BUSINESS STRATEGY & ORGANIZATIONAL RISKS
Our ability to meet our growth targets depends on successful product, marketing and operations innovation and successful responses to competitive innovation, evolving digital marketing and selling platforms, and changing consumer habits.
We are a consumer products company that relies on continued global demand for our brands and products. Achieving our business results depends, in part, on successfully developing, introducing and marketing new products and on making significant improvements to our equipment and manufacturing processes. The success of such innovation depends on our ability to correctly anticipate customer and consumer acceptance and trends, to obtain, maintain and enforce necessary intellectual property protections and to avoid infringing upon the intellectual property rights of others, and to continue to deliver efficient and effective marketing across evolving media and mobile platforms with dynamic privacy requirements. We must also successfully respond to technological advances made by, and intellectual property rights granted to, competitors, customers and vendors. Failure to continually innovate, improve and respond to competitive moves, platform evolution, and changing consumer habits could compromise our competitive position and adversely impact our financial condition, results of operations or cash flows.
We must successfully manage ongoing acquisition, joint venture and divestiture activities.
As a company that manages a portfolio of consumer brands, our ongoing business model includes a certain level of acquisition, joint venture and divestiture activities. We must be able to successfully manage the impacts of these activities, while at the same time delivering against our business objectives. Specifically, our financial results have been, and in the future could be, adversely impacted by the dilutive impacts from the loss of earnings associated with divested brands or dissolution of joint ventures. Our results of operations and cash flows have been and, in the future could also be, impacted by acquisitions or joint venture activities, if: 1) changes in the cash flows or other market-based assumptions cause the value of acquired assets to fall below book value, or 2) we are not able to deliver the expected cost and growth synergies associated with such acquisitions and joint ventures, including as a result of integration and collaboration challenges, which could also result in an impairment of goodwill and intangible assets.
Our business results depend on our ability to successfully manage productivity improvements and ongoing organizational change, including attracting and retaining key talent as part of our overall succession planning.
Our financial projections assume certain ongoing productivity improvements and cost savings, including staffing adjustments as well as employee departures. Failure to deliver these planned productivity improvements and cost savings, while continuing to invest in business growth, could adversely impact our results of operations and cash flows.
Additionally, successfully executing organizational change, management transitions at leadership levels of the Company and motivation and retention of key employees, is critical to our business success. Factors that may affect our ability to attract and retain sufficient numbers of qualified employees include employee morale, our reputation, competition from other employers and availability of qualified individuals. Our success depends on identifying, developing and retaining key employees to provide uninterrupted leadership and direction for our business. This includes developing and retaining organizational capabilities in key growth markets where the depth of skilled or experienced employees may be limited and competition for these resources is intense, as well as continuing the development and execution of robust leadership succession plans.