Andre Maciel
Executive Vice President and Global Chief Financial Officer at Kraft Heinz
Yeah, sure. So I think maybe starting with the U.K., as we said last year in earnings, this is a place that suffer a significant amount of inflation or even more than other developed markets. And private label in that particular market has started to get a lot of traction and we decided in Q3 last year to start to step-up investments to protect the volume. We do have some factories in the U.K. that's also we need to be mindful about the utilization of those factories and protect volume for some of the strong brands we have over there. We have put that in place since now almost a year ago and we have seen the returns happening on the volume share side. So I think we're moving in the right direction. And we are able to mostly protect even gross margin because of the amount of efficiency that we have generated there. So U.K., I think is moving in the right direction.
When it comes to China, I mean, similar to what you have heard from others, the industry continues to be soft. I mean, that's the expectations that we do have about a country like China. So we continue to gain market share in modern trade. So that's a good thing, but the industry is just not working. And I think we actually set our expectation moving forward at least for the short-term about China industry growth. In Brazil, the good thing is we continue to gain market share. So that's been very consistent and feel good about that. The consumer, it has been demonstrating similar to other parts of the world fatigue and has been showing also vulnerability. So we saw some price gaps to branded players for private label there is negligible also coming down. So we had to invest. But we face a situation where the customers adjusted their inventories down.
You have to be -- understand that in emerging markets, retailers tend to carry more inventory than in developed markets. So in a country like Brazil, you can see inventories at the 45, 50 days level compared to the U.S. where you see 20 days, 25 days. So it's very different. And what we have seen a situation like we are right now high interest rates, consumer tightness is retailers start to adjust their inventories down. And honestly, we are not expecting that and that created a challenge for us in Brazil in the first half of the year. We believe that inventories -- we believe right now that they should be at the appropriate level, which should allow us to improve the situation, but yeah, that's a little bit of snapshot.