or share repurchase question. And, you know, I guess there's just a lot of moving parts. You're repurchasing shares at a level well above, you know, displacing, I guess, any options-related issuance. Your debt did rise a little bit sequentially. You raised your dividend, et cetera. But just thinking about the share repurchase activity level, you know, in light of the new authorization and et cetera, should I look at, you know, the $24 million that was spent here in this quarter as something more opportunistic in nature, or is this something that we should think about as programmatic? You know, in other words, with the new authorization and your healthy cash flow, I mean, does opportunistic, did you consider, opportunistic share repurchase at, let's say, the current price, a core part of your capital deployment strategy, or is it more of, I don't know, like a flywheel dependent on M&A opportunities and some other things? Thank you.

Yeah, good question, David. Yeah, I would go back to sort of our overall capital allocation philosophy, which is first and foremost, invest for growth, whether it's organic or inorganic. You use the word opportunistic. I think that's the way that we think about share repurchases as well as we sort of evaluate where our capital structure is, where our leverage ratio is, what we see relative to our M&A pipeline or internal investments. And And then how we think about balancing all those pieces, I wouldn't characterize it as programmatic. I would say it is opportunistic, and the new repurchase authorization that we have really just gives us the flexibility to be opportunistic as it makes sense in the market.

Okay, great. I appreciate all the color.

Our next question comes from Arun Viswanathan with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Hi, good morning. This is Adam on for Arun. Thanks for taking my question. My understanding is that gross margin of performance was mostly on volumes for the quarter, but maybe if we could double-click on price a bit, it seems like you're doing quite a good job at pushing that through to offset inflation so i guess i have two quick questions on that how much of the price you've already implemented has yet to flow through in third quarter and um how much of your year-over-year growth do you think is mostly from the outperformance in the first half meaning you know how much do you think you're going to have some of this flow through in the second half versus early in the second quarter. Thanks.

Yeah. So let's talk about the gross margin piece first and the pricing piece first. The majority of the pricing has flown through, right? Because the prices have stabilized at these high levels and the delay, I guess, has been we have a few index adjustments that are just time-based, and they come at the beginning of a new quarter or middle of a quarter sometimes. So I would say we don't expect much more in the short term from a net selling price per kilo expansion unless the external environment dictates that we have to do that, and hopefully it doesn't. But if it does, we'll go and get it. I think you're asking, you know, second quarter was a really good volume quarter, was a good quarter for us overall. Is that sustainable? I mean, we see, you know, as I said in the comments up front, I think the third quarter will probably look very closely like second quarter. Traditionally, third quarter tends to be a good quarter for us. The second half of the year tends to be a little bit better for us than the first half of the year. That growth, you know, the Asian markets for sure in the second half of the year have traditionally been better than the first half. Europe will be tough, right, in the month of August, and they may walk back a little bit in Q3, but we're seeing some relative strength in the Americas right now. And we're pretty confident that demand will hold up that we would see a third quarter pretty similar to what we saw in the second quarter. And then the question becomes what happens in the fourth quarter. With all the volatility in the world right now, I don't really want to go that far down the road, but I think we're tracking on this sort of mid-single-digit to high-single-digit EBITDA growth for the full year.

Okay, great. Thanks for that. And, you know, maybe if we could go back to the Bolton piece. It kind of sounds like you're saying that India and China are consistently providing the most opportunity for maybe acquisition potential. How are you thinking about that in terms of end markets? And, you know, I know there are several kind of reasonably depressed end markets, like building construction, et cetera. So how are you thinking about acquiring things, you know, at discounted multiples, bring in, you know, a creative full times versus bringing things in that are not necessarily at their growth part of the cycle, or is that not how you're thinking about it at all? And you're more concerned with the sort of the cross-selling and synergistic piece?

No, I mean, it's, so, so now you captured pretty well, you know, the, the, the variables, right, that we consider. So when we're talking about bolt-ons, we're looking for, we're either going to look for something that's a portfolio edition, right, or some IP or capability that we don't have today. A capability could be technical capability or access to markets or certain channel play. So those are things that we consider. I think we're not necessarily looking to go out and get into things. We help people manufacture things out of metal, right? So if there are parts of the portfolio or the value chain today that we don't have or we don't have everywhere, then we would be looking at strengthening our portfolio, adding those capabilities um there's also as you said uh periodically there are some things that come along that you would look at purely from a synergy standpoint it's a pretty fragmented space there are a lot of regional players small players in those regions and if you can go and get something and get some arbitrage on the multiple then then we've done that successfully in the past and would would certainly consider doing that in the future. And then we always leave, we leave dry powder, we position ourselves to be able to do something more transformational, a larger type of deal. Of course, those are rare, and they take a lot of time to get done. But that's sort of the overall landscape there, Adam.

Yeah, and I would just add that, you know, we have a track record of buying, you know, good businesses, EBITDA positive, cash flow positive businesses that are creative to our business. And, you know, we look at those opportunities, as Joe said, through the lens of a commercial channel or a new product technology or an asset and bringing that into our large global footprint with all of our capacity and capability to, you know, accelerate growth in those acquisitions that we've made. So, I think that's how we think about a philosophy from a, you know, sort of financial standpoint.

Great. Thanks for the detail, and congrats again on a great quarter.

Yeah, thank you, El.

We have now reached the end of our question and answer session. I would like to turn the floor back over to Joe Berkowitz for closing comments.

Sure. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. We appreciate everyone's continued interest in Quaker Houghton. And I also just want to thank our colleagues around the world for their hard work and dedication to our customers. Our people are our greatest asset. Please reach out to John if you have any additional follow-up questions. Thank you.

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