Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Judy Hong – Goldman Sachs.
Judy Hong - Goldman Sachs
Murray, you talked about the sequential improvement in the premium brands as the quarter progressed with your incremental promotional spending. How sustainable do you think is that sequential improvement, especially as we see lower consumer confidence and just the more distressed the conditions for the consumers in the U.S. and whether you are taking any additional proactive steps to provide more value to the consumers.
Murray S. Kessler
Gasoline prices is always something that we track very closely and that is coming down dramatically. As we’re sitting here on the call, it’s down $4 today or something, the price of oil. So that’s gone back to retail good news.
I think a second one is that a lot of these competitive new product introductions we faced in the beginning of the year, that challenged us with pipeline and some competitive trial, are all starting to lapse. So if you add up all those new product launches, they probably represented 5 or 6 share points and one of the incremental differences versus a year ago, and if you get into the fourth quarter, that more than cuts in half and as you get into the first quarter it goes down again.
But on an ongoing level of performance of those, they haven’t continued to grow. They were kind of one-shot, they got a level of share, and if anything they’ve tailored off since then in the aggregate. So I think that competitive new product pressure that was on us is going to subside significantly.
And from our own standpoint, we stepped up the flexible funds significantly in the third quarter and made sure we had stronger programs in place in the fourth quarter and deployed all of those. So we will have stronger promotion plans in the fourth quarter versus year ago.
And our PDL to price increases. The gap is closing again, as well.
So, you put all those together, and but for the consumer confidence, I would say we were set to have some really very positive growth. But I’m pretty optimistic that we have real strong plans in place going into the fourth quarter.
Judy Hong - Goldman Sachs
And if I look at your PV brands they were up only 3% or so in the quarter, I’m just wondering if you can address what’s happening within your PV brand portfolio as to whether the emphasis on the premium in the quarter sort of left an emphasis on your price value brands in the quarter.
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