Press release
Newell Brands Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2024 Results
Transformation of Structural Economics Continues at Pace Operating and Gross Margin Both Improve Year-over-Year Provides Preliminary Outlook for Full Year
About this update from Newell Brands Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\nTransformation of Structural Economics Continues at Pace\nOperating and Gross Margin Both Improve Year-over-Year\nProvides Preliminary Outlook for Full Year 2025\n\n\n ATLANTA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nNewell Brands (NASDAQ: NWL) today announced its fourth quarter and full year 2024 financial results.\n\n\nChris Peterson, Newell Brands President, and Chief Executive Officer, said, \"Newell Brands delivered strong results in 2024 driven by disciplined implementation of our new corporate strategy, operating model and culture transformation. We drove year-over-year sales performance improvement as we significantly strengthened the company’s front-end selling and marketing capabilities. The Learning and Development segment returned to positive annual sales growth despite category declines. We drove strong gross and operating margin improvement, while purposely increasing our level of A&P investment, and we meaningfully de-levered the balance sheet through both debt reduction and EBITDA growth. While much work remains and the macroeconomic backdrop is still uncertain, we are laser-focused on returning the company to sustainable topline growth, continuing to drive operating margin improvement ahead of our evergreen target and strengthening the balance sheet.\"\n\n\nMark Erceg, Newell Brands Chief Financial Officer, said, \"During the fourth quarter we successfully refinanced $1.25 billion of debt at attractive rates as part of an offering which was six times oversubscribed. We believe the strong support our offering received reflects the considerable work done since the adoption of our new corporate strategy six quarters ago which has improved Newell’s top-line performance, strengthened our balance sheet and, most importantly, fundamentally transformed our structural economics. Fourth quarter reported gross margin increased by 430 basis points to 34.2% compared to the same quarter last year and was 790 basis points higher than the fourth quarter of 2022. The fact that we have driven such rapid and pronounced gross margin expansion during a period of top line compression and a sustained and sizable draw down in inventory levels, both of which drove our plant networks capacity utilization levels down, is particularly notable. Looking forward, Newell Brands' core sales growth is expected to positively inflect during the back half of 2025 and...