Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions). Your first question comes from Lauren Torres of HSBC. Please ask your question.
Lauren Torres – HSBC
Hi, everyone. My question is regarding the outlook for next year to the extent that you can talk about it. This year you've been successful with respect to managing your costs better and raising prices. I guess, Rob, you touched upon the costs that your ability to realize further cost savings next year. But curious to get your thoughts about where that is coming from, being that you were quite active doing that this year.
And then, on the pricing side, if you think the consumer environment should remain soft, do you think there is still some good room to take pricing? And if you do, do you think that will affect further consumer push back because of those price increases?
Doros Constantinou
Hi, Lauren, this is Doros. Well, we are going through our business planning process at this stage, and we expect volumes in 2010 to continue to be impacted by the challenging economic conditions and the weak consumer environment. We expect that a number of our developing and emerging countries will be impacted by further tough economic conditions in 2010, and the recovery will be coming at a slow pace. So our focus continues to remain on strengthening the market positions, winning at the point-of-sale. And I believe that this strategy has been effective for us so far.
Now, regarding the pricing, inflation is expected to moderate next year across the markets. We expect that weighted average will be somewhere in the range of 4%. And that is currency neutral. Pricing opportunities are not expected to be significant. However, we have the commodities, and at this stage we are not expecting again a significant change in the commodity costs versus the levels of 2009.
Rob Murray
Lauren, regarding cost savings, as I mentioned, we will have additional benefit from cost savings from our restructuring program on top of what we've achieved this year of about EUR20 million, at this stage. We do also expect through our business planning process that we will identify further opportunities.
And then I would say on the currency side, you guys may know as well as we do, but people are obviously projecting that there will be some return of GDP growth in our markets and that currencies will moderate favorably for us. But however, that's very difficult for us to pin down at this stage. So we'll have much better feedback on this, obviously when we announce our full year earnings.
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