Newell Brands announced its first quarter 2025 financial results, highlighting strong results in core sales growth, operating margin, and earnings per share. The company’s focus on driving continued progress on strategic choices to improve the business’s fundamentals and maintaining a robust domestic manufacturing base positions it well to manage tariff-related sourcing dislocations and ultimately benefit from them.

Mark Erceg, Newell Brands Chief Financial Officer, said that swift interventions, including targeted pricing actions, incremental cost reduction efforts, and rapid sourcing decisions in conjunction with the first quarter bottom-line over-delivery, gave the company confidence in fully offsetting the U.S. tariffs and foreign retaliatory tariffs currently in place, other than the additional 125% U.S. tariffs on China, and maintaining its original 2025 full-year net sales, operating margin, and EPS guidance ranges.

First Quarter 2025 operating results showed a decline of 5.3% compared with the prior-year period, reflecting a core sales decline of 2.1%. Reported gross margin was 32.1% compared with 30.5% in the prior-year period, with the positive impact from gross productivity, pricing, and lower restructuring-related charges more than offsetting headwinds from inflation and foreign exchange. Normalized gross margin was 32.5% compared with 31.0% in the prior-year period, which represented the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement.

Reported operating income was $21 million compared with $16 million in the prior-year period, with a reported operating margin of 1.3% compared to 1.0% in the prior-year period. Normalized operating income was $71 million, or 4.5% of sales, compared with $79 million, or 4.8% of sales, in the prior-year period. Net interest expense was $72 million compared with $70 million in the prior-year period.

At the end of the first quarter of 2025, Newell Brands had debt outstanding of $4.9 billion and cash and cash equivalents of $233 million, compared with $5.0 billion and $372 million, respectively, at the end of the first quarter of 2024.

Source: Newell Brands