Newell Brands Inc.

Good morning, and welcome to Newell Brand's fourth quarter and full year 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After a brief discussion by management, we will open the call up for questions. In order to stay within the time schedule for the call, please limit yourself to one question during the Q&A session. Today's call is being recorded. A live webcast of this call is available at ir.com. NewellBrands.com. I will now turn the call over to Joanne Freiberger, SVP of Investor Relations and Chief Communications Officer. Ms. Freiberger, you may begin.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Newell Brands' fourth quarter 2025 earnings call. On the call with me today are Chris Peterson, our President and CEO, and Mark Erseg, our CFO. Before we begin, I'd like to inform you that during today's call, We will be making forward-looking statements which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially, and we undertake no obligation to update forward-looking statements. I refer you to the cautionary language and risk factors available in our earnings release, our Form 10-K, Form 10-Qs, and other SEC filings available on our Investor Relations website for a further discussion of the factors affecting forward-looking statements. Today's remarks will also refer to non-GAAP financial measures, including those referred to as normalized measures. We believe these non-GAAP measures are useful to investors, although they should not be considered superior to the measures presented in accordance with GAAP. Explanations of these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations between GAAP and non-GAAP measures can be found in today's earnings release and tables that were furnished to the SEC. Thank you. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Chris.

Thanks, Joanne. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning. I'll start by sharing some company and business-specific observations related to fiscal 2025 and then comment on how we are approaching 2026 from a strategic standpoint. After that, Mark will walk through fourth quarter and full-year financials before providing a 2026 outlook. Since deploying Newell Brand's new strategy in the summer of 2023, we have invested heavily in rebuilding our front-end capabilities, consumer understanding, brand building, innovation, marketing, and go-to-market excellence, to name a few. We've also focused on strengthening critical back-end capabilities, such as manufacturing and distribution, procurement, and information technology, while simultaneously reducing complexity and instilling greater discipline and accountability across the organization. This focus and attention drove swift and steady progress, and about nine months ago, when we shared first quarter 2025 results, Newell Brand's sales trends, structural economics, and leverage ratio had all dramatically improved since the start of the turnaround journey. Frankly, with core sales down only 2% in the first quarter of 2025, we were confident at that time that core sales would positively inflect at some point during the year. That, of course, did not occur because tariffs intervened, driving the need for multiple pricing actions, which significantly affected consumer behavior and retail dynamics. For example, Newell's categories, which were originally expected to be flat during 2025, ended up being down two to three points and some large retailers shifted from direct import to domestic fulfillment. In addition, competition was slow to initiate pricing actions, and select international markets were disrupted by second or third derivative tariff-related impacts. Simply put, 2025 proved more difficult than we anticipated at the start of the year. The good news is that the team acted decisively across sourcing, productivity, domestic manufacturing, and pricing in response to these challenges. From a sourcing standpoint, we reduced China's sourcing exposure to below 10%. which you may recall was closer to 35% just a few years ago. The decision to proactively diversify our supply chain away from China before tariffs even presented themselves has materially strengthened the resilience of our supply chain. From a productivity standpoint, we took an important step during the fourth quarter to further strengthen Newell by announcing a global productivity plan designed to enhance competitiveness, simplify the organization, and support long-term value creation. The global productivity plan was enabled in part by the capabilities we've been building across the company, including greater use of automation, digitization, and artificial intelligence to simplify processes, accelerate cycle time, and enhance execution across functions. As we implement this plan, we are redirecting resources toward our highest value activities, including innovation and brand building, while creating a more agile and high-performing organization. These actions are fully aligned with our disciplined execution model and our long-term objective of delivering consistent, sustainable, and profitable top-line growth. Implementation of the plan is largely complete in the United States, Latin America, and Asia, and on track with our original plan. From a domestic manufacturing standpoint, we continue to invest behind automation and secured roughly $40 million of incremental tariff-advantaged business wins in the second half of 2025. And finally, from a pricing standpoint, we successfully executed three rounds of pricing across impacted categories to protect the structural economics of the business. Importantly, these actions helped us to actually expand normalized operating margin for the year while increasing advertising and promotional support by 50 basis points. This also allowed us to maintain Newell's leverage ratio at about five times. And while it might not always have been readily apparent, Distribution momentum improved, and we saw continued share gains in parts of the portfolio as the year unfolded, which is why, in large part, fourth quarter sales came in modestly better than anticipated. Let's now turn to our three business segments, starting with learning and development. Learning and development was the most resilient segment across the portfolio this past year. Writing performance was supported by strong brands such as Sharpie and Expo, consumer-preferred innovation like Sharpie Creative Markers and Expo Wet Erase, limited tariff exposure, and best-in-class domestic manufacturing, which helped us secure a meaningful increase in points of distribution. In Baby, we delivered strong performance in a tariff-laden environment. The shift from direct import to domestic fulfillment is now behind us, and after three separate pricing actions, the Baby business is on very solid footing. For the full year, Graco's innovation program and improved go-to-market execution drove a 160 basis point increase in market share, and in the fourth quarter, Graco's market share was up over 350 basis points. The home and commercial segment was where we felt the most pressure during the year, and within that segment, Kitchen had the most difficulty given soft consumer demand, distribution losses, and elevated promotional intensity. However, during the fourth quarter, we increased promotional activity and, where appropriate, took selective price adjustments in the U.S. and Latin America to remain competitive in a highly promotional environment. As of today, kitchen pricing and promotional levels are where they need to be to effectively compete, and early consumer feedback on recent innovation launches, such as Rubbermaid EasyStore Lids, is encouraging. Moreover, we just secured a tariff-advantaged kitchen win with a large U.S. retailer, which we will talk more about at Cagney. Commercial performance reflected stable demand in institutional and hospitality channels, partially offset by continued softness and DIY. In home fragrance, performance improved as the year progressed, with the business returning to growth in the fourth quarter as the Yankee Candle relaunch was fully implemented across all retail channels in the U.S., Consumer response to improved innovation and execution has been encouraging, reinforcing our confidence in the direction of the business. In outdoor and recreation, top-line performance stabilized, and gross and operating margins bounced back as the year progressed, reflecting the benefits of simplification, tighter inventory management, and improved execution. While demand still remains under some pressure, innovation is building and distribution is improving, so the segment is entering 2026 in its best position in years. To wrap up 2025 observations, our new strategy, operating model, and culture were all tested throughout the year, and we're very pleased to report that execution held, which is why we can confidently state Newell exited 2025 stronger and more resilient than when the year began. As we enter 2026, a central theme will be disciplined commercial execution with our retail partners to convert key capabilities which we spent the past 12 months further strengthening into improved performance while maintaining margin and cash discipline. For 2026, our guidance assumes that the categories we participate in will decline by approximately 2% for the year. Even in that environment, our innovation and improving distribution give us confidence that we can outperform our categories and grow market share, which would be the first time since the Jarden acquisitions. While we recognize there may be external tailwinds, such as the stimulus effect of higher consumer tax refunds, we are not relying on that dynamic in our category growth forecast and view it as potential upside rather than a baseline assumption. Innovation remains a key source of our confidence because we currently have more than 25 Tier 1 or 2 launches planned for 2026. which is the strongest innovation lineup we have had since the Jarden acquisition. We'll provide a deeper look into Newell's rebuilt innovation pipeline at Cagney in a couple of weeks. That distribution is also expected to turn positive in 2026 for the first time since the Jarden acquisition, supported by line review and tariff-advantaged manufacturing wins. Our supply chain and procurement teams to continue to operate at world-class levels and should generate enough productivity savings to offset inflation and higher year-over-year tariff costs, while overhead discipline and productivity will enable increased investment behind innovation without compromising profitability. Consistent with this, we are planning for normalized operating margin to expand in line with our evergreen financial model, inclusive of a modest increase in advertising and promotion support, which as a percent of sales is already up 50% over the last three years. Mark will have more to say about this in a minute, but please note that we do not expect core sales growth in the first quarter, in part because, generally speaking, major shelf recess and the associated innovation and distribution gains that will follow are slated to really begin in the second quarter. In summary, while external factors may have delayed our turnaround by a few quarters, we remain confident that Newell Brand's methodical capability-based transformation into a world-class consumer products company is still very much alive and well. As we enter 2026, we are well positioned to convert the capabilities built over the last several years into improved performance while maintaining margin and cash discipline. Our capability set has been dramatically improved as evidenced by a much stronger innovation funnel, improving distribution trends, higher levels of more effective marketing support, and a completely rebuilt and highly skilled team. I want to thank the Newell team for their continued focus, resilience, and execution in a challenging environment. Their commitment and hard work are what made the progress we delivered in 25 possible and what makes Newell Brand's future so bright. With that, I'll turn the call over to Mark to walk through the financials and our outlook in more detail.