Jerome A. Peribere - Sealed Air Corp.
Management
Sure. So in Food Care, we're seeing continually strong growth out of North America. We had negative volume in Latin America, actually very negative in Brazil, positive in some other parts of Latin America, but for a total being negative. We believe that this is going to be stabilized. When we look at the herd and type of the cattle cycle, we are seeing that, specifically in Brazil, we're seeing that it has hit the trough in 2016. We believe that the first half of the year is going to be somewhat flattish, and that it is going to start to improve in the second half of 2017. When you look at Australia, 2017 is going to be lower than 2016. Again, we are following very closely their herd size. The herd size is being rebuilt in 2017. It has dramatically come down in 2016 for all the reasons that we talked about. And when you think about the herds in 2014, it was 29 million head, and in 2016 it was about 26.2 million. And this has been a huge reduction and the slaughter rate has dramatically decreased. We believe that it is going to continue in 2017 at lower a pace but it's going to continue, and definitely as the herd is being rebuilt from 2016 in 2017 and onwards, towards 2021, we believe that the business in Australia, the slaughter rate is going to increase, and as you know, it's a positive from 2018. So what we see is that from 2018, we're going to have the three big parts of the world which are exporting, et cetera, which are Latin America, Australia, and North America be on an up cycle, and that's going to be definitely very positive of that. To be noted also is that the exports out of Brazil are improving, but you have to remember that about 88% of the Brazilian beef exports are frozen and 12% are fresh. The good news is that fresh is expanding with the approval to export to the U.S. and will open to Asian markets as well. So on Product Care, we think we have a huge momentum on 3PL and e-commerce. We're going to be showing more of the partnership agreements that we have in the second quarter with very important ones. And so we're doing great things. It is going great and we are going to be showing, we believe, nice growth in the 3PL, e-commerce in North America. The European business has been negative in the fourth quarter. Disappointing, definitely led by our industrial business in Europe. The whole question is how do we mitigate with e-commerce and 3PL the flattish trends in industrial. And our view is that we shouldn't count on industrial increase in 2017, and preserve our position there at the very same time, continue to aggressively grow the businesses which have momentum and in which we're very disruptive.