Kimberly-Clark Corporation (NYSE:KMB) 21st Annual dbAccess Global Consumer Conference June 4, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Michael Hsu - Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Nelson Urdaneta - Chief Financial Officer
Chris Jakubik - Head of Investor Relations

Conference Call Participants

Stephen Powers - Deutsche Bank

Stephen Powers

Okay, welcome back everybody. Good Afternoon. I'm Steve Powers. I'm the Head of Deutsche Bank's U.S. Consumer Staples Franchise. And I am thrilled to welcome back Kimberly-Clark Corporation to the conference. With us today are Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Michael Hsu; Chief Financial Officer, Nelson Urdaneta; and the Head of Investor Relations, Chris Jakubik.

The way we're going to run today's session is that Mike will start us off with a brief presentation. He'll run about 15 minutes or so, and then we'll open up the balance of our time to Q&A.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike.

Michael Hsu

Okay. All right. Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having us back. We're thrilled to be back. And we really appreciate of all of you for joining us today. I'm pleased to be here with you all today. Back in March, we hosted our -- we provided a deep-dive into our business for the first time since navigating what was an extraordinary four-year period for all of us during the pandemic. And so I'd like to use the first few minutes of our time here today to review how we see the next chapter of growth for Kimberly-Clark unfolding, who we are, how we will lead and where we will grow.

I don't know, Chris, you want to show them the forward-looking statement, but those statements all apply. But for more than 150 years, Kimberly-Clark has been powered by care. And this is embodied by our company's founding principles. We make the best product, we take care of our customers, we take care of our people and we take care of our shareholders. We're building upon this remarkable legacy and ushering the next chapter of the Kimberly-Clark story, one that is stronger and faster. We have very important strengths to leverage that powerhouse brands and categories, science as our competitive advantage and scalable capabilities led by top talent.

And we will harness these strengths to drive a higher level of performance by: accelerating pioneering innovation through category shaping technologies that we believe will enable us to further elevate and expand our categories; optimizing our margin structure as we better leverage an evolving external supply ecosystem and accelerate deployment of best practices across the enterprise.

And finally, by wiring our organization for growth, reorganizing our operating structure to enable greater connectivity that can fast-track the best of what Kimberly-Clark has into our markets. As we execute this plan, we're confident our earnings growth combined with our strong dividend yield will enable us to deliver consistent double-digit total returns for our shareholders. I'll briefly unpack each of these elements.

First, we are a $20 billion global enterprise serving more than 175 countries in five huge daily need spaces: baby and childcare; feminine care; adult care; family care; and professional. We have an addressable market of approximately $240 billion across these categories. And then within these categories, we have 12 powerhouse brands that have number one or strong number two positions that drive more than 80% of our overall net sales. Six of our brands generate $1 billion or more in annual retail sales.

Our categories really have three exceptional traits that provide significant opportunity for building differentiated consumer preference and durable brand equity. First, our consumer base is made of highly targetable users. Yes, we are in daily use categories, but our consumers have very well-defined entry points. When you need us, we will know. This enables very targeted marketing requiring less need for mass media and makes our consumer relationships native to first-party connections and social media.

Second, our brands drive enormous lifetime value. High-frequency and high retention make our brands long-lasting annuities. Many of our products are used multiple times per day over many days, months and even years. There is very little category substitution. We are not competing for share of stomach like sweet versus salty snacks. Therefore, our investment in recruitment is very efficient compared with the always-on recruitment required in many other CPG categories and personal care categories.

Third, our products provide invaluable solutions to our consumers. From greater absorbency to more comfort to better skin health, our science-based innovation solves big problems for our consumers and our solutions make their daily lives better. Now our pathway to elevating these huge categories and continuously redefining what's good, better or best is limited only by our imagination and engineering know-how.

We deliver meaningful innovative features and benefits that drive performance-based differentiation. Our ability to drive brand loyalty and enhance our value propositions across our good, better, best tiers goes beyond conventional flavor or scent-based line extensions. So therefore, our categories have many, many tailwinds. The world's population is projected to expand by 1 billion people by 2030 and we have renewable recruitment targets at discrete entry points. 130 million births annually where we address the need for diapering, 65 million young women entering puberty requiring period care, 45 million women entering menopause yearly when leaks begin and 57 million new home purchases, an adoption moment for our family care products. We see this translating into solid, if not accelerating organic growth across our categories.

Unlocking growth at point of market entry starts with understanding the consumer's journey and the most critical on-ramp moments. We work hard to recruit new moms in these critical moments and we connect with her when she's planning for her newest family member or shopping before the baby arrives to ensure Huggies is in the nursery or when the baby might have sleep challenges and needs a more absorbent overnight solution. Winning these recruitment moments is crucial as we support mom and dad on the diapering journey. This is very unique in CPG.

For example, we recruit at newborn with Little Snugglers and then when the baby starts to become more active, they transition into Little Movers. When sleeping challenges inevitably arise we provide overnights and then when they become big kids they're ready to move into Pull-Ups. Helping families navigate this journey with care yields 87% more value per baby household.

And as the chart shows, an average U.S. diaper household is worth about $300, but when we actively recruit and retain, that value increases to nearly $600. This applies to all our categories as our consumers navigate the journey of life from first period to childbirth to menopause and all the changing needs throughout a lifetime. With different needs and evolving challenges, we're able to deliver unique benefits every step of the way, we are their partners for life.

Now science is a huge focus and a big competitive advantage for us. We're proud of our strong legacy of innovation. We invest systematically in material invention, product engineering and manufacturing process development, continuously seeking better solutions to unmet consumer needs. And we develop and engineer proprietary manufacturing assets in both our personal care and our tissue operations. Now we've established four platforms that guide our innovation, each centered on an unmet consumer needs to be. And you can see them on this chart.

Skin health and wellness, garment-like comfort, leak-free confidence and sustainability. We established our skin health and wellness platform last year. The fact is every single one of our products are used in direct contact with consumer skin. Rashes and red marks are simply not acceptable to our team and there's a great deal of innovation and differentiation we can bring about in this space.

The final area I'll highlight is sustainability. For Kimberly-Clark, sustainability is not an afterthought or a nice to do. We continually apply science to improve the health of our business and to support the sustainability of the world's natural resources. We've done this with a focus on responsible sourcing, supply chain efficiency and product and materials innovation that reduces our plastic and forest footprints, our water consumption and our climate-related emissions. We've made significant progress on all fronts and we're ready to take the next leap forward.

We've recently set a new ambition to be natural forest free across our entire product portfolio. By 2030, we will be more than halfway to this goal and we will continue to work to responsibly accelerate our progress toward a 100% natural forest-free supply chain. We believe we have the science and the engineering know-how to deliver a step-change in the sustainability of our offerings while creating an exceptional product experience at a price that consumers can afford.

To generate greater growth and returns on our innovation, we've also built a suite of scalable commercial capabilities and created strong momentum. In the past five years, we've shifted toward a digital-first brand paradigm focused on building lifetime relationships with our consumers. We've established superior end-market execution by deploying world-class talent, process and tools, and we've installed a disciplined analytical approach to revenue growth management to optimize trade decisions in real-time.

We've strengthened our financial position across our cost structure, our cash flow and our balance sheet, including better risk management principles to mitigate input cost volatility. Importantly, we've done this with a team that brings deep experience and diverse experience across markets and categories and cultures. Two-thirds of our leadership team are new to the company or new to their positions within the past three years.

So we have all the building blocks in place and the necessary scale to drive consistent growth. And we'll leverage our scale to launch us into our next chapter of growth by powering care. To harness these strengths, we will sharpen our strategic focus to accelerate pioneering innovation, to capture the significant growth available in our categories by solving big unmet consumer needs, optimize our margin structure to develop -- to deliver superior consumer propositions at every run of the good, better, best ladder and wire our organization for growth to help make our enterprise stronger and faster.

As I mentioned, there remains a huge opportunity to elevate and expand our categories and markets, and we will capture this growth by accelerating our pipeline of innovation with an onslaught of categories shaping new products, elevating and personalizing our storytelling and design, driving genius execution by backing local agility with world-class tools, and I'll bring this to life a bit through diapers.

Now the diaper category has been a long -- around for a long time, but there are still a surprising number of problems that we have to solve to -- that we still yet to tack -- need to tackle. The core category benefit is of course, leak protection. However, the average urine leak rate in the category is about 5% to 6%, meaning roughly 1 in 20 diapers have some type of leak. So clearly, there's more work to be done. We have already designed compelling solutions to this issue at low cost, high scale and we'll have more coming soon.

In sleep, we pioneered overnight diapers and in comfort, we have a very soft and gentle diaper called Little Snugglers, but there is much more opportunity in areas like fit and breathability. We've seen room to run and have some strong promising innovation in this space.

And then there's skin care -- skin health. If you are a parent, you know that when your baby's sensitive skin is suffering from irritation or rashes, it upsets the entire household. One key cause of skin damage is prolonged contact with mess and unfortunately the average baby sits in mess for 40 minutes before change. So we've pioneered a patented technology that protects the baby's skin five times more effectively than current products. And recently, we announced the launch of our skin essentials line across diapers, wipes and training pants in the US, utilizing this technology.

China is another great example of our focus on delighting consumers across the value spectrum and our elevation strategy is driving growth in a tough environment. In the first quarter this year, we saw a double-digit increase in net sales and a 200 basis point share increase driven by gains in both premium and Mainstreet diaper segments. Our premium range products, Huggies, PP Mask and Huggies Little Penguin further advanced the premiumization ladder by introducing a new level of innovative skincare and comfort, redefining the consumer experience for a new generation of moms. And at the same time, our mainstream products, Huggies Cloud Touch and Huggies Little Peach are converting share from local brands, driving superior quality at a strong value. This is how we drive performance-based trade-up in our categories.

Our second area of strategic focus is to optimize our margin structure by modernizing our supply chain. We have a long track record of delivering strong cost savings year-after year. However, we think we can do much more. The basis of our opportunity resides in our historically decentralized approach. We have more complexity than a company of our size and scale should. And at the same time, supply ecosystems in our categories continue to evolve and we can enhance our performance by tapping into these opportunities more aggressively.

We see the opportunity to generate more than $3 billion in gross productivity and approximately $500 million in working capital savings in the next several years through value stream simplification, network optimization and digital automation. We're off to a strong start and we'll have more to report on specific actions and drivers that our initiatives ramp-up in the coming months.

Wiring our organization for growth is our third area of focus and the key to unlocking our full potential. Our historically decentralized structure enabled the building out of a global footprint with a heritage of very, very strong local execution. However, at the same time, this approach lacks efficient connectivity to enable us to fully leverage our global scale and deploy our innovation initiatives at maximum speed. Our next chapter will be written by a high-performing networked organization that strikes the right balance of local agility while leveraging the benefits of global scale.

And we're reorganizing into three focused business segments. Through wire for growth, we'll also streamline hierarchies and reporting structures and improve process to enhance connectivity for better execution. And as we do this, we expect to enhance our competitive advantage and drive greater returns on investment by improving our speed-to-market on a global basis for future product and commercial initiatives, reducing product costs while delivering superiority by leveraging our global technical capability, enhancing the strategic nature of our customer relationships around the world, increasing our ability to realize our brand's full potential and generating approximately $200 million in SG&A savings in the next few years to invest back into the business and support meaningful margin leverage as we drive volume mix-led organic sales growth.

Now as we hit our stride, our strategy and our operating model will enable us to drive a durable long-term growth algorithm comprised of organic net sales growth that leads market growth, mid to high single-digit growth in operating profit and EPS on a constant currency basis and $2 billion or more of free cash flow per year. As a result, we're confident in our ability to continue growing our dividend and repurchase shares with an aspiration to deliver consistent double-digit total returns -- total shareholder returns in the coming years.

So with that, Steve, thank you, and we'll be happy to take your questions.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q - Stephen Powers

All right. Great. Thank you. So I think one question that I've gotten pretty consistently since March and the unveiling of this is just what really is different, right, because a lot of what you've talked about in the broadest sense, making more -- making Kimberly-Clark more consumer-focused and more well-rounded capabilities and more growth minded in its everyday approach, these are all tenets that you've been kind of preaching since you arrived on the scene. So is there a way to crystallize just building on what you've just run through, what really is the new call to action within the organization? What's new and different versus more evolutionary?

Michael Hsu

Yeah. I'd say, look, this is a logical evolution of the strategy, right? So you'll notice that elevate and expand still remains core to it. I think what's changed over the last five years in my mind has been, one, our conviction and confidence in our ability to elevate has fundamentally changed in a positive fashion. We're very confident in our ability to deliver that. You know what I would say is when I came into the role or came into the company, there was some question marks around, hey, can you elevate? Are these more categories that have commodity-like tendencies?

And my view, having worked in a lot of different categories, I've worked in many brands that people perceive to be commodities. And what I would always say to people is, it's not a commodity, it's just that management has lacked the sufficient ideas grounded in consumer insight. And so in my parlance, I would say what we have is tired managers, right?

And so -- and I think over the last five years, I think what's been conclusive is the thesis that we can elevate our categories is dramatically proven. When I joined the company in North America, our business was primarily a value tier business or we would call internally mainstream value tier. Today in North America, more than two-thirds of our business is premium. And so that's been a dramatic shift.

In the Investor Day presentation materials, I think we showed in China, back in -- even as recently as 2019, only 19% of our overall business mix was premium. And three years later, that's up to 42%. However, if you look at North America at over 60, China at 40s, therein lies the opportunity. And so I'd say that elevation has occurred in every market, I would say, significantly even in developing markets like China. But I think there's still more -- much more opportunity for us to get way better on that. So I think that's one big thing.

The second big thing is to drive that elevation, we brought in leaders like Alison Lewis, who really brought in, I would say, world-class capabilities in -- along with Robert Long, an innovation, revenue growth management, analytical approaches, sales execution. And so I think we've really enhanced our underlying commercial capability across markets. And so that's really been, I'd say, an important driver over the last five years. And so that's kind of the second big thing.

The third big thing that -- is that while we're pretty convinced that we have a much larger cost opportunity than we thought even five years ago. And what's changed that? Well, we've brought in the right expertise with our Chief Supply Officer, Tamera Fenske and she's brought in a different crew that has kind of the track-record experience, and says, hey, maybe some of the differences that you thought were necessary across markets. We showed this chart out, if you remember, some countries and diapers are indexed at 100, which is low.

We have countries ranging indexing to 200. Well, look, I think with more expertise kind of in the country and the company looking across markets, so it says, hey, maybe that doesn't have to be that way. And in fact, maybe we drastic -- dramatically have to change to kind of get everybody to a lower level, right?

And so I think those are kind of the big things. And therefore, I'd say, I think for me and my team, I think our conviction around our ability to elevate and deliver accelerated performance has increased.

Stephen Powers

Okay. And how deep do you think that conviction and readiness goes in the organization? As you say, you've built a whole team around you, brought in a lot of external skill sets. But as you go throughout the organization and drive down in the organization, is there buy-in, is there the skill sets? Are you guys ready to go or do you have to still build that capability?

Michael Hsu

No, I'd say, there's a lot of buy-in. So just the night after Investor Day, we flew back to Dallas and then we had a town hall with our Asian region. So we had a few several thousand people on that call that night making the announcement because we try to convey what we were presenting in the Investor Day and also importantly this big reorganization that we had just announced. And so we had to explain that reorganization. And the next morning, we had over 10,000 of our employees on the global call.

And I would say the important thing on the buy-in is, I think the organization and our -- we did this pulse survey coming out of it, organization totally gets why we need to change. And the thing that I love about Kimberly-Clark is, we grew up locally, we are very agile locally, we are very fast locally. And so -- and our teams locally love to compete and they love to win. And so they get the call to action and so they really buy into that.

I think the part we're working through is the organizational approach, which is we have historically been a little bit more decentralized. And so a lot of decision-making is left into the markets. We're still going to have the markets run the P&L and they'll have a lot of decision-making, but we're going to have a more constructive dialogue about what the right answer is. So does your cost really need to index at 200 or should it be 150? Or why wouldn't it be 100, right? And versus, hey, look at what these guys are doing and see if you want to apply that. It's going to be, I would say, my version of a networked approach, more constructive discussion around the core issues.

Stephen Powers

Okay. So Nelson, I want to get you involved here as early as well, because from a -- just from a cost management standpoint and what you've termed as more end-to-end margin management, maybe can you help us bring to life what that means, right? Because as Mike said, it's not as if Kimberly-Clark was ever viewed as sort of sluggish when it comes to cost savings. The FORCE Program was always kind of synonymous with Kimberly-Clark. So as you take this next step forward, what is -- how do you -- what is the aim there? What's the build on what historically has been already a pretty good cost productivity model?

Nelson Urdaneta

Sure. And Steve, as Mike mentioned in the prepared remarks, we have a long track record of delivering cost savings. And I think for us, what it really did was build the discipline and the culture around it, which is a necessary ingredient for this next phase. The opportunity for us is what Mike said. It's about the global approach. We've been highly decentralized with the level of complexity in our supply chain that now with Tamera having come in almost two years ago, done the complete assessment, we are positioned to exploit that in a favorable manner.

And there's two things there. One, it's around deploying integrated margin management. It is an end-to-end approach that will address not just revenue growth management as a lever for gross margin, but also all elements of costs with an objective to drive the lowest total delivery cost of our products and drive overall margin expansion over time, in line with our ambitions.

The second bit is around a robust proactive productivity set initiatives, a pipeline that we've been building over the last couple of years and that's why we have the confidence to announce the transformation program that we did. And that transformation program is composed of two things.

The first one is on the SG&A front. We said we're going to deliver approximately $200 million of SG&A savings as we stand-up our new organizational structure that will go-live October 1st of this year. And then the second element is the transformation of our supply chain. That transformation will deliver approximately $3 billion of gross productivity savings and $500 million of working capital improvements in the next five years or so.

And they'll be anchored on three things. One, value stream simplification. Simply said, we're going to look at what are our product specs globally, what are our supply base globally and drive optimal cost in that end. Secondly, it's around taking a hard look at our network, network optimization. We're going to look at the four walls of our manufacturing facilities and our distribution centers, driving simplified processes across the mall and best practices.

And then last but not least is automation. And two forms of automation. One, digital. It's going to be deploying tools that we're already putting in place on the procurement end of the house to ensure that we have optimal negotiations with suppliers and payment terms and also that we drive multiple supply and demand, which will delve into better inventory levels and better costs. And the other bid, which you saw in the deck as a picture is actual automation within our facilities. So we're going to be driving more robotics that will enhance our overall cost structure.

Stephen Powers

Okay. Why is the organizational redesign necessary for the operating model redesign?

Michael Hsu

Yeah. A couple of things. One is, Nelson, we both said, hey, we've operated somewhat in a decentralized model historically, which served the company well for a long time, but I would say it's also created inefficiency in terms of too many silos. And I would say -- and really the thing that I'm after is to get us to operate faster. And part of it is what slows us down.

I mean, what you have is local agility when you're decentralized so you can react to market situations quickly, but sometimes that the solutions are subscale and you end up reinventing the wheel more often than you need to. And so really what we're trying to do is kind of organize functions and markets both horizontally and vertically so that information can travel across functions and across markets quicker, so that we can get to the best outcome for consumers. So that's one set of things.

The other thing area that I would say that is a big focus of the reorganization is -- what we're trying to get to is a more focus and more scale. And you know, what do you mean by focus. Well, certainly with our new operating segments, right, we have North America and $11 billion business, international personal care, international family care. North America and $11 billion always had focus and they always will have focus. They're big, right? But in terms of international personal care, really the core of that business is the five focus markets, right, which include China, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia, right? And so…

Nelson Urdaneta

And Brazil.

Michael Hsu

And Brazil. So that -- and why do we organize it that way? I'd say up until now, those markets had all been embedded in a broader geographic organization. But these geographic organizations, Steve, tended to have 40 plus or minus countries in them. And so there's a lot of complexity in that, and what creates a lot of distraction for what ultimately becomes a lot of small markets. And so what we want to do was to have one of our best commercial leaders that has a great track record of premiumizing commercial execution and driving commercial execution, kind of focusing in on the big markets that account for over 60% of our personal care revenue and more of that -- more of that in profit. And so that's one focus area.

The other focus area, interesting, we were out in London last month with our international family care and professional team on a kind of organization design session, because they're kind of designing it from the ground-up. And the team was like all excited. And I'm like what -- I thought you guys would be frustrated like have to do all this work on top of your day jobs and they're like, no, no, no, this is awesome, what's great about this?

And like, well, for the first time, we're the focus, right, for both consumer tissue and professional tissue, right, because that's a dedicated organization that is really focused on growing tissue. And that's kind of what I was looking for because depending on what country you're in, sometimes if the predominant business is diapers, you're going to focus on diapers and then the tissue side may not get as much attention. Conversely, if you're in the UK, the predominant business is tissue, that's why that business is growing because it's -- and growing share because they're getting the right focus. So that's one angle of focus.

The other area that I talked about is scale. And you know, one of the obvious areas of scale and people ask, well, why did you put professional and consumer tissue together? The reality is that for 80% of that business, it's the same manufacturing base, the same technology. So there's definitely scale in the production.

The other area that I see a lot of scale is in the marketing, right? And I can see, although it's not exactly that today, but I do think professional should be a marketing vehicle for the consumer products. And so I think there's a lot of scale left to be had both on the professional side and the consumer tissue side, but also similarly in our personal care businesses around the world.

Stephen Powers

Great. If we come kind of more to the here and now, I'm sure you've encountered this as you've talked to investors this morning, the pervasive question that I've got in the last week plus as I've been moving around Europe is, what is the state of the U.S. consumer and where do we go from here? So as you think about the consumer demand backdrop, I would say, not only in the U.S., but kind of across your markets, how do you assess current trends? Any changes that you're taking note of? Because I think that is a hot topic this week.

Michael Hsu

Yeah. One, the -- I guess, the main word I'll use and I think I said this on the earnings call, Steve, resilient.

Stephen Powers

Yeah, still.

Michael Hsu

Still resilient. And -- but I would say, hey, it's definitely bifurcated, right, or there's bifurcation in consumer demand. And so when I say resilient, I would say, there is a large swath of higher income consumers that thus far have not been significantly affected by what's happening kind of economically in their worlds, right? And so -- and evidence for that is in markets like the U.S., China, Brazil, I mean, developing markets included, our premium business continues to grow.

And this is what's important and what's also a significant change. I talked about our big shift from value over the last 12 years, I've been 12, to premium, that the long-term kind of path to growth in our categories is by elevating and premiumizing the category and making the category more valuable to consumers and then by extension to retailers.

And so we've done a lot of that and that's why in the first quarter in North America, the categories on average grew about 5%, right? So mid-single-digit range. And so -- and a lot of that still is on the back of premiumization. At the same time, I grew up in a lower middle -- lower middle-class household, and so we're very cognizant of the pressures on the middle to lower-income consumer. We're really proud as a company that we serve -- we feel like it's our responsibility to serve all consumers.

And so, I've said a few times that our strategy is we're going to have a compelling valuable offering at every rung of the good, better, best ladder. In North America, it's very important for us that our Scott 1000 users feel like we're offering them a great value. We still have an important Kleenex mainline business in addition to the premium parts of the business. True that the premium part of the business has grown more, but we're still committed to making sure we're offering a great value in mainline.

Chris Jakubik

I think one thing to recognize too is within our categories and we come from the food side as well the durability of demand in our categories is not substitutability. And so it's not really a share of stomach game. So the dynamics may be a little bit different than what you may be hearing from other companies.

Michael Hsu

Yeah, good point, Chris, because we all worked at a big food company together, but Chris is the most recent addition. And so the aha firm is, hey, the elasticity of the category is in fact very low, right, because if you think about our daily use categories, bath tissue, diapers, the usage generally remains constant, right? And it's -- I wouldn't say it's not sensitive to price, but price is not the most important factor going on. People have their needs. And so we're -- we recognize that, but we also recognize the need to make sure that our products offer a great value. So it's why we're focused on improving the product through innovation and also making sure our price points are appropriate.

Stephen Powers

And how do you -- your -- I guess, sort of test your confidence level in what you called for in terms of volume and market share recovery as the year progresses? And how concerned are you? How do you protect against more price based competition if the consumer does start to deteriorate?

Michael Hsu

Yeah. Well, one, I'd say, personally, I've never been a fan of over-promoting categories. We view promotion as a very important tool to drive trial, primarily of trial of innovation, right? And so therefore, it's a component in an overall brand strategy, brand marketing approach. It's not a growth strategy in and of itself. And why do I -- one, it's -- in our best case, it's very dilutive. In our worst case, it's unprofitable.

And so I'm very careful about over-promotion because what can happen and I've seen at other companies is you get into this doomed cycle of promotion where you're losing money on the promotion, then you have to cut the product quality and that drives the thing that we all don't like to see, right? And so we're trying to build a virtuous cycle of growth and that's why we want to invest in product quality, we want to invest in the marketing to drive the trial of our better products. And promotion is used to induce people to try the new items, but that's not the strategy.

You're well aware, I think you're already in this role back in 2017 when there was theoretically a price war in the category. It wasn't really a war because we didn't participate. And while -- you know, well, I'd say, I didn't like our share performance that year that the over-promotion of the category really hurt the category and we're focused on growing the category.

Stephen Powers

Great. Nelson, you probably have got this objection as well. So the objection -- other objection here to the strategy is, okay, this all sounds great. But when pulp prices go up and resin prices go up, like, it's going to go back to the old kind of more commodity-based model. Why is that wrong? What have you done maybe to get a little bit more visibility into those cost cycles? And then I think that ties into the margin management you were talking about earlier.

Nelson Urdaneta

Yeah. So it all starts with last five years, our elevate strategy has been working. And it starts with that. We've been able to continuously premiumize the category and create value and address consumer needs. When we look at how we emerged in 2023, it's much stronger as we went through the pandemic and all the supply chain related issues. And in fact, we developed strong capabilities, both on revenue growth management and on cost management. Our approach today is more proactive than reactive. We've -- we have a renewed focus on reducing earnings volatility and three things that we're doing.

The first one is we're developing and harnessing strategic relationships with our suppliers as opposed to transactional. Secondly, we're engaging in more proactive risk management strategies with hedging where we can hedge, think of currencies, resins, energy and where we can't, we're working through these strategic relationships with our suppliers to establish contract structures, which seek to give us the time to maneuver.

And then last but not least is always-on revenue growth management. So that -- the combination of those three position us differently than five years ago. And on top of that, we've got our strong productivity pipeline supporting our ability to manage better today than when we were five years ago.

Stephen Powers

Yeah. Dual approach, mute the volatility and then be better equipped to deal with it what remains.

Michael Hsu

That's right. And we will continue to build and invest in those capabilities.

Stephen Powers

Okay. We're just about out of time. I want to maybe give you the last word and -- because there are a lot of things we haven't talked about today. So as you maybe cherry-pick from what we haven't talked about, what would you leave with investors is sort of the incremental takeaways and thoughts as they consider Kimberly-Clark as an incremental investment?

Michael Hsu

Yeah. I would say, one, back where I started, like we see a long runway of growth ahead of us really through this elevate strategy. Certainly, we're always going to be cognizant of our value proposition in the economic cycle in all cycles. But the long-term future, there's a lot of development opportunity in our categories. One, because of, I would say, the inherent tailwinds that I kind of mentioned in my script there, which includes the number of births and people entering other categories that -- there remains the opportunity for us to kind of win all the consumer entrants that come into the category every year. So that's one big thing.

Second big thing is, we've built a very strong executional capability over the years by investing in the right capability and bringing in leadership that really are experts in their fields. And so we're excited about that. And then the last area is around cost. I think, as you said, we've been very good and disciplined about cost over many years. We've been building up our muscle over it.

And I think we've brought some new insight and talent in that says, hey, we can find a higher gear and we're very confident in that. So we believe we can develop -- deliver kind of the accelerated algorithm that we talked about. And in combination with our buybacks and dividend yield, Chris, and everything else that we can deliver consistent strong returns for shareholders.

Stephen Powers

Yes. We didn't talk about capital allocation, but that remains an arrow in your quiver, no doubt. With that, we're out of time, but I want to thank you all three of you for being here. I want to thank everyone in the room for being here as well. I wish you all a great conference.