Driving strong and consistent cost efficiency is fundamental to our ability to deliver sustainable and dependable growth. During 2008, we invested $0.14 of earnings per share into up-front costs for savings initiatives. We regularly make such investments, and we account for them as a part of our normal operations. In addition, we continually identify new cost-saving programs. We have targeted efficiencies that will deliver $1 billion of annual cost savings by 2011.

In 2008, we began reviewing $2 billion of indirect spending to identify efficiencies through centralized purchasing. In addition, we initiated the K-LEAN manufacturing initiative—Lean, Efficient, Agile, Network. This initiative ensures our manufacturing culture will continue to foster improvement, drive waste reduction, optimize manufacturing operations, uphold exemplary quality and safety standards, and maintain high organizational effectiveness. During the year, we began implementing K-LEAN in several North America plants. The initial results were so impressive that we are now in the process of introducing K-LEAN across North America, Latin America and Europe, with the goal of increasing our productivity savings to as high as 4 percent of cost of goods in 2009.