we feel good about the share gains. We feel also good about the fact that they're really broad. Other than Brita and Litter, we're growing share everywhere. It's our objective to grow share in the U.S. but it's also our objective to grow categories. One thing that I would note is that behind the increase in investment and also behind the innovation, our categories this quarter have been quite healthy. We saw 2% category growth this quarter. That's been as high as it's been in recent years. I would say in the future I would expect our share gains to continue. I would think that on Glad and bleach we might see somewhat depressed shares for three quarters to four quarters as we cycle through those price increases. But we are putting the plans in place based on stronger investments, based on strong innovation, based on competitive marketing communication that's centered around consumer value, that should make us expect to continue to see share gains.

Christopher Ferrara - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Okay. And I guess on the buyback, on a separate note, are you done with the targeted buybacks you guys were – I think you said you were going after some of the share creep you'd had. Are you guys done with that? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: I think what we've consistently said is, within our outlook, we will periodically re-enter the market to soak up stock option dilution. And I think you'll see us again periodically do that with the excess cash. Beyond that, we haven't commented on specific plans.

Christopher Ferrara - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Got it. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Lauren Lieberman from Barclays, your line is open.

Lauren Rae Lieberman - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Thanks. Just quickly on bleach, I was curious did you talk about what you have seen more recently as demand is kind of normalizing or accelerating now that pricing has been in the market for a couple of months? Thanks. Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. So I mean on bleach what we're seeing is that share has been strong. I mentioned earlier we've seen five quarters of share growth on the business. Expect that to ease up, so feeling good from that vantage point. I think as far as the category is concerned, our expectations are that that will be more flat going forward. But feel good about the innovation program that we're putting in, feel good about the communication that we're putting in. One thing that we're doing is supplementing the very strong focus on Laundry with stronger communication around cleaning occasions. One thing that we found is that heavy users in particular display a lot more usage around cleaning occasions on top of laundry, so we will focus on that part of the business. So I would say bleach is steady as she goes and feel good about the prospects in the category with the one caveat that we'll cycle through the price increase and somewhat slower consumption over the next three quarters to four quarters.

Lauren Rae Lieberman - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

Okay. Great. Thanks. And then also just on Green Works, I was surprised to see Green Works Laundry called out in the release. So my recollection was that you were kind of giving Green Works, the line, another go, but I thought it was more in the Household Cleaners and not so much in Laundry. So maybe I need an update on what's been going on or not going on with the Green Works franchise. Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. You're correct, Lauren. Our focus in Green Works actually is on the Cleaners side and we have three core categories: sprays, toilet bowl cleaners and wipes. And those are performing okay. Green Works laundry was a distribution loss with one specific customer. It's non-strategic. It's a one-time event but it doesn't affect our plans on the remaining Green Works business going forward.

Lauren Rae Lieberman - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst

All right. Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

We'll hear next from Erin Lash from Morningstar.

Erin Lash - Morningstar Research

Analyst

Thank you for taking my question. I was hoping you could talk about the acquisition environment. I think there was a lot of talk at CAGNY in terms of the fact that acquisition premiums being demanded by sellers were too high. And I just wondered if that had changed, or if there's any I guess your interest in looking to acquire to, as a use of cash. Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. Well, a couple of things. First of all, we certainly have plenty of dry powder to be able to do bolt-on acquisitions, as I mentioned earlier. So no concerns there. From an acquisition market, it continues to be, particularly in the U.S., a seller's market more than a buyer's market. And I think you see that when you look at the multiples some of these businesses are trading at. All of that said, we do have a pipeline of ideas we're working against. We continue to be very interested in natural personal care and opportunities in that space. The whole idea of health and wellness is interesting. We like U.S.-centric businesses because it allows us to hopefully pay for a deal on synergies with our U.S. business and then buy a growth upside. So I would say we stand ready to do acquisitions. We're continuing to work the pipeline. But I think these things take time and they're pretty difficult to predict. Nonetheless, we think we'll be successful over the next couple of years.

Erin Lash - Morningstar Research

Analyst

Thank you for that. And just one follow-up. You mentioned that it is a seller's market. In that light, and obviously several of your peers have been looking to kind of skew their brand portfolio, was that something that you've considered or are you happy with the brand mix as it stands? Stephen M. Robb - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: You might recall that over the last couple of years I think we have made some adjustments in the portfolio. We exited the auto business because we didn't like the trends of things like STP. We didn't think it was right for us as a company. Of course we more recently exited Venezuela as a way of adjusting the portfolio. I think like other companies we do have small brands that are probably trapped in the portfolio. We're always looking at that to find out if we're the highest-value owner. Keep in mind, though, many of those businesses have been in the portfolio for decades. As a result, they have virtually no tax base. So sometimes it's better to manage the business for cash over the long term and use that cash to invest for growth or return it back through the dividend back to our shareholders then to sell those businesses where you may have substantial tax leakage. Nonetheless, we continue to look at the portfolio on a regular basis.

Erin Lash - Morningstar Research

Analyst

Thank you. That's helpful.

Operator

Operator

This concludes the question-and-answer session. Mr. Dorer, I would like to now turn the program back to you. Benno O. Dorer - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah. Thank you. Let me sum this up. I feel very good about our third quarter and year-to-date performance. I'm pleased that our strong year-to-date results allowed us to raise our sales outlook. And I believe our strategy and focus on accelerating profitable growth are the right ones to create long-term shareholder value. So I look forward to speaking with you again on our next call in August when we will share our full-year results and provide our fiscal 2016 outlook. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

That does conclude today's teleconference. We thank you all for your participation.