“In the middle of all that, as I already said, our categories, we expect to continue a strong buy.”

In context

“look like from a top line and a bottom line perspective. Now particularly that our pricing in Europe is complete and behind us. And so yes, FX is impacting our EPS but we are still showing real growth in -- or growth in real dollars. So overall, I would say the results are good. So if you look a little bit beyond that, what does that mean? From a consumer perspective in the first place, we see in emerging markets consumer sentiment being very solid, very positive. I'm talking about Southeast Asia, India, China even. And so there is a certain optimism. And the degree of strength in the consumer confidence in emerging markets for us is almost to pre-COVID level. Of course, developed markets, we see a very mixed picture, challenged in Europe, as we all know, relatively optimistic in the U.S. In the middle of all that, as I already said, our categories, we expect to continue a strong buy. We see more and more signs that consumers continue to see or increasingly see our categories as an affordable indulgence. We see consumers saying that chocolate is really something they cannot live without. And so we believe that the spending decrease that we will see from consumers eventually, as inflation keeps hitting them, is going to be probably more in the big ticket items. Grocery seems to be doing overall pretty well, I would say. I think we also are benefiting from the fact that we have strong brands in which we continue to invest quite significantly. That's part of our thinking, and I think that is helping us in our results. Pricing, of course, played a role. On pricing, where we stand is that we've just gone through our second round of pricing this year in Europe. We've announc”