Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from William Chappell - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.
William Chappell - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey
On the quarter, I’m just trying to get a better understanding. When you talk about 80% of consumer takeaway and if we look at year-to-date the sell-in has only been up 2%, how do I make sense and maybe you can talk a little bit about inventory levels being up and where they stand going into the off season?
James Hagedorn
Are you talking about our inventory levels or retail inventory levels?
William Chappell - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey
Both because I assume you have to take some back towards the end of the season.
James Hagedorn
Barry, why don’t you take retail inventories and then I guess Dave, why don’t you take our inventories.
Barry W. Sanders
POS is what it is. Going through the quarter inventories are slightly down at the retailers so just as always in the past, year-over-year we continue to work with our retailers, try to get more efficient so the takeaway at retail is slightly higher than what we actually shipped into them. And part of that’s also pricing relative to what they price the products and so forth. So triangulated on it, there sales are going to be slightly higher than what ours are this year.
James Hagedorn
And cleaner. I think less risk on returns; not more.
David C. Evans
Bill with regard to our inventory, our inventories were up about $44 million at June 30. About half of that is just due to cost increases that we’ve seen on mostly our fertilizer products and about a quarter of it is due to foreign exchange rates on our international inventory. You also asked about kind of divergence of POS in shipments. I think for the nine months period they’re actually fairly close. As a total company our sales are up 3%, if you drill into global consumer up 6% and you back out fx, you kind of get down to 5% and you see our POS up year-to-date is 2%. There are a lot of moving parts in that but I can tell you that if we go business-by-business, meaning lawns, home protection, and gardens, the shipments out are all within call it 100 basis points in terms of change versus the POS change. So I think retail inventory’s in good shape and they’re fairly aligned at this point.
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