We are on. All right, hello everyone. We're going to continue. Thanks for sticking around. We're—I’m pleased to have with us, Whirlpool Corporation. To my left, Jim Peters, CFO, and to Jim's left, Scott Cartwright, VP of Investor Relations. I remain Mike Rehaut, at JPMorgan. We'll do a fireside chat, as always, and there'll be some time left over for Q&A. Jim, Scott, thanks for joining me. Appreciate it. Happy to hear, Mike, and good afternoon, everybody. We'll start off, I guess I usually like to start off on the top line and kind of work our way down. You know, demand trends versus guidance. Your 2025 guidance that you reiterated most recently, on your first quarter earnings call, assumes flat North American shipment growth. The question here is, you know, how have the year-to-date trends, as they progress so far, compared to your expectations? What needs to occur during the rest of the year for the outlook to be achieved? Yeah. I'd say a couple things here is one, the trend is, you know, played out the way we thought it would. We said at the beginning of the year we thought the industry would be flat. We didn't see any real catalysts in terms of, you know, mortgage rate changes or anything that might drive the industry in a different or a more positive direction. You know, also, the mix of the industry has been still relatively heavy from a replacement perspective. So that's been in line with what we thought. We continue and, you know, it's been close to there throughout the back half of the year. We continue to also expect it to be relatively flat. We don't see any big drivers that could, could necessarily push it up, but we also don't think it, because it's such a replacement industry right now, we don't necessarily see some things that'll push it down. You know, so if I step back from that a little bit, I think where the opportunity though comes from us in some volume in the back half of the year, even if the industry is flat, still is around as we look at how the tariff and trade environment unfolds. Us being the largest domestic producer, producing 80% of what we sell in the U.S. here in the U.S. really gives us an opportunity to begin to look for share, further market share in this type of environment, especially as some of our competitors who are producing outside the U.S. now all of a sudden have higher product costs that they have to deal with. Even if it's only a 10% tariff, it still has a significant impact in terms of product cost overall for them. I'd say that's at least how we see the overall industry evolving, but also the potential for our volume evolving in the back half of the year. You know, you kind of referenced the discretionary, repair model element of the demand picture remaining constrained or depressed. I assume, does this year kind of assume a continuation of that dynamic into the back half as well? Is that fair to say or? Yeah, I would say right now, if you look at where the overall housing market is, where mortgage rates are, et cetera, I think it's still a very heavy replacement industry at this point in time. There's no real catalyst. I mean, even if you've seen some of the latest information out of the overall real estate market and, you know, many of the realtors coming out and saying the spring selling season's had a really slow start to it. I don't think there's a catalyst out there or anything out there that will drive incremental existing home sales, which is really what the driver is for the discretionary segment for us. You know, the reason we say that, and just to kind of highlight that again, is when somebody buys an existing home, one of the big things they do is they replace all the appliances in the home. They go and they replace an entire suite of kitchen appliances, which then tends to drive the mix or improve the mix because those are more profitable for us. They're also a less price-sensitive consumer because it's a planned purchase. When you're looking at a duress purchase, or a replacement purchase, that tends to be unplanned and it tends to drive the consumer to mix down some. You referenced tariffs as a potential opportunity, perhaps for your own business in the back half, but I'm curious, more from an end consumer standpoint, the impact of tariffs as they've been announced over the past couple of months. I know that, obviously during your last earnings call, you referenced some of the importers kind of preloading the channel or getting high levels of imports ahead of the tariff phenomenon. I'm more curious about how the consumer has acted in the last couple of months and if the actions of those imports, those higher levels of imports, if that's kind of played out one way or the other in the end purchase. Yeah. So here's what I would say is I think, you know, right now, as we've all seen, is consumer sentiment is relatively low and the consumer has had, you know, some anxiety, that's come along with obviously all the news in the marketplace and the uncertainty. Now, you know, to a limited, that's probably had a very limited impact on our business because it's back to what I said earlier and all that being a large replacement industry right now and that the majority of the consumers, about 2/3 of them in the market, because they need to replace something that's broken, they're almost forced to be out there. Then you've got another 10%-15% that is more around new home construction and all that. It leaves the already, the appliance industry was under pressure and the discretionary part was under pressure before consumer sentiment dropped. I would say that that is probably, you know, one of the things that we look at and say, yes, that you would hear from a lot of different retailers, the consumer is hesitant to make large purchases right now. They may be buying other things, but they are hesitant to make large purchases, but we are primarily a replacement industry at this point anyway. You know, to the second part of kind of the loading in of the product that has come from outside the U.S. and you can look at import data and all that and see, you know, how much really got shipped in in a short period of time. I do think that has probably had an effect at least at a retail level in terms of, you know, what products are available and all that. Now, most of that is low-end entry product or typically a good portion of that is. And that's what the consumer in a replacement environment has been out there looking for too. You have probably seen a fair amount of that begin to flow through already, and through at a retail level, but I do not have perfect visibility into what retailer inventories are, our competitors' inventories are obviously, but I do think that at least, you know, has been one of the impacts we have seen from a sell-in perspective. Obviously from a sell-out at a retail perspective, you would be seeing some of that flowing out right now. Okay. You know, also just, you know, basic tariff question, obviously with the most recent reset of the China tariffs to 30%, from 145%. You know, how does that impact, you know, your own estimated headwind that was recently stated about $400 million? And moreover, I guess second part of that is if the April price increase was already implemented to begin to offset some of that, do you now actually have a positive spread or, or how, how might that play out in the back half? Yeah. That's a good question. I think the thing I always have to preface any of this with is we do not know where the tariffs are going to land in the end, the full level of tariffs. There is obviously the China tariffs that have moved from 145% to 30%, and we will hopefully eventually get a number where we kind of know, but we always said we thought it would definitely be somewhere below 145%. That just was not sustainable. You have the 10% tariffs on all the other countries right now. Again, we do not know where some of all those are going to land. While that impacts us a little bit less, we do have some components that come out of there, but it is more impacting our competitors. That kind of puts some uncertainty, but I would say yes, if the tariffs wound up at a 30% level from China, then we definitely would have a lower cost impact in terms of what we would see in our P&L. To that extent, we would either have an opportunity there to leverage some of the actions if we could to drive incremental margin, or we will continue to look at those actions and say what makes sense. What makes sense is in line with what competitors might be doing, what makes sense from the mitigation actions that are not actually pricing, such as us moving production or having our suppliers move production. What I can say at a minimum, we are confident that we have the actions in place to offset the tariffs at where they are right now. And then the question, you know, Mike, to your point, becomes as we look forward on that, is there an opportunity there from a margin perspective or even more importantly, is there an opportunity there from a market share perspective that we can continue to leverage that, and, you know, leverage the lower tariffs to actually go after some market share. Right. That's great. You know, so maybe, you know, on the topic of market share, you know, maybe you could kind of give us, kind of an overview of where the competitive landscape is today in terms of, you know, the market share winners and losers over the past five years, let's say. I know you kind of walked through your own share objectives at your analyst day about a year, a little more than a year and a half ago. I'm sorry, a little more than a year and a quarter ago. But, you know, try and give us a sense, I guess, first off, just, you know, where is the, so I guess it's a two-part question. I don't wanna put too many into one question here, but, you know, just on the, you know, current, competitive backdrop, you know, how would you characterize, you know, pricing and promotional activity over the last few years, and how has that impacted, and how has this year's volatility impacted some of those dynamics? Yeah. Let's say the good thing to start off with, or maybe the neutral thing, is our market share from, you know, when we did the Investor Day, is relatively flat. You know, now we do expect and we had expected to build some market share in the back half of this year with the new product launches that we have, and we do believe that those are on track right now. I'd say that's the first thing to kind of talk about. You know, as you asked about where some of the market share gains and losses are coming, what I would say is what I would expect to see in the at least upcoming months is that, you know, the biggest impact to market share will be dependent on producers who are producing in China. Obviously, even with 30% tariffs, that's going to put a headwind on there that will obviously have an impact on products that are coming out of there and the ability to continue to be profitable in the U.S. marketplace. I think that's where you could see some shifting, especially, you know, at the retail level on whether these products are, you know, branded or private label or whatever, but being produced in China, that they'll have to look for alternative sources or alternative products to put on the floor. I'd say that's where I think at least some of the bigger shifts are coming. As the further tariff environment plays out, that'll also have an impact on, you know, market share and all that. As I highlighted before, I think with 80% of our product produced in the U.S., we're best suited to go after market share in this type of environment. To your question more around the competitive dynamics of the market out there, as we talked about, you know, last year we really saw throughout 2023 and 2024 a build in the promotional spending. We saw competition probably getting, you know, back to the levels of promotional spend they did before. With that, we did increase our promotional spending, but then we began to reduce our promotional spending last year and said, you know, at this point with a replacement industry, it just doesn't make sense. You're not driving any incremental volume in the industry, you're just lowering the overall price. I'd say that was more how we looked at it. Now, as you come into 2025 with the tariff environment, other things going on, I think you will begin to see, obviously we've taken some promotional pricing, but then additionally, I think you're going to see some of our competition doing it as you go through Memorial Day and into the 4th of July holiday, because that's the logical progression of how these things occur as you go through the big promotional period. You know, I just expect to see probably, you know, in the marketplace, all of that evolving in the near future. As I said, it's still a largely replacement industry. From an overall promotional perspective, I don't think that's gonna change the dynamics of the overall industry demand. Great. Maybe shifting to margins for a moment. You know, you had, again, from your Investor Day last year, a goal of 11%-12% North America margins by 2026. Right now your guidance for this year is 7.5%. I know obviously there have been a few differences in the, you know, market composition, some other drivers that have, you know, resulted in where margins are today or for this year. Maybe just kind of walk through how we should think about margin progression over the next two or three years, the primary drivers of, hopefully, margin improvement over that time. You know, and, you know, how those pieces might just come together and emerge. Yeah. I think if you look at the guidance that we gave or the, you know, the goals that we gave for North America, in our last Investor Day, those were really based on what we saw in a pre-COVID environment in terms of where the overall margin profile of our North America business would be and should be. At that time, we were assuming that you would begin to see the Fed cutting interest rates. We had assumed that you would begin to see a reduction in mortgage rates, and we had assumed that you would begin to see just a stabilization in the appliance industry and a healthy mix. Didn't need to be a significant growth in the industry, but the mix of the industry would go back closer to where only 50% was replacement and about 1/3 to 35% was discretionary, which is the most profitable part of the industry. Unfortunately, what we saw then unfold throughout 2024 was an environment where mortgage rates didn't go down. Replacement became an even bigger part of the industry. Obviously, it drove the mix of business down, which was different from what we would've assumed going in and is significantly different from what we saw in a pre-COVID environment where you at least had a healthy existing home sales, you know, type of picture. All of those assumptions became significantly different. What needs to happen now to get from where we are here to get to, you know, to where we thought we could be? As I mentioned, I do not know that we need to see significant growth in the industry, but we do need to begin to see the housing market get healthy and the mix at least shift back to less replacement and a more balanced part of discretionary. The second thing is, I think you will see with a lot of the actions we have been talking about, we continue to take more and more cost actions. Our goal is additionally to reduce the amount of cost we have within our products because we see that as an opportunity to further drive cost reduction. The third piece that we see is an opportunity, again, with all the promotional price increases that we've taken leading up to this, is to really just put, as we've always said, our approach to promotions is to be disciplined and only do it when it creates value. We see that as a further opportunity there. The last piece is really driving that market share, and driving it. We did see in that meeting that we really wanted to go from a 26%-27% to closer to a 30% market share. As I mentioned, I think the opportunity, because with the tariff environment and our U.S. production base, should make us a winner in this type of environment and gives us a chance to go take market share and increase our production, which gives us further leverage in our factories, which will then help our margins pretty significantly. That is one of the biggest things we can get from a margin lift perspective. We have always talked about that incremental margin within our business tends to drive around 20% type of benefit on that incremental margin. Now, in a highly replacement, it is obviously gonna be a little bit lower than that historical average, but when you get back to a typical mix, that is about what incremental volume will drive in terms of what it brings to our bottom line. Great. You wanted to also shift towards marketing and technology spend. You know, notice that in the last few years, marketing and technology has been a margin headwind of anywhere from 50-75 basis points annually, I wanna say. Just kind of curious about where marketing and technology is today as a percent of revenue, and when might this number stabilize or even become a tailwind from a leverage standpoint? Yeah. I would say we're getting closer to the stabilization. The reason I say that, there's a couple things in here right now that I would say is, one, we have continued to invest in engineering around our products and innovation around our products and development, but we're constantly pushing ourselves to get more efficient in how we do that. That's a big part of the technology spend there. Additionally, in some of the technology spend, we've invested in our platforms for more of our direct-to-consumer sales, and we're really getting closer to a point where our platforms are at the right place there. The biggest component of that is brand spending. You know, as we came out of COVID and we started to look at the market where it was not a market that, you know, where the appliance demand was that every piece you produced, you could sell right away. We got much more focused on our brands on a go-forward basis and really looking at what we need to do for the long-term health of our brands. We began to invest incremental funding in our brands. At some point, we will be to that right level soon, and that is where it will begin to level off, and then we will just maintain that on a go-forward basis. The opportunity then for it to become a little bit less in terms of the margin impact is as we get volume back in the business and pick up some market share, we get the leverage off of that. I would expect it in the coming years to become less of a headwind. Right. Right. Okay. One more question for me, and I know there probably is a couple questions in the audience, but you know, obviously the topic of leverage comes up, you know, quite frequently. You know, maybe if you could just comment where you are today, with regards to your, you know, Investor Day goals of being under 3x by the end of this year, roughly 2x by the end of next year and the path towards that. Yeah. We'll probably be closer to the mid-threes by the end of this year. What we did is we paid down $500 million of debt last year. We still intend to pay down $700 million of debt this year using the proceeds from our sale of our India business, or further dilution of our India business, and then the remaining coming out of free cash flow, which will allow us to get into that type of neighborhood. We will have a continued focus on reducing our debt levels down as we head into 2026 also. That still remains a priority for us. You know, maybe just to step back on the India sale too, is it is progressing forward very well. We have had numerous interested parties and we are evaluating different forms of transactions in terms of all the parties that we have had, but we have had a very high level of interest and we do believe we are on track to complete that within this year and in the back half of the year. We do see that as a positive step in bringing our leverage down, but also a positive step for that overall business where we do believe we are setting it up for success in the future. I mean, I appreciate the comments there on the progression with the India sale. You know, maybe if you could just remind us, you know, what the expectations were when you announced it in terms of the proceeds from that and if that is still, you know, kind of a reasonable way to think about it. Yeah. So, you know, when we announced it, we expected proceeds in the, in the range of, let's say, $500 million-$550 million. And I would say today we still feel that's a very good number, as we look at the different types of transactions and forms of transactions in front of us. And so there's no change to what we think the cash flow impact will be from that. You know, the other positive aspect of it that we've always said is you have to keep in mind that we have certain tax assets and other things that allow us to optimize that from a tax perspective, and maximize the amount of cash that we can realize off of the sale. Great. Perfect. With that, I'll open it up to questions from the audience. Yep. Hi. Just talk about your goal to have a share gain from 26%-27% up to 30%. Can you talk about which levels of the price point are you going after, the lower end share? Do you think that's more available in the premium side? Where do you, you know, what areas do you see that coming in? Yep. And I'll, since we're doing the webcast too, I'll kind of repeat the question, but it was around, you know, as we look to gain share, what are the different price points and areas that we're looking to gain share? I think it's across the full spectrum of price points, to be honest, because I think there is some opportunity on some of the entry-level product that will be with the tariff environment that will make ours much more competitive in that space and take away some of the cost competitiveness that comes through some of the loopholes that we're already in, some of the existing tariff structures and other things. I think we'll be able to pick up some there. I think in the mass part of the market, as I talked about before, many of our competitors, even if they're producing in somewhere like Thailand or in Vietnam or somewhere like that, a 10% tariff can still have a pretty significant impact on their product, and it could be somewhere in the range of, let's just say, $30-$40 per unit. Again, there's an opportunity for us to take share there. At the premium side, I think more of that is going to come with the new product launches that we're doing. To be honest, we're probably doing the biggest refresh of our KitchenAid major domestic appliance lineup that we've done in the last decade. We're completely relaunching the entire suite of KitchenAid products. You'll be able to customize handles, colors, all sorts of things. It was very well received at the KBIS event in Vegas earlier this year. I think it's a blend of across all areas of the portfolio, but some of it's going to be more cost-driven and that will be low opening price point to mass. Premium is going to be more based on new product lines. Any other questions? Let me just throw out one, as well. You know, there is obviously, with a lot of the back and forth on the tariff situation, and, you know, you have different retailers talking about price increases, and then there has been some pushback from above, so to speak. You know, I think Home Depot came out and said that they are not going today, they are not going to raise prices, or they might drop some product lines. You know, to the extent that you see yourself obviously as a beneficiary of the tariff backdrop, any thoughts around, you know, perhaps, on a retail level, not seeing the extent of those price increases that you would expect all else equal? Specifically, I am thinking in, you know, at a Home Depot or a Lowe's. Yeah. Again, I have not had a chance to listen to the entire Home Depot call, obviously, because I have been talking to many of you today that are in the room here. But, you know, I do not have the full context of what it was said in, but I have seen some of the headlines. What I would say is that, you know, from an overall more broad retail perspective, while you typically, whenever you do any type of pricing or reduction in promotions, you are always going to feel some resistance, what we have seen is still an ability to drive these promotional price increases through. We have seen it pretty consistently out there, and we have been able to maintain our market share while we do it. It's hard for me to get into some of the specifics of, you know, what a specific retailer may or may not be doing on their floor and what they may be considering, how they're taking pricing or how they're adjusting to this environment. I do believe a lot of what they said also, what I at least read briefly, is they were looking to get more and more of their product that they get away from certain countries and make no other, you know, country have more than 10% of the volume, which would say that, okay, then they're gonna force more on domestic producers. Anybody who does that, force, you know, look more at domestic producers, and that may be an opportunity to pick up some volume for somebody who is a large domestic producer. Right. Again, I don't have any specifics, as I said, because it's all pretty fresh off the press. Yeah. Appreciate that. Thanks for, thanks for taking the audible. No problem. Carla? Sure. Do you have some debt maturities coming due later this year? I was wondering in terms of how you'd like to refinance them? Yeah. The question was around our debt maturities coming due. As we look at the different things, you know, what we've said is right now we intend to, you know, most likely go into the market at some point in the future. We have not given a specific date or anything. You know, we do believe we will probably most likely go with senior unsecured type of debt like we have in the past. With paying down about $700 million of debt and then refinancing the term loan that we have, our interest costs should in aggregate probably go down because, you know, we are going to make that big pay down on the debt and the debt that we are refinancing is already at a higher cost. You know, as we look at it, I think we highlighted in our earnings call presentation that we do believe we have good windows within our debt ladder going forward of where to place some of this debt and that we intend to refinance about $1.1 billion-$1.2 billion sometime in the upcoming future. The biggest part of all that that's maturing for us is more out in October. I mean, that's what we've said so far. Thanks. Any other questions? All right, we'll keep it to there. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks so much, Scott. Appreciate the time.