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Newell's Smart Productivity Moves Likely to Offset Cost Pressures

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Key Takeaways

  • Newell drives efficiency and profitability through its productivity initiatives.
  • NWL focuses on automation, cost management and revenue-growth strategies.
  • Optimizing category mix, SKUs and supply chain are core pillars of NWL's operations.

Newell Brands Inc.’s (NWL - Free Report) productivity mechanism plays a vital role in enhancing efficiency and driving higher profitability. The company is executing strategic initiatives to deliver productivity gains through increased automation and stringent cost management. Optimizing category mix, managing revenue growth, streamlining SKUs and improving supply-chain performance are the key pillars of Newell’s operational strategy.

The company has implemented a corporate strategy that prioritizes investments in innovation, brand-building and go-to-market excellence across its brands and markets. NWL is strengthening its commercial capabilities and improving organizational efficiency. Strategic pricing and productivity actions have successfully mitigated inflation and currency translation impacts, contributing to the company’s performance.

Newell is benefiting from productivity and pricing actions, which have been boosting margins for quite some time now. In first-quarter 2025, normalized gross margin expanded 150 basis points (bps), reflecting the seventh straight quarter of year-over-year increase. Gross productivity savings and pricing more than offset inflation and foreign currency translations. We expect normalized gross margin to expand 120 bps for 2025.

Newell’s organizational realignment is designed to reinforce its front-end commercial capabilities, sharpen consumer insights and aid brand strength. The company looks forward to boost accountability, drive operational efficiencies, reduce complexity and allocate more funds for reinvestment. Newell is enhancing its front-end commercial capabilities through consumer-led innovations. 

Moving ahead, management expects that easing commodity and input cost inflation, favorable foreign exchange movements, robust productivity gains and pricing will help mitigate the impact of increased tariff costs. Such factors are likely to drive margins and profitability.

NWL’s Competition in the Productivity Improvements

The Procter & Gamble Company (PG - Free Report) , Colgate-Palmolive Company (CL - Free Report) and Clorox (CLX - Free Report) are the major companies that make constant productivity moves.

Procter & Gamble places a strong emphasis on driving productivity. The company is advancing productivity investments to counter inflationary costs and currency volatility and to drive margins. PG continues to accelerate productivity across all facets of operations to reinvest strategically and fuel enterprise-wide growth. Procter & Gamble seeks to gain greater visibility into cost-saving opportunities by leveraging globally scalable programs like Supply Chain 3.0, which focuses on optimizing supply-chain operations. Supply Chain 3.0 is helping the company to efficiently deliver products to the retail partners, with the integration of automation, data synchronization and digitization.

Colgate’s productivity drive plays a pivotal role in the strategic execution and operational excellence. Its productivity push leads to better efficiency and higher profits by offsetting the elevated input and operating costs. CL has been streamlining its global supply chain, adopting modernized manufacturing automation and optimizing the overhead structure, reaffirming its commitment to deliver greater efficiency and cost effectiveness. Colgate looks to navigate raw material inflation through key strategic methods, including productivity improvements and bolstering supply-chain efficiencies.

Clorox aims to drive higher productivity across the organization through its transformation efforts, including its enterprise resource planning (ERP) conversion. The ERP transition is a critical step in CLX’s digital transformation, enabling quick, data-driven decisions and boosting capabilities to fuel growth and productivity. Its streamlined operating model is focused on simplifying operations, enhancing technology and delivering agile growth. Clorox has been making constant efforts to drive efficiency across manufacturing and logistics, as well as optimizing portfolio moves. Its IGNITE strategy is also progressing well.

NWL’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of Newell have lost 45.7% year to date compared with the industry’s drop of 0.4%.

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From a valuation standpoint, NWL trades at a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 7.63X compared with the industry’s average of 20.46X.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for NWL’s 2025 and 2026 EPS indicates year-over-year growth of 1.5% and 0.9%, respectively. The company’s EPS estimate for 2025 has been stable while the same for 2026 has gone north in the past 30 days.

Zacks Investment Research
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research

NWL stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). 

You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

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