Newell Brands Inc. Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

You can go. All right, to close out the day, we are pleased to welcome Newell Brands to the stage. Today we are joined by Chris Peterson, President and CEO, and Mark Erceg, the company's CFO. Thank you both for being here again this year.

We are excited to be here.

I am going to start with some questions around top line. The second quarter marks the first quarter of core sales growth for the company since the second quarter of 2022. For those in the audience that might be less familiar with recent results, can you maybe give us a walkthrough of what drove this long-awaited inflection?

Sure. In 2023, we launched a turnaround strategy, and a big part of that turnaround strategy was capability improvement on the front-end parts of the business that were required to drive sustainable top-line growth. These are things like consumer insights, brand building, new product innovation, and go-to-market. What was exciting is, since we launched that turnaround in 2023, in 2023, core sales for the company was down 12%, so we clearly needed to do something different. We improved in 2024 and 2025 sequentially, but we were still down. What is exciting about last quarter is all of those things came together, and we delivered 2.3% core sales growth. Importantly, within that 2.3% core sales growth, seven of our top 10 brands grew, five of our six business units grew, and the U.S. led the growth with 5% core sales growth.

We also are forecasting, or provided guidance for Q3, which we're in right now, for that growth to accelerate a little bit with core sales between 2%-3%. As we sit here today, we're very comfortable with that top-line guidance, and the bottom-line guidance that we provided as well.

Okay, great. As you mentioned, U.S. core sales were up 5% in the quarter. U.S. distribution was up mid-single digits, which was driven by aisle reinvention, your tariff-advantaged position in some categories. You had shelf space gains across retailers and channels. I'm curious to talk about how you're working to convert these distribution wins into sustained consumer pull so that you keep or expand that shelf space from here at the next year's line review.

Yeah. Distribution gains are important, but you're right that we need to earn sustaining those distribution gains. What we're excited about is that we're driving POS and consumer offtake that is supporting those distribution gains. If I looked at our POS data last quarter, we grew POS on six of our top 10 brands. Eight of our top 10 brands increased their sequential rate of POS growth. The things I talked about of better consumer understanding, strong new product innovation, better consumer brand building, and stronger retailer execution, all are things that help us sustain better consumer offtake to ensure that the distribution gains are sustaining and, in fact, continue in the future.

Okay. In the past, you've highlighted areas where your share of distribution lags your dollar share, so using this metric to pitch for additional shelf space to retailers. How much runway do you still have left there? Said differently, is distribution a multi-year core sales driver?

It clearly is a multi-year core sales driver. First of all, if you step back and look at when we put the turnaround strategy in place, one of the things we looked at was, where was the company from a capability standpoint? We were not tracking distribution. Talk about starting from zero. We put in place a very sophisticated tracking system. We now track distribution on all of our brands at all of our retailers in the U.S., which is how we know that our distribution this year is up mid-single digits. But we still have a significant number of brands, even with the distribution gains that we have made this year, where our share of distribution is below our market share. That generally means, when we see that we have opportunity to go for more distribution.

We are excited about the start of this journey, but I do think that there is opportunity ahead for the company to continue to grow distribution across the portfolio, given our starting point.

Are there particular categories that stand out where the gap is the biggest?

It is very different by brand, by category. We tend to look at it on the brand basis and say, "Where are the brands the most under-shared?

It's not linear. There isn't a common theme. I would say all of our business units have opportunity for distribution gains to get to fair share. We are closing some of that gap with the mid-single-digit distribution increase this year. As to your question, I do think we've got a multi-year journey here.

Okay. Also, I'm guessing there's also no real pattern in terms of retailers.