Good morning, everyone. Or in French, "Bonjour a tous." It is a big honor for us to welcome you here personally in our headquarters here in Clichy, here where it all started for BIC many years ago. Also a warm welcome for those who are joining us online today. For those who do not know me yet, my name is Rob Versloot, and I have the pleasure to lead this company since almost one year. If everything goes well today, I hope to celebrate my first anniversary at BIC in exactly eight days from now. A bit about my background. I have been working in the fast-moving consumer goods industry for the last 30 years. My first job was a salesman. You will notice today in the presentation that DNA of the salesman has always stayed with me. I am all about commercial execution.
I spent the first 15 years of my career in originally a Dutch company called Numico. The bankers here maybe remember the deal that Danone did when it acquired Numico many years ago. I spent a couple of years with Danone as well, and then transitioned to a Swiss food company called Hero, where I had the pleasure to lead the company as CEO for the last 12 years. Now since one year at BIC, and I can tell you I am honored. I am honored as a Dutchman to lead this iconic French company and to contribute to its development. Let me see if this works. It does. Luckily, I am not alone today, but I am joined by my wonderful colleagues of our executive committee. This is a new team.
This is a team that I have assembled over the last 12 months, and it is a great combination of some longstanding experienced BIC executives, complemented by new hires, mostly in the commercial and financial areas. Today, we have the pleasure to start with me, or I have the pleasure to start with sharing our overall strategic ambition. We will then welcome my colleague, David, who will take you through the category strategies of each of our core categories. We are then going to switch and focus on in-market execution, starting with our largest market, North America. It will be presented by my colleague, Haven, followed by Alina, who will take you through our in-market execution in our international markets.
We then will speak about sustainable development, a very important topic for a company like us, before Grégory will take you through the numbers, our transformation, our financial ambition, and I will finish off with a conclusion. Yes, it is really a pleasure to kick off this meeting today and take you through our strategic ambition. Before doing so, I like to share with you what I have learned here now 12 months in this wonderful company. I like to take you through some of the key strengths and assets of which we are very proud here at BIC. Starting with our most important asset, a legendary brand. A legendary brand, a French icon. Having worked for so many years in fast-moving consumer goods, there are not many brands in this world who can count on the same global awareness as the BIC brand can.
It is really a fantastic asset to build on. Secondly, I have them here, our products. They are absolutely iconic. They are being recognized all over the world. The lighter, the pens, the shavers, absolutely iconic design, wonders of industrial design, and this is something we are very proud of. When you think of design and these icons, we really plan to leverage that more and more in the future as well. Thirdly, I spent roughly half my time in markets. I have traveled all over the world to all our important BIC markets, and what I see everywhere is people with a real heart for the company, passionate professionals who want to make things happen and who give it all day by day. Really a fantastic culture with great people. Then manufacturing.
I told you already, I am a commercial guy, but I do know something about supply chain, and the BIC factories are absolutely state-of-the-art. I have not encountered in my professional life such great technical know-how, such fantastic efficiencies. It is pretty amazing that we as a company, which are offering relatively affordable products, we can generate gross margins of over 50%. That is very much driven by a fantastic supply chain and manufacturing footprint on which we are very proud as a company. Last but not least, distribution. You can travel basically anywhere in the world, and I guarantee you will be able to find BIC products in literally every corner. Still not enough. We still have a lot of opportunity for distribution. But we are present in more than 160 countries, so really a fantastic worldwide distribution footprint.
This is a lineup of which many companies are jealous, I can tell you this. This is a fantastic basis to build from. But we want to be brutally honest with you also today. When we look back at our performance, we conclude that we have some issues to fix here at BIC. Today, we are a EUR 2 billion company, and that is not bad. That is great. The problem is 10 years ago, we were a EUR 2 billion company. I want to be very clear, we have not been able to grow our business structurally in the last year. We have lost volume, and we have also suffered from declining profitability. Our EBIT margin last year was 13.6%. At the same time, I want to be balanced. I want to call out the issues, but I also want to be balanced.
The company has remained with a very solid financial foundation and structure, and it has been able to really sustain shareholder returns. I want to be very clear about what is our priority here at BIC. Our number one priority is to drive organic growth. But before doing so, there is a couple of things that we need to fix, and we are very aware of that. Coming from fast-moving consumer goods industry, what surprised me when I started here at BIC and started to analyze our P&L and look at our commercial activity, we are not investing sufficiently in both brand support and commercial execution. For the elderly people in the room like me, I remember BIC as a company who used to advertise like crazy. Tour de France. John McEnroe. Who remembers John McEnroe, the famous American tennis player? BIC was all over in advertising.
And I think when we look today, when I go to the socials, when I look at TikTok together with my daughter, I do not really see us. We really have an opportunity to improve our brand support. When we benchmark with other companies, we can also clearly see that there is a gap. Second issue which struck me is, I think the company has been busy in recent years with acquiring in what I call rather exotic new businesses. The company made several acquisitions. We are very proud of one acquisition, namely Tangle Teezer. I will talk more about that today. We also did other acquisitions in categories which were pretty far out of where the DNA and the strength of BIC is. We acquired several businesses in the beautiful art of skin tattoos, temporary tattoos. We bought a company called Rocketbook, digital notepads.
We invested in a company called AMI. In my view, this has led to a lack on the core business. One of the first decisions the board and I took when I started last year in Q4 was to say goodbye to those businesses. They were not contributing to either growth or profitability, and we wanted to make a clean start. You have seen that last year in Q4, that we took that step. Third point I want to call out is our organization. Very complex in my view, which surprised me. I think BIC's DNA is an entrepreneurial company, a family-owned company. But we saw very many different management layers, a bit unclear on who is accountable for what. We took a lot of steps the last 12 months to implement a leaner and more commercially focused and a less complex operating model.
That of course caused a lot of change here in this company, but that change was necessary in order to be fit for growth going forward. I am convinced that our new commercially oriented setup will also help to speed up innovation, to be much closer to consumers and customers in order to grow the business. We are very clear on what our issues are, and we are very clear on what we need to fix. The great news is there is so much opportunity still to grow our business. I know some of you are a bit doubtful about the growth profile of some of our categories, but I can tell you, on a global level, all our categories still show growth. On top of that, our market share is much smaller than I thought when I started to work at BIC.
I think the name is bigger, the brand is bigger than the factual market share. For those of you, I know the questions will come, lighters. I just want you to remember this fact. From the 10 lighters sold in the world, only one is BIC. One out of 10. So there is a lot of opportunity to capture share, and I am going to explain to you today how we plan to do that. The point I want to make is we are very clear about our priorities. As I already mentioned, key KPI going forward is organic growth. In order to trigger that, we know we will need to invest more in our brand and our commercial execution.
In order to enable that, we need to transform the way we are organized. As I mentioned, we took a lot of steps, and change our ways of working. We need to change the shape of our P&L in order to drive this company as a true fast-moving consumer goods company. When it comes to growth, it is all about execution. Growth doesn't come by itself, so we really took the time to make deliberate changes in the way we plan to execute growth. We have developed a model which is based on quite a well-known theory called How Brands Grow of Professor Byron Sharp, and we call it How BIC Grows. So we have been training our organization, we are still in that process, to change the way we plan to execute growth. It is all about penetration.
Our strategy will be focused on how can we drive additional penetration. How can we make from one out of 10, two out of 10 in lighters? There are ample opportunities for additional penetration in this company. It has to do with, of course, the availability, the physical availability of the product. It has to do with mental availability, and that is why I am so keen on really driving that brand and mental support going forward. It also has to do about product and portfolio. I am going to come back later on this, but we are moving from a locally diverse commercially execution to a standardized growth model going forward, which is called How BIC Grows. Of course, you are very curious to see how we are going to make all this happen. Before explaining that, I have a video to show you to give you an idea.
[Presentation]
[Presentation]
Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, let's get back to what made us great. I was talking about growth before the video, and I think it's very important that we are clear about our North Star. Who do we actually want to become in this growing company? BIC to the Future is about becoming the leader in beautiful, better, everyday essentials. That's what I'd like this company to be recognized for. Why beautiful? First of all, we have this background of these iconic designs in the company. Through design, through a rejuvenated brand, through great packaging design, we will seduce more consumers in order to increase penetration. The combination is better with better is a testimony to the superior product performance that BIC products deliver. Again, the lighter. I can testify to this personally. Unfortunately, I am still smoking for the last 30 years.
There is no better pocket lighter than the BIC lighter. Tangle Teezer. I invite you to try this. You will never use a different brush again. So we have this combination of products that really deliver on performance, and what we want to do is we want to beef up the beauty, the attraction of our products. Beautiful, better, everyday essentials. That will help us to increase penetration. Now, we're announcing our strategic plan today, but it's not that we have been sitting still here in Clichy in the last 12 months. I already mentioned the decisive action we took in order to refocus the company on what it knows best, our core business, and we have divested or stopped the things that were distracting us. I mentioned Tangle Teezer.
We are incredibly happy and proud to have Tangle Teezer in our portfolio, and you will hear today that the category of brushes will become the official fourth leg of our company. Why does this fit well with BIC? Again, let's go to beautiful, better, everyday essentials. Great-looking product, fantastic product performance, made from plastic. Hey, which company can produce plastic products like no others? So we have great opportunity for insourcing margin expansion. We can leverage our worldwide distribution footprint. So this is really a perfect match. Very happy with Tangle Teezer, and you've seen also in our recent results publications that we have made great progress with integration, but also with acceleration of growth. I'm not the only new guy here at BIC.
You will meet my team today, which has been renewed for an important part, but also our board of directors has had many changes, and we feel incredibly supported by our renewed board, and we are 100% aligned on the strategy that we are pursuing and explaining to you today. I mentioned our operating model. We took decisive action to adjust our organization structure in order to become more agile, to come closer to customers and consumers. We are pleased. I want to be, I won't say satisfied, but we are pleased with that we see after a very tough year last year, we see that the momentum is improving at BIC. We had a moderate growth in the first half year, and a very high EBIT margin, thanks to a one-off related to the tariff substitution and strong cash flow.
I think we are managing to stabilize the company, slightly growing, whilst we are preparing for sustained growth going forward. I'd like to keep the things very simple and clear. From the category point of view, we've made clear choices. We are going to focus on our traditional three core categories plus brushes, because we see an incredible opportunity to develop the brushes category. If you go to the store like I do every week, I invite you to take a look at the brushes section. It's a section where there is no branded leader, and when we look at Tangle Teezer and its performance in the U.K. and in the U.S., our two main markets where we invest, we take share with an incredible speed.
We did a lot of research on Tangle Teezer, and in my career, I have not seen a consumer funnel which is so strong as Tangle Teezer has. The relation between awareness, trial, repeat is really fantastic. We're also very clear on the role of each of the categories, and my colleague David will enlighten you a little bit more about it, but each category has its own role to play in the total BIC mix. On the country side, we have also taken decisive action because as this plan is a lot about commercial excellence, we want to make sure that we are properly set up in our country organization to execute with excellence.
What we have done is we have categorized our markets in four different buckets depending on its development stage or the performance, and have adjusted our in-market strategies based on the category of the country type. White spaces, also important. You will learn, despite the worldwide distribution footprint we have, there is an incredible amount of white space still available for our company to capture. I showed you where we want to play, both from a category point of view and from a country point of view. Let's now discuss what are now the levers which we can pull in order to improve that organic growth performance at BIC. I'll take you through these one by one, starting with portfolio. The BIC company is in love with SKUs, I have noticed. Really, there's a deep love for developing as many SKUs as possible.
When we analyze that portfolio, I think we have over 10,000, over 10,000, yeah, over 10,000 different SKUs. When we analyze which part of the portfolio is now actually driving our growth, our profitability, it is a very small part. We really believe we have an incredible opportunity to clean up our house, to reduce the portfolio, and focus much more on those products and SKUs that really matter. That will help our commercial colleagues to be more clear. I believe less is more in this particular case. It will not only help our commercial colleagues to improve their focus, it will also benefit our supply chain. You can imagine if you have a smaller portfolio, but you have higher production requirements on your core SKUs, that that will help efficiency even further.
We are at a good level, but we do not want to stop where we are today. We want to increase going forward. This is my favorite one, the BIC brand. What you see here is some early directional work which we are pursuing at the moment. BIC is a fantastic brand, but it is a little bit outdated. Yeah. It starts to feel like yesterday's BIC brand. Yeah. What we want to do is we want to rejuvenate this wonderful brand. We want to connect with younger consumers, and we are working at this as we speak, and you see some first directional executions here. The mission is clear. BIC has to become cool again. I do not want my generation to talk about BIC. I want my children to talk about BIC in school, at the clubs, wherever they are.
There is this wonderful basis and great heritages, but it is time for renewal, for reconnection with new consumers. I see a wonderful opportunity to propel this brand into the future. We are working on the brand, and once we have defined the renewal, that is the time when we are going to start to invest behind it and make the whole world known about the new BIC. You saw in our growth model, it is about portfolio, it is about mental availability and investment in brand support, but it is also about making the product available everywhere. What I have noticed here in my time at BIC is a very strong focus on what I call the traditional super and hypermarket channel. Yeah. When you are here in France, you can go to the Carrefour, you see our products, et cetera.
The point is, there is a lot of opportunity in alternative channels, and I can name a couple of examples. Fastest growing channel in Europe is discounters. BIC is underrepresented. We have to get in there. In stationery, back to school, that is, of course, nice and an important season. Do you know which distribution point we sell the most 4-Color pens here in France? Disneyland. Disneyland. Marne-la-Vallée, next to our factory. Yeah. We got to go there where the consumer shops, recreates, travels. I see a lot of white space in channel development outside traditional supermarket, hypermarkets. The traditional channel, convenience channel, discounters, tourism, leisure, you name it, we have to be there. An important lever for us in our ambition to increase penetration is to start occupy white spaces in the distribution landscape.
I mentioned it already, this company was known for great geographical expansion. Our founder, Marcel Bich, Le Baron Bich, traveled the world and opened countries 60 years ago, went to Brazil, went to Mexico. I do not want to compare myself with Marcel Bich, but we got to take the learnings of what made us great. When you analyze the geographical footprint of BIC, there is opportunity to increase our presence in emerging markets. That was a great timing. Talking about emerging markets, we know we want to be selectively. We have carefully chosen which markets do we already have brand equity, where do we already have a structure, where do we have the right to win? We see, particularly on the African continent, huge opportunities for growth.
We have already strong presence in Africa, so it is not that we are now suddenly starting to embark on an African adventure. We have analyzed that we can really turbocharge our sales through the recruitment of hundreds of new colleagues in sales. When you look at Africa from a demographic and an economic growth point of view, it is in a great case for growth. Population will double in Africa. Clearly, we see opportunities for geographical expansion for our business. I am coming to the last lever, which is innovation. Of course, as a fast-moving consumer goods company, we need to renovate and innovate our portfolio. When we talk about renovation, remember the mission, beautiful and better. I want all our products to look outstanding. I want to seduce and attract consumers.
There is so much we can do with decoration and execution and packaging design and product shapes. That is where we will focus. When it comes to innovation, I want to be selective because most innovation fails. Most innovations clutters the portfolio. Most innovation has to be withdrawn from market. I want to surely innovate, but we will test, we will learn before we roll out. Those are the five levers which we want to pull in order to drive growth. I am coming now to some other enablers which will help us to realize what I have just told you about. I think we already spoke about the brand. We have two wonderful brands, BIC, which needs renewal, and a great Tangle Teezer brand. We spoke about consumer and commercial excellence, the whole focus, the relentless focus on excellent execution in markets.
We will continue to nurture our supply chain. We are not going to fix what is not broken. We have a great supply chain. We are proud of it. We will nurture it. Where we have work to do, and Greg will speak about it later today, is in our digital infrastructure and capability. Clearly, we are not where we want to be. Part of our transformation is also a very deliberate investment to get up to speed in the area of digital capability. We spoke about organization, and as I mentioned, we have taken a lot of decisive steps. Last but not least, our sustainability strategy will be fully focused on circularity.
We have, of course, in a company like ours, a duty to think about the end of life of our products, and my colleague, François, will take you through our thinking how we will try to become a circular company in the future. On organization, as it's so important in order to help us execute well, I'd like to take you through how we plan to execute commercially. I spoke about that focus on four core categories. We have established a unified category organization, and that part of our organization is responsible for our brands, is responsible to define the right portfolio. It's a big change versus the past. Portfolios used to be managed locally. Responsible for innovation and is also responsible for manufacturing. This is the what we make and the how we make.
Once we have done that here, once we have rejuvenated, redesigned the portfolio, it's being handed over to our commercial leaders, who will focus on execution. Alina and Haven will take you through the plans. So they are all about distribution, customers, service levels, and local activation of our business. That is the operating model we have implemented here at BIC, and this is a big change for the company. It's really a big change. I'm coming to the end of my presentation, and as I already mentioned, I like to keep things simple. This is a one-slide summary of what I've been sharing with you this morning. Now, I know you now all look at the numbers, or probably you have seen them already. We truly believe organic growth is possible at BIC.
Remember that slide with the market shares, there is so much to be found. So we want to guide you that we will be able to grow around 3%, and maybe I want to include some comments on that, on this projected organic net sales growth. It's very broad-based. It's very broad-based from both a category point of view and from a geographical point of view. We believe that all our categories can contribute to growth. We expect double-digit growth in brushes, and if you've looked at the recent result, you see that it is there, and we are convinced that we can sustain it going forward. From a country point of view, also there, we have really found a balanced picture. We foresee robust growth in our number one market of the United States of America.
We foresee double-digit growth in the emerging footprints, which we are developing and investing in. Last point I want to make on targets, and this is a very important point. We have chosen targets that are ambitious but credible. I think our company, in the past, has disappointed investors at times by not delivering upon commitments. This is not my style. I want to build a trusted relationship with our investors. I do what I say, and I say what I do. That's the style. So these are credible targets. They're ambitious. They are a step change versus what we did, but we want to deliver upon them. Last point I want to make before I hand over to my colleague, David. I'm sure you agree our strategy is not rocket science. This model is a proven, fast-moving consumer good model. This is best practice.
Its success will depend, very simple, on execution. That's why I spend at least half of my time with our colleagues in the markets. Execution. That's where our focus will be. Grégory will also later show you in our whole transformation, we have focused on how can we ensure execution? How can we make sure we don't go wrong here? As the former salesman that I am, I love execution. I get happy when I'm in the store and I see the perfect portfolio in the fantastic packaging on a display. This is what we're going to be about. My ambition is to develop BIC together with my team into a professional, growing and winning Fast-Moving Consumer Goods company. We have wonderful heritage here at BIC, but I'm convinced about a great future for this iconic company, and look forward to become the leader in beautiful, better, everyday essentials.
Thank you very much. I'll give the floor to my colleague, David, to talk about our four beautiful categories. Merci beaucoup.
Good morning to everyone. My name is David Cabero. I'm the Chief Growth Officer at BIC. My career has been divided in three different periods. The first one, 10 years with finance experience in Arthur Andersen and L'Oréal. 20 years with commercial experience as a general manager in different countries, sub-regions, and regions. The last role that I took was the general manager of Europe. The last three years as category leader, first in stationery, and now with the four categories in my new role. I'm 22 years at BIC, so I know well this house. Not yet. Our success at BIC has been anchored with simple, functional, desirable, long-lasting, accessible products. What we were calling our better everyday essentials. Those attributes today are no longer sufficient to grow.
That's why we are adding design to the products, to our core range, which means that we are turning those products into beautiful, better, everyday essentials, adding the beautiful part. The ultimate objective of this is twofold. First is to attract new consumers through penetration, as some consumers that are buying today other brands and other products will buy BIC, and generate new purchasing occasions. It's a very important shift in our strategy, because it means that we are strengthening the core. It means that we are increasing volumes through penetration. It means that we are increasing margins through mix, as those products are more expensive. We are making a better use of our current manufacturing capabilities, with the objective of profitable long-term value generation. So I invite you now to visualize all that through a video. Growth will come from integrated strategies of those four category plans.
These frameworks enable us to adapt our play to win in each and every market. In stationery, there will be a penetration-led volume growth in developing markets, as we have plenty of space to grow still. In developed markets, we will double down on animation with the new ranges that you have seen already before at the entrance of this session, and always with a profit-oriented mindset, because I want to remind you that stationery is the lowest profitable in percentage category that we are having, the less profitable. Lighters in developed markets where we are already present, the focus will be in visibility on the point of sales, while in developing will be, again, penetration, presence, market presence. We will increase our brand appeal with renewed decoration, both on the lighter itself and also on the POS material.
In shavers, we will double down, we will grow the core, our base, the non-refillable market, while we will do the first steps into the premiumized segment, the refillable market that accounts for 60% of the total market and where our market share is still very low. We will gain distribution in the channels, the growth channels, where we are still very limited presence. An example is e-commerce in shavers. In brushes, we will accelerate in the premium segment. We will win through innovation from detangling, the core of our business. You have seen probably the Complete Care range that is outside that James has been showing you. A very nice range that is now being sold on the markets as we talk. We target the geographical expansion to scale the high growth momentum that we are going through. The value creation algorithm, where it resides?
It resides on giving to each category complementary roles. We are going to invest in Tangle Teezer, and we are going to invest in shavers. But in stationery, we will be much more profitable mind. This will be the compensations that we are going to create, and the algorithm will come from the sum of all those parts. There are three common levers that you will find across all categories, the four categories. First, our way forward is striking an equilibrium in our commercial regional footprint. As developing markets grow double digits year after year till 2030, by 2030, developing markets, developed and NAM will have equal weight. It means that each one of them will have 33% of the net sales of the company, mitigating risk and limiting growth dependencies in only one region. Second, we will reduce our portfolio between 30% and 50%.
We will focus on the core in the hero products, and we will eliminate the tails. For cash generation. Third, we will focus on the right channels. Discount and e-commerce, which are the fastest-growing channels today in FMCG, but also traditional channel, where we have already 50% of our business, is very fragmented. There are plenty of white spaces across the world, across the regions. Let us move now category, let us start with stationery. The key feature of stationery is that this is a very fragmented category, with a lot of fragmented in terms of competition, with a mature market, that is a mature category. Very volume sensitive. It means that the small variances in volumes have significant impacts in our cost of goods. Limited technological innovation, it is not each and every day that we change the inks.
The value for opportunities for BIC resides at volume in developing markets as we grow in penetration, value through mix in developed markets following the archetypes that we just saw, entering in new channels. I will mention gifting as an example, leisure, tourism. The 4-Color of Euro Disney is sold at a price higher than 8 EUR. If you go to back to school in France, as an example, you will find at less than 2. So it is times four the price. It allows us to capture value through increased product desirability and design. It is new consumer occasions that we are entering in. Last but not least, we will leverage BIC's unique brand, but also scale as we are today a global business. Today, stationery is a category with lower profitability. I just mentioned it before.
We want to turn stationery into a value-creative category to improve cash generation. How we get that? Through three must-win battles. We boost penetration in developing markets with volume growth, leveraging already our current commercial and industrial footprint. We are already there. We have the infrastructure to do it. We elevate the brand in developed markets. You saw it. We are shifting on those markets into beautiful, better, everyday essentials, bringing design, bringing attractivity. You saw the Vibes probably, if you had the time, our new range also in the video. A range that is attractive and allows us for trade-up and allows us to increase penetration through new consumers that were not buying our products, especially in the young generations. Always improving profitability through reducing portfolio complexity and with the launch of higher-margin products.
If we talk about portfolio strategy, we will bring design into our products, making our products more desirable, launching the Vibes, launching 4-Color with new colors like the Mineral Tones, pastels, leveraging the trends that are changing each and every year, and collaborating with brands like the Stranger Things that you saw with it in Brazil. This animation strategy has also a benefit, some benefit in our P&L. We do not develop products from scratch. We are starting from hero products. This means quicker speed to market to bring animation, but also lower capital requirements, as we have already the machines to do it. Secondly, we will execute with renewed geographical focus, so developing markets on volume, develop markets on value through mix.
With that, what we are doing is we are bringing the developing markets in the center of our strategy, and that is a big shift in the strategy that we are presenting to you today. Increasing penetration through hero products, selling more the Cristal, is something that we master. We have been doing that for decades. It has been the base of our international expansion and has brought predictable returns over time, so this give us a lot of confidence of how can we do that globally again. Thirdly, we will simplify our portfolio, focusing on the core products, cutting the long tail, which is a big part of the portfolio, but it adds very few sales and very few additional consumers, and that is the plan on the portfolio strategy. Let me move now into lighter. That is a very fragmented category.
As mentioned by Rob, only one out of 10 products are sold by BIC. 90% of the products in the market are outside BIC. This means unlimited possibilities of growth independently about the market evolution. The growth pools globally are shifting toward wider spaces, towards developing, towards where population is still growing. Growing in developed markets requires an excellent execution on the point of sales. We have wide spaces in one part and execution very important on the markets that already more mature markets like the developed ones. The value opportunities for BIC. What we want to do is first to capture those volumes that are outside our hands. That is the first priority, and we will do that through penetration, physical availability, target route to market, and brand investments. There will be some targeted investments in this category.
Defend, of course, the U.S. profitability, which is the BIC part of our profitability today, and increase the portfolio desirability. Lighters for BIC is a profitable growth category. Whenever we sell more products, more lighters, we do profits. We have seen that for years, and you know that well. We will drive profitable growth through animation and penetration. We want to be seen, we want to be there, and we want to be desired. Be seen in developed markets, we are already present, so all the focus is on visibility in the point of sales. Be there in developing markets, we are there but with very limited presence, so here the question is more on the white spaces, on being present, and that will be the focus, bringing the products into the shops. Be desired is through increased brand and portfolio preference, product preference.
You will tell me, for lighter, what does it mean to have a product preference? That is very simple. From our consumer insights team, what we know is that 40% of the purchases are impulse-driven. Decisions happens at the point of sale, and the attractive decoration is what drives consumer preference. The solution is very simple. To drive growth, we will improve our decoration designs and the designs of the products that we are going to launch in the next few years. As with the weight of the decors, the decorated lighters grows, and particularly those of the premium lighters, that we benefit from mix, we benefit from higher sales and margins. As you will understand, the price of a decorated product is much bigger than a classic range lighter. Let us move into shavers. What are the key features in shavers?
The larger and faster-growing value pool are outside of the BIC perimeter. Why? Because it is 60% of the market, the refillable market, and we have a very small, a tiny market share in this category. Female shaver is a pocket of growth. We know that, has been that for a while. There are new usages and shaving occasions. The value opportunities for BIC are quite straightforward. We are going to grow in our core, which is the non-refillable, where we are strong, while we are going to start building our presence in premium. You saw it. We have the full range at the coffee, close to the coffee machines of the new products that incorporates all premium technology that we have been developing in the last few years. We are going to leverage the female shaving growth with our brand, our franchise, Soleil, very well-known.
And we'll go to innovate to answer changing consumer needs. You see, in contrast with stationery and lighters, now in shavers, we're talking about innovation and high brand investments. That's a different complementary roles that I was mentioning at the beginning of each and every part of our product portfolio. What we want to be, what is our brand positioning in shavers? That we want to be is the brand of choice for savvy consumers, those that look for great performance at affordable price. That's what we are. That's what BIC is. The way of doing it is through three mass win battles. The first one is to grow our non-refillable core. We need to start entering to refillable market. This is growing, and we're not present, so that's the second. Third, last but not least, is to enlarge our footprint particularly in developing markets.
You know in shavers in developing markets, this is where our value for money proposal counts the most, because that's a great competitive advantage in countries where purchasing power is low. We're going to drive mental availability, increase brand preference, and we're going to convey to our consumers the right messages through the right channels. Leveraging partnerships, we're successfully launching a new advertising campaign featuring international football player that you might all know, which is Ronaldinho in Brazil, with tremendous success. Of course, we'll have to continue securing excellent execution in the point of sales where decisions are taken. Let's move into brushes, which is our fourth and last category before concluding. Tangle Teezer has been an amazing acquisition, a very successful one. With double-digit growth compounding across quarters, quarter after quarter since the moment of the acquisition.
Our brand benefits from leading market positions and exceptional brand awareness. We have been delivering through robust execution across markets. Manufacturing and supply chain synergies, as mentioned by Rob, we're a plastic company, are well on track, and that's helping also this flying wheel of reducing cost, investing in the brand, and growing. We have launched successful media campaigns supported by key partnerships that adds to the brand and helps the brand, like "The Devil Wears Prada," that you have probably seen, and also Kim Kardashian's Skims brand. What are the features of this category, brushes? Firstly, it's a highly fragmented category. This means that today there is no global leader, market leader. The value is concentrated in the premium segment. Growth is driven logically by brand desirability and product performance. E-commerce and premium channels are reshaping the market, and they are fast-growing compared to the rest.
The value opportunities for BIC are also very straightforward. We're building leadership in the premium brushes. We're prioritizing e-commerce and premium channels where we want to be and win. We are supporting Tangle Teezer unique brand image through those partnerships that I just mentioned, and we are scaling selectively in priority markets, growing the U.S., growing the U.K., and selecting some other markets. But we want first to become leaders in each and every market that we enter instead of spreading across plenty of different geographies. The ambition is to become global market leader in brushes. I think you had already imagined it before. The undisputed global leader. How we'll execute our ambition? We're going to extend from the core with innovation, the Complete Care range that you saw at the entrance and also the video. We're going to drive brand awareness to convert the high-value consumers.
As we increase our packaging and our launches, we are going to refine the packaging and increase visibility to make clear the difference between the ranges for our consumers and to facilitate their choices. We are going to prioritize high growth markets, pockets of growth in very selected markets. We are extending our portfolio through a pipeline of differentiated products with a strong focus design, with color trends that change each and every year, as you can see here, that is the last collection, with patent protection. There is technology behind, and that is why it is a perfect product and great for use. We are currently launching the Complete Care range, a need identified by our consumer insights team to complement our detangling range. We are launching partnerships like The Devil Wears Prada just to reinforce and continue reinforcing our brand.
To conclude, we are shifting our strategies, and when we do that, this requires also a change in our operating model for excellent execution. We work as one BIC. Categories define the strategy. Regions deliver local commercial execution. This new model brings agility, it brings simplicity, very important for us, and it brings scalability to help growth. Our current commercial and industrial footprint allows for these geo-localized strategies that we are having across the regions, the ones that now Haven and Alina are going to present to you. Haven, Alina.
It is a pleasure to be with all of you today. Since this is our first time meeting, I figured I would give all of you a brief introduction to myself. Alina will do the same in just a moment. I am Haven Cockerham. I lead the North American business, and I have been with BIC now for just five months longer than Rob, so almost at that one and a half year mark after a long career in consumer packaged goods. That time has been spent primarily between Procter & Gamble, Heinz, and Sanofi, another French-based company, with those early years focused largely on marketing, innovation, and selling. More recently, I have spent just over a decade really in senior general management roles, mostly across North America, but also some time in global category roles as well.
In fact, most of that time was spent on businesses that are very much in need of transformation, not all that dissimilar from the North American region for BIC. Alina?
Thank you, Haven. Good morning to everyone. I am Alina Asiminei, and I have been with BIC almost one year, end of September. I am serving as Chief Commercial Officer for International markets. I bring 26 years of experience in consumer goods across Nestlé, Philips, and Kimberly-Clark. My journey has taken me from Romania to Portugal to Latin America and United Kingdom now, and across a broad range of responsibilities from sales to marketing, to strategy, to general management in both local and global roles. Throughout my career, my focus has been very consistent, driving results while transforming the business through people and with people. That is the experience and mindset I bring to BIC as we unlock the growth potential of our international markets.
Today, we want to show you how both of our regions will contribute to BIC's growth ambition through 2030. We have one, I repeat, one BIC commercial strategy and one common ambition. That is really to grow household penetration, earn our margins, and relentlessly simplify our business. Both of our markets are very, very different starting points, and therefore, while our destination is common, our destination is shared, we will create growth in different ways.
Exactly, Haven. That is a very important point. We are not creating a North America strategy and an international market strategy. We are executing one BIC strategy against different market realities. In North America, the opportunity is primarily about strengthening an already powerful core and scaling new sources of growth. Across international markets, we have a completely different opportunity. Enormous geographic reach, but significant headroom to recruit new consumers, and that leads to two different growth equations, and that becomes ever clearer when we look at our commercial growth agenda.
You can see that philosophy here. At the top of this strategy house is our common ambition, as I mentioned, growing penetration, earning our margins, and simplifying our business relentlessly. For North America, our role is to strengthen the core, while at the same time scaling new growth with deliberate choices across countries, channels, and our categories.
For international markets, our role is to scale penetration and recruit new consumers. Our choices will be very deliberate across regions, channels, and categories. Underneath both regional models are common BIC capabilities, supply chain, digital transformation, brand support and innovation, talent and commercial capabilities. I would summarize this house very simply. One roof, one ambition, one set of capabilities, different growth equations. Because winning in a market mature like North America and recruiting new consumers in Africa or Asia requires a different execution, but they are serving exactly the same BIC strategy.
If we could advance the slide, please.
Yep.
I'd like to start by giving just a little bit of context on the North American region for those who are less familiar. North America is our second-biggest region after Europe, with around 35% of our net sales. This region consists of two countries only, two large countries, including the U.S., which is by far BIC's largest market. When we think about our market share position across North America, we are number one in lighters, still with additional upside. We are number two in stationery. We are number three in hairbrushes and number four in shavers. Also tremendous upside across all of these categories. While the region is large, the problem is that net sales has been decreasing significantly over the past three years, and this is impacted by several reasons. In lighters, we know the driver.
The driver has been Asian imports, counterfeits, declining cigarette smoking usage. In stationery, drivers are different. Ball pen segment, which is the segment where we're most heavily developed, has been declining faster than the market. On shavers, we've seen fierce competition in the shavers business, particularly on the women's side of the business, and on top of that, as you heard David Cabero mention earlier, there's a very large portion of the segment of the market where we simply don't have presence, and that large segment is actually premium refillables, which is growing. We're very clear on what has caused the decline in the past. However, importantly, we're also now very clear on what needs to be done differently to stabilize this region and return it to growth.
In fact, in 2026, we are already seeing early signs of achieving this transformation with stability in the first half of the year. Here is how we are going to proceed. Because going forward requires us to not only stabilize, but maintain the stability we have achieved thus far and accelerate even more going forward. We have a very clear roadmap. Our ambition is to transform North America into a penetration-focused growth engine for BIC. Our approach is to strengthen the core while establishing these new platforms of growth. Importantly, the development of each of these new growth platforms is already well in progress. You might argue that transforming North America is one of the biggest challenges of the company, and you are about right. However, our initial actions are already having the positive effect with growth in the first half. I want to reiterate that.
Here is what it is going to take to sustain that growth going forward through our 2030 time horizon. First, on Stationery. Protect the core. This means increasing penetration in our strongest and our growing segments. Our growing strong segments are mechanical pencil, correction, and ballpoint. Thank you very much. We have successful results in Western Europe already, and the results in Western Europe have come largely by premiumizing this category. While the idea of premiumizing our business is not new to us as a company, it is new to the North American region.
This is an established model that is proven in Western Europe. Our opportunity in North America is to recreate and leverage this proven model across the region. The path forward to transforming the Stationery business is well defined. David mentioned the unlock in Stationery is unlocking new premium channels such as museums, bookstores, amusement park. Again, proven.
On Lighters, our number one priority in the U.S. is to stabilize this business, and we have managed to successfully do so in the first half. However, beyond stabilizing the business, we will build from here to reach new consumers in emerging channels. We will increase brand desirability, as David mentioned, through many of the design opportunities and improve our profitability. In fact, in just two slides, I will give you an even deeper view on the strategy that is already starting to deliver the sustainable improvement that we need to deliver on this business. On Shavers, our recently launched product range of Soleil and Flex are continuing to deliver solid results around the world. We will continue to accelerate the rollout of these products in the U.S. We will not stop there.
Since we currently do not address 65% of the market, the growing segment of the market, we will move into that space in the future. Quite frankly, we now have best-in-class technology that rivals industry leaders to allow us to better compete in that space. This will allow us to compete with the full product offering in the shave category, creating potential for BIC in the North American region that we have never before experienced. Brushes. The model that we are executing in the North American region for brushes already works super well. This is not a fix, this is not a restart. This is continuing to expand our points of purchase, driving in-store and online visibility, and continuing to innovate to maintain the momentum that is already healthy and already established on the brushes business.
We have a key differentiated brand with solid awareness and consumer sentiment, and we will continue to invest behind the Tangle Teezer brand. As we think about our road to 2030, we are a well-penetrated company across North America that, as many of us have said around the globe, and especially in North America, we have significant upside. We still have white spaces that we do not address today, and it is time to unlock this potential. Our way forward is already defined. First, scaled growth in new channels. I have mentioned some of them already for Stationery, and there are more for Lighters. Secondly, consumer insight-led innovation. This is a discipline that we are using now across all of our categories. Thirdly, leveraging more iconic products.
You have heard several speakers before me refer to the need to streamline our assortment and increase efficiency and focus on those SKUs that are most productive in-market. Lastly, we are well on our journey to implementing a new leadership structure in North America. In fact, we have established new capabilities across sales, marketing, and even supply chain with new leadership across each of those. Our plan for the U.S. lighter business is important. I want to focus on U.S. lighters for just this one slide here, because U.S. lighters has been a bit of a pain point for the company over the past several years.
First, while this business experienced significant decline in 2025, we believe our plans are right and moving in the right direction given the improvement that we have already seen, the stability that we have already seen in the first half on the U.S. lighter business. Importantly, it is well-positioned for continued growth going forward. Let me give you a hint of the strategy to reinvigorate growth and profitability on this business going forward. First, we do have a safe harbor already, and that safe harbor shall really rely on defending and strengthening key elements. First, we have leading position and very strong market share already across the North American region. The second safe harbor is continued to support and enable our efficiencies in manufacturing and supply chain. These are never going to change. First and last items on this slide.
However, as we think about unlocking growth, new growth opportunities, those really come from activating weapons that we have really not leveraged aggressively up to this point in time. First, David mentioned growth through design and innovation. This winning innovation is key for unlocking growth in white space, growing segments, and large retailers where we are currently underrepresented. Secondly, we see the unmeasured channels as a significant opportunity of growth.
While we have roughly an 80% market share in measured channels, our recent estimates show that we are significantly underdeveloped in unmeasured channels. When we refer to unmeasured channels in the North American region, think of rapidly growing and emerging outlets, those outlets like smoke shops and dispensaries. Big opportunity for the U.S. To unlock opportunities in unmeasured channels, we are working to enhance selling and in-store execution with a focus on improving visibility through significantly more disruptive in-store display execution.
Rob and David both mentioned visibility, improving visibility is the key in these channels. Lastly, we must recommit to counterfeit defense on this business. While certainly committing to counterfeit defense has the ability to protect our revenue, the single most important reason for committing to counterfeit defense is because we have an obligation to protect our brand, our brand image, and also consumer safety. Those are the most important reasons for us to double down as a new leadership team in protecting the business via counterfeit defense. Returning NAM to growth is not only dependent on the lighter business. U.S. Lighters is an incredibly high priority for us in the North American region, but it will not be our only focus going forward. We also want to reignite growth on our other categories, and we will adopt a dedicated mindset that is unique to each of them.
On stationery, our focus is all about improving profitability by elevating and simplifying the portfolio. Very consistent with the global strategy. We are doing the same specifically in North America. We are rationalizing our portfolio, simplifying the tail SKUs, and driving increased desirability through animation. Lighters. I just told you about lighters and how we are chasing profitable growth in new, faster-growing emerging channels and segments and white space. Ultimately, we will be driving visibility in these emerging, faster-growing channels while defending our safe harbors. On shavers. Shavers is the opportunity to crack into the premium refillable segment and innovate on our core business. We have to keep the core fresh, both on the Soleil brand and the Flex business. Lastly, on brushes. In brushes, we will invest to grow and continue accelerating this business.
We have a fantastic asset, and investing in brand support is a priority, as it allows us to accelerate distribution gains fueled by innovation and partnerships. I hope this gives you a sense for the overall direction in North America. I will turn it over to Alina, who will give a similar overview for international markets. Alina.
Thank you, Haven. Now let me take you inside the international markets growth equation. BIC has an extraordinary geographic reach. We are present, as Rob was mentioning as well, in more than 160 countries with iconic products, strong brand recognition, and leading position across many markets. When I look at international markets, what excites me most is not only the scale that we have today, it is the headroom that we still have ahead of us. Across our markets, there are millions of consumer we can still recruit, and that is the opportunity at the heart of our strategy. Turn our geographic scale into consumer scales, put BIC into hands of more consumers, and do it through a more focused, repeatable, and profitable growth model. Our international growth equation starts with penetration. Quite simply, right? More consumers buying BIC.
But to recruit those consumers, we need to win on three fundamentals: availability, affordability, and visibility. We need to be where consumers buy. We need to offer the right products at the right price point that they can afford. When they are ready to buy, BIC needs to be visible and easy to choose. But penetration alone is not enough. We need to create penetration that brings sustainable volume-led growth. We need margin resilient growth through mix, pricing, and portfolio quality. We need execution excellence. Many times mentioned here by Rob. Superior availability, customer service, superior customer service, and forecast accuracy. While the growth philosophy is common, the way we activate this equation naturally differs by category, and I will start with stationery. Here it is all about simplification, David Cabero was already mentioning, portfolio tiering, and pricing power.
In lighter, David Cabero mentioned, it is about focusing on market share through affordability and visibility. In shavers, it is all about brand building, geographical expansion, and portfolio tiering. Last but not least, in brushes, it is again about penetration through brand visibility and focused innovation. Again, one growth equation, different category plays. But to capture this opportunity, we need to change how we operate. Today, international markets is characterized by very different growth profiles across countries. Execution has been historically very country-led and very siloed, and our portfolio became too complex. This makes it very difficult to constantly translate our strength of BIC into scalable growth. By 2030, we want the model to look very different. We are moving towards scalable, repeatable growth engines, simpler execution, and greater leverage of our iconic products.
Basically in other words, we are moving from individual countries growth stories to growth model that we can understand, we can repeat, and we can scale. That is a fundamental change in how we manage international markets. Now the question is where we are going to deploy those growth engines? International markets is clearly not one homogeneous market. That is why we are not going to apply one formula everywhere. We have organized our markets in clear archetypes. Let us look here. Africa is fundamentally a penetration engine. Asia, it is a wide spaces where we need to unlock it. Mexico, it is a turnaround where we need to rebuild the fundamentals. Europe, it is a combination of developed and developing markets where we need to scale and optimize as much as we need to do it in Oceania. In Central and South America, it is all about scaling up.
Different starting points, different place, one growth philosophy. Across these different place, the commercial levers become increasingly common. We have six commercial levers in international markets. We need to win in the growth channels. We need to strengthen our route to market to win traditional trade. We need to reinforce our brand and pricing power, and we need to simplify our portfolio. The fifth one, it is about building strong value retailer proposition, what matters for our customers. Last but not least, we need to create innovation that drives incrementality. This is the way we are going to create repeatability without pretending every market is the same. Most importantly, this is not only the strategy for the future. We already have evidence that this model works. Brazil is one powerful example. Look at what happened in shavers since 2019. Market penetration increased by 5 percentage points.
BIC penetration increased by around 16 percentage points, and our volume doubled. We did not simply participate in category growth. We recruited consumers materially faster than the category, and penetration translated into volume. If you think back to the growth equation I showed you earlier, the ingredients are quite familiar. Availability, affordability, strong brand and products, and disciplined execution. Brazil matters not because we want to copy Brazil everywhere. It matters because it proves that the underlying principle of the model can work. Now imagine applying those principles where the penetration headroom is significantly greater. We need to create more Brazils in international markets, in markets where millions of consumers have yet to enter our category and buy BIC. That is why developing markets represent such an exciting part of our 2030 opportunity.
We have millions more consumers to recruit at scale, and we see potential for double-digit growth in many markets by 2030. Population alone does not create growth. We have to unlock it. We are going to do so focusing on three pillars. Expand availability, so basically be where consumers buy. This means expanding go-to-market, strengthening our traditional trade execution, and putting more feet on the ground. Secondly, increase affordability. So win the first purchase with the right entry price points, with smaller packs and formats, and where appropriate, local sourcing and manufacturing. The third one, it is about scaling execution. So basically build repeatable engines through reliable supply chain, stronger distribution capabilities, Salesforce automation. When we talk about recruiting millions more consumers, this is not an abstract ambition. We know what drives penetration.
We have evidence that it works, and we are building capabilities to replicate it at scale. International is already a business with extraordinary geographic reach. Our opportunity now is to turn this geographic reach into consumer reach across different categories, across different geographies with different growth plays, but one growth philosophy. Recruit new consumers, scale what works, and turn penetration in sustainable and profitable growth. Merci beaucoup. I will turn over to François.
Good morning. You all know this product. We have sold 50 billion of them in more than 160 countries. It is one of the most iconic objects this company has ever made, engineering the everyday to deliver up to 3,000 flame safely and at a price per flame that almost everyone on Earth can afford. What happens after the last flame of this product? Many still think this product, when out of flame, worth exactly zero. There is a name, and it is known as orphan product. Those products are those that are too small to be collected, that are melting different raw materials, plastic and metals together, and as such, there is no recycle stream which is accepting them. I would like you today to take a fresh look at that. My name is François Clément-Grandcourt. I am serving BIC for 26 years.
Before BIC, I worked in marketing for Coca-Cola and Danone, and I have 20 years in BIC of general management position. First, in distribution, and second, in industry. In the last 10 years, I took over. I was responsible for the lighter division after François Bich. François Bich was very fond of rules. He was a founder of lighters and basically defined the proper way to do it to be safe. He was regularly reminding the fact that some point in time, the rules need to change. He was taking very often the example of Marcel Bich changing the rules of the America's Cup. This is the whole point of this presentation. Our future lies in changing the rules to create new value pools.
As BIC enters this new phase of transformation, sustainability is becoming an even more important part of our journey and our long-term value creation as well, and I will be insisting on that. Today, I will be focusing on BIC's sustainable development program to 2030, which is based on three pillars. First one, circularity, second, climate, third, people. Even more specifically, today, I will be talking to you about circularity. In 2015, every expert we consulted told us that recycling lighters was technically impossible, and the others were adding that with a product with 19 parts like this, it was not only impossible to disassemble, but it was financially absurd, for a simple reason. Not enough raw materials to pay for everything to get back and to disassemble. That was a consensus. It was not unreasonable at the time.
It was the state of the art of the knowledge at that time. No more today. Why didn't we walk away? Because of what this company is. Always engineer the everyday. Since the start of the company, BIC has done one thing better than anyone in the world: take an everyday object and solve, through manufacturing excellence, a problem everyone else considers impossible or not worth solving. For example, having pens for a few cents. We did not treat circularity as a communication, nor as a corporate social responsibility program, but as what it is really about, an industrial challenge, and industrial problems are precisely what this company was built to solve. The group gave us three things that are rare in a large company. The first one, the freedom to try.
The second one, the patience to let us learn, and once it worked, the full weight of industrial power of the company. I assure you as well that the initial momentum was provided 20 years ago by Marie Bich-Dufour, and that drove a lot of what we have today. What I'm about to describe is what BIC's culture of innovation is all about. What did it take? It took building every link of a chain, which basically was not existing, collecting millions of small objects that had never been collected. A way to sort what comes back. A way to take apart an object that honestly, believe me, we spent years to make sure that nobody could dismantle.
And that allows, at the end, having spent decades on this, we have a way to get recovered material, metal and plastic, back into production at our own quality standard. None of that existed. Our team built it after more than 10 years of R&D. The engineers and operators of the lighter division did it. Today, used lighters are collected, sorted, dismantled, and recycled. That is a world first. No one anywhere had ever recycled a lighter. Let's take a step back. BIC industrial strengths are unique. Strong vertical integration, applied R&D, tool rooms, mechanical engineering, and integrated automation departments, fitting shops, production workshops, obviously, backed with deep operational raw material expertise. This unique capability, built over the last 80 years, allows to disassemble industrially high volumes of small parts with high precision. I am insisting on each of these words because that defines precisely the know-how which was developed.
It allows to get 100% purity of raw materials and allowing as well to recover parts. Basically, engineer the everyday up to product end of life. Along the way, we learned the most important lesson of all. An orphan product is not worth zero. The day it runs out of flame, this product still has value. Our last production allowed to produce lighters recycled with 80% of the non-consumable lighter value. It works. Don't get me wrong. When approached as industrial discipline, not as communication exercise, circularity is financially sound. The end of life of our products has stopped being a dead end, leveraging what was supposed to be our weakness, 1.5 billion units of a tiny, complex object. Handled industrially, it has become a source of value that we control and a value creation lever for the group.
Part of the plan to 2030, circularity is a strong focus of BIC's roadmap. A few years ago, I presented to you at our general assembly, our very first disassembly machine. That was the first building block. Now we have six machines in line. We are ready to launch the first ramp-up phase, bringing the lighter program at scale in France by 2027, and the start of other pilots in other geographies to be ready for further expansion from 2029. After 10 years of debugging lighters, as this is working, we want to build and expand the same principle to the other categories. Here, you have what a Cristal looks like with all the tiny parts, which you may not see precisely. Here, you have a full 4-Color, another kind of animal. We are preparing the first machine for these products.
The question is: Can pen, shaver, and brushes' end of life become as well a value pool? This matters now because the world is catching up with this subject. First, European regulators are turning a tiny paragraph in a report into a mandatory legal obligation. Major retailers are now ranking their own suppliers based on circularity, and we stand already among the pioneers. Last, raw materials and their accessibility are a challenge. They will remain volatile as far as anyone can see for today. For our whole industry, the end of life of product is becoming a cost. BIC has turned it into a capability years before the market demands it. Today, that capability serves BIC product in BIC plants for BIC customers. But the problem it solves Small, everyday product with no end of life exists far beyond us.
What I take away from these years is pretty simple. This company still does exactly what BIC started 80 years ago. It takes an everyday problem the world considers impossible, and it is engineering the everyday. That is BIC DNA. It was true of writing and of all BIC product categories. It is now true for all the products beyond the last flame, the last line, the last shave, and the last brush. Thank you. I now turn it over to Grégory, who will go over our transformation initiatives and financial ambition. Thank you.
Thank you, François. Good morning, everyone. My name is Grégory Lambertie. Today is my eight-month anniversary at BIC, and I am delighted to celebrate it with you. I have joined BIC because I saw it as an incredible opportunity to revive what has been a story of entrepreneurship, growth, performance, and emotional connection with the consumer. Before that, I spent 25 years in finance internationally in the U.S., Canada, in the U.K., West Africa, South Africa. First as an advisor, then as an investor in consumer companies, in family companies. Finally, in the corporate world, first leading strategy, M&A, public affairs, and then as a CFO. You now heard how we intend to grow across our categories and markets. Let me show you how this translates into BIC's financial algorithm. There are three things I would like you to remember.
First, we are targeting balanced growth, supported by both volume growth and price and mix, with the right contribution depending on each category. Second, this growth will create operating leverage, meaning that the profit will grow faster than sales as execution improves and the transformation takes effect. Third, we will fund that transformation while strengthening cash generation and growing shareholder returns with a disciplined capital allocation approach. Now, what does this mean in terms of value creation? We are starting from a financially sound business with a number of actions already started and yielding some early results, as you saw in our H1 publication. Our plan is a combination of an investment plan on the one hand, and a transformation plan. We will invest in BIC's key assets, manufacturing, commercial capabilities, distribution, and of course, the brand.
We will make targeted investments in processes, digital and IT transformation, with clear returns leading to growth acceleration and improved profitability and cash generation. So it is about investing in the priorities with the clearest returns and making sure that the transformation delivers productivity gains and savings. So what does it mean in terms of financial terms? If we turn to our 2030 ambition on the next slide, by 2030, we are targeting three clear financial outcomes supporting a capital allocation framework. First, organic sales CAGR of around 3% between 2026 and 2030. Second, operating leverage, together with the benefits of the transformation, will drive around 200 basis point of margin expansion versus 2025 for adjusted EBIT, reaching more than 15.5% in 2030.
Thirdly, those profits will translate into cash, meaning free cash flow of more than EUR 250 million by 2030, and cumulative free cash flow over 2027, 2028, 2029, and 2030 of EUR 900 million- EUR 950 million. This is a self-funded investment plan that still maintains a clear framework for shareholder remuneration, with a growing dividend and a payout ratio of 40% - 50% of adjusted EPS. The logic is clear. Growth supports operating leverage. Transformation supports productivity and cost savings. Moving on to the next slide, our 3% organic sales growth ambition is broad-based, as you've heard many times this morning. All four categories will be contributing. What matters financially is the quality and the breadth of the growth they create. Overall, we should expect growth to be balanced across volume as well as price and mix.
Volumes remain important, particularly where we have the opportunity to increase penetration and improve availability, as you've heard from Alina. Price and mix will also contribute through portfolio premiumization, in brushes, for example, and targeted innovation. The plan does not rely on a single lever. This results in a healthier model, reaching more consumers, improving portfolio value, and translating category momentum into sustainable growth. Let's now look at the sources of growth. The first building block is strengthening and growing our core operations, as you've heard from Rob this morning. About a third of our overall growth is expected to come from strengthening the core, so stationery, lighters, shavers. We already have significant scale. We have a strong brand. We have top-notch manufacturing and broad distribution in our existing business. The opportunity is to get more from these assets through better execution.
This means increasing penetration and availability, strengthening our go-to-market execution, and implementing the category roadmaps you've heard about today. In developed markets, it's more about protecting our strong positions while improving channels, particularly as you've heard from convenience, from e-comm, and from e-commerce as well, and discount channel, as well as improving the mix and the execution. In developing markets, it's recruiting more consumers through better availability, affordability, and route to market. So financially, this gives us a much broader and resilient base for growth. On the next slide, on top of that stronger growth in the core, the second building block is new growth avenues. Those are expected to represent 2/3 of the growth ambition. They're concentrated in three areas.
The continued scaling of brushes, which we expect to carry on growing double digit, greater penetration in developing markets, as Alina mentioned, and selective expansion in higher values area, like refillable shavers. Here we're not starting from scratch. We're leveraging existing assets, brand, manufacturing, distribution, and our consumer proposition, which we all know. Second, we're applying a measured risk-reward approach. For example, if I take developing markets, this is not about taking crazy risk in new countries. It's about taking advantage of the fact that we're already in 166 countries, and that we intend to selectively turn the dial on some of those where we know the market, we have good partners, and we see the most attractive risk-reward. To sum up, the core gives us the foundation. These focus growth avenues give us the acceleration. That combination underpins our net sales growth trajectory to 2030.
In order to deliver that acceleration, we will invest around EUR 100 million in one-off OPEX, the majority in the first two years, and those costs are fully reflected in the plan. We will need to invest in the capabilities, the systems, and the execution discipline we need to change that. We have already done the bulk of the first part, organization. We are now focusing on improving productivity, unlocking efficiencies, and strengthening execution discipline across the group. We will also increase CapEx in the early years before reducing it slightly thereafter, while remaining broadly around 4% of sales throughout the plan. The phasing is deliberate. We want to invest early so that the benefits can build throughout the second half of the plan. On the next slide, you will see that the transformation is concentrated around four clear operating priorities.
First, manufacturing, where we intend to improve productivity, ensure the appropriate investment in AI capabilities, predictive maintenance, for example, and choose the right balance between internal and external production through the appropriate use of OEMs. Second, in supply chain and planning, we will be moving to next-gen supply chain management systems, providing us better visibility and allowing better route planning and savings. Third, on commercial unification, it is about standardizing part of our field sales effectiveness and tooling while reducing portfolio complexity. Fourth, on digital and systems, it is really about improving corporate function productivity. In total, the current roadmap comprises more than 100 initiatives expected to generate around EUR 80 million of savings, annual recurring savings, by 2030, supporting our margin expansion ambition.
You could say this is all very nice, but it will not happen by chance, and you would be right. To ensure disciplined execution, a dedicated transformation office will monitor the program, track implementation and the benefits delivery, and reinforce accountability with the right incentives aligned with the delivery. This governance is new. It will be critical to maintain pace, prioritize the highest impact initiatives, and ensure that we deliver the recurring savings. What does this do to the shape of our P&L? Our ambition, as you heard earlier, is to move closer to the economics of a traditional fast-moving consumer goods model. First, OpEx come down as a percentage of sales, supported by the EUR 80 million of recurring savings I just described. Second, we reinvest part of those savings behind the business with higher and more targeted brand support to drive penetration and visibility.
Third, that reinvestment increases adjusted EBIT, driving approximately the 200 basis points of margin expansion between the end of 2025, last year, and 2030, as we said earlier. This is not simply a cost reduction program. We are changing the shape of the P&L, taking cost out and reinvesting selectively behind growth, expanding margins at the same time. Moving on. Let me now bring this to life in terms of margin progression. Adjusted EBIT will grow faster than sales, taking margin to 15.5% by 2030, with steady progression across the period and categories contributing evenly to the uplift. Importantly, that EBIT expansion has two engines. Around 60% comes from the business itself, growth, mix, operating leverage, and 40% comes from transformation net of the reinvestment. Productivity, simplification, and targeted savings. That balance is important. We are relying both on growth and cost reduction. Now on free cash flow.
Cash generation is central to the plan. We are building a profitable growth model that can self-fund the transformation plan while still growing free cash flow over time. The core business provides the first source of cash generation. We then invest in transformation, which generates saving and helps us fund new growth avenues. As those scale, they add further free cash flow contribution. Here, the phasing matters. It is important to bear in mind that we invest early, particularly in 2027 and 2028. As those investments begin to deliver, free cash flow accelerates from 2028 to reach more than EUR 250 million in 2030. This supports our ambition to generate between EUR 900 million and EUR 950 million of free cash flow over the next four years to 2030. In other words, the plan is designed to strengthen the business while increasing cash generation throughout the period.
This leads us to our capital allocation policy. Our approach here is guided by one simple principle, discipline with flexibility. Growing shareholder returns are a cornerstone of that framework. The foundation is a growing dividend within a payout range of 40%-50% of adjusted EPS. Beyond dividends, buybacks remain an available tool, subject to share price evolution and market conditions. We will deploy any remaining capacity where it creates the most value, whether through external growth or additional opportunistic returns. Let me conclude with the financial commitments at the heart of this plan. Around 3% organic sales growth, margin reaching more than 15.5% by 2030, and EUR 900 million- EUR 950 million of free cash flow over the next four years, with the final year above EUR 250 million.
That is the financial outcome of sharper portfolio choices, stronger execution, disciplined reinvestment, and ambitious transformation, creating the capacity to support growing shareholder returns. Thank you for your attention. I now turn it over to Rob for the conclusion before we go into a Q&A session. Thank you.
Thank you, Grégory. Thank you for your patience. We are coming to the conclusion. I will promise to wrap it up shortly. It went so well with the slides today. Now my last slide refuses to appear. There it is. Okay, good. Last slide of today before we go into Q&A. First, a big thanks to all my colleagues for fantastic presentations today. I hope that you agree with me after having seen this new strategy being presented today that our path is Cristal clear. We are going to focus, we are going to execute, we are going to transform, and we are going to grow and deliver. We will focus on our four beautiful everyday essentials categories. We will grow through investments in a cool and rejuvenated brand. We will dial up on innovation and selective geographical expansion, as Alina has showed you.
Most importantly, we are going to execute with commercial excellence in every market. Thanks to Grégory and all the colleagues, we are going to transform this company. We will become simpler, leaner, and more efficient. That will lead to a situation where we will deliver sustainable cash generation, shareholder returns, and long-term value creation. That is the new BIC. Focused, built to grow, and positioned to create value for years to come. Thank you very much for your attention. Merci beaucoup. Please bear with us a minute while we set up for the Q&A. We are very happy to take your questions. Thank you very much. That is why it is better to use plastic. This was not planned.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do not worry. We can clean up after.
We need to.
No, I think we need to get rid of this. Problem solving. Good skills here.
Thank you for your attention. Before we start the Q&A session, just a quick reminder that questions are reserved for analysts and investors in the room. When asking your question, could you please just state your name and the name of your institution? Thank you.
Bonjour. Geoffrey d'Halluin from BNP Paribas. Thanks for the presentations and for taking my questions. I would have three questions, please. The first one is related to the cadence of the organic revenue goals targets. Should we expect the goals to be steady over the plan? Or should we expect to have any kind of accelerations towards the end of the plan? Just to get your thoughts on the cadence of the organic growth rates. The second question is related to the margin expansions. A bit the same questions. You expect 200 basis points of margin expansions compared to 2025. That means about 40 basis points per year. Should we expect steady margin expansions? Or again, should we expect to have further accelerations toward the end of the plan? The last question is related to the brushes, which is now the new category for the company.
Keen to get your thoughts on where the growth should come from in terms of geographies. I think you said you would expect double-digit growth rates over the period. If you could also remind us what were the revenue achieved by Tangle Teezer in 2025 and maybe also the margins of the company. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Geoffrey, for your questions. I will answer your question on growth, and then Greg will talk about margin. On growth, if we put the things in perspective, we come from a negative organic growth performance last year of - 4.7%. For this year, you know our guidance. We're guiding for slight organic growth, and we aim to subsequently increase organic growth going forward step by step. There is some acceleration towards the later years in the plan. That's concerning growth.
On the margins, as you heard, we are going to front-end the investment. So there is the one-off OPEX on the one hand, but there is also initial OPEX in new feet on the ground, in some brand support that is part of our cost base that will weigh on margins initially. I would expect some acceleration in the growth increase versus 2025 throughout the plan.
I think the last question was concerning.
Tangle Teezer source of growth.
Yeah. So for Tangle Teezer, from a geographical point of view, we expect continued double-digit growth in our key markets, especially in our largest market, the U.S., fueled by innovation as the Complete Care launch, and also increased brand support.
And we will progressively deploy new geographies along the plan. Right now, it is more U.K. and U.S.
Correct. Yeah.
Good morning, Christophe Chaput speaking from ODDO BHF. I have three questions, please. The first one is a kind of follow-up regarding the free cash flow. So obviously it will be very strong in 2030, above EUR 250 million. But I am sure there is a phasing effect as well. So concerning 2027, I know it is probably too early to give that guidance, but would you say it will be above EUR 200 million? The second one is about Brazil on page 55. You give a lot of insight regarding the volume and the penetration improvements since 2019. Could you give us as well the profitability evolution? Probably not some precise figure, but rough, let's say, one could be great. And the last one, if I may, is that on shaver, you share with us the ambition to develop into the refillable segment.
My question is that what is the risk that the leader react, let's say, negatively to that ambition? And do you have already some indicator to help us to understand what could it be or your early success, let's say, in that field? Thank you so much.
On your first question around free cash flow, as we mentioned, the investments in the EUR 100 million of transformation costs of one-off OPEX will be front-loaded, more in 2027 and 2028, where we expect to spend the majority of this EUR 100 million. As a result, the free cash flow will really accelerate throughout the period, with 2027 being the lower point. On whether it should be above or below EUR 200 million, I would say that we would expect 2027 to be in line with what we will post for 2026. The next question was on Brazil with volume penetration and profitability. I do not know if you want to take the volume and penetration and profitability. We do not comment per country. What I can tell you is that the shavers business that we just show with increased volume, increased penetration, showed a better profitability.
Well, I will not go into country-by-country profitability detail.
No, I think it is this, and it is through the mix is to working around portfolio. We have a strong brand in Brazil, so it is a combination of factor that enable us a healthy equation in Brazil.
Yeah. Your third question was concerning a potential competitive reaction in shavers. I think you even asked if they would like it. I am pretty sure they will not like it. If we look globally at shavers, we all know who the market leader in premium shavers is. It is Gillette. Gillette has been very successfully challenged, not to their success, but by the challengers, for instance, in the U.S., by a brand called Harry's, and actually, it has been losing market share steadily and consistently. So this proves to me that it is not impossible to challenge a market leader. I think it is all about how we execute, how we dare to be different, and that is why we are working on our brand so much. That is maybe also a change versus the past. With innovation, we will not suddenly deploy that everywhere.
We will launch customer by customer, we will check progress, and we will only roll out once we have proven success. We are already quite far in preparation for that.
Yes. Good morning. Marie-Line Fort from Bernstein. I have got three questions as well. In terms of SKUs reduction, could you come back on this pillar, which is a usual topic for the strategic plan for BIC. I would like to know what is the division, the more exposed, and what is the timing or reason to execute this strategy. Also, do you expect any impact on sales in the first years of the execution of the plan?
Yeah. Oh, first, sorry. You have three.
Yes. Second question is about your transformation plan and the EUR 100 million of cost. Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of investment you are going to do, split between brand support, cost savings, OpEx reduction, whatever? Last question is about M&A. You do not mention M&A as part of allocation plan. Does it mean that you will not consider any project? It would be interesting to have your view. Thank you.
Great. Thank you for the questions. I will answer your first and your last question, and Greg will take the second one. David will maybe help me on the first one. Your question was which category is most exposed for portfolio simplification. That category is stationery. In fact, if you look more in details in our stationery category, there is actually a very profitable core, our key SKUs, but we have a very long tail of smaller products which we aim to rationalize. There are also opportunities in the other categories, but not to the extent as is in stationery. I really like your second question because, of course, this is also what our sales teams are asking, "Will we not lose sales in this process?" It is all about executing it together with your sales forces and customers.
My experience is that it leads to increased sales, and that is a bit counterintuitive, but if you simply offer shelf space to product that have a much higher rotation instead of occupying that by products that actually nobody wants to buy. Of course, it has to do with a careful synchronization and together with customers and the sales force. We will be very deliberate in the way we execute.
In terms of the EUR 100 million investment, it is really in the four pillars I mentioned. We will be investing in the manufacturing on the one hand. For example, I mentioned predictive maintenance and this sort of thing. We will be investing in the supply chain to ensure that we optimize our routes and our order total in full, so meaning the accuracy of our delivery, and therefore increase revenues. We will be investing in the commercial area with a number of investments in RGM, in pricing, in feet on the streets, as we mentioned, and we will be investing in IT, of course, to ensure that we make the best use of AI for our G&A spend.
I would like to complement on what Rob said on the SKU rationalization, to give you some additional numbers and thoughts. 1,000 SKUs, only 2% of our net sales. At the end, what happens is that as all in operator world that we are living, the more sales are concentrated in few SKUs. There are plenty of SKUs not generating much sales, not generating additional penetration consumers. To the point, rotation in the point of sale is very small. If we do not deplete it will be our customers doing that for us, so we need to anticipate that. Those products generates cost, less agility, less flexibility in our industrial footprint, and a lot of stock, so it consumes cash flow. So very limited sales downside. On the contrary, we need to execute with a process. We have been building a process now with the commercial teams.
There is a portfolio strategy. We apply that per regions. We work with the commercial teams to avoid some mistakes when you do that centrally. It is a collaborative process that we believe will bring not only more sales, but also much better cost and cash over time.
Your third question concerned M&A. Let's get back to the core of this plan, it is about organic growth, because this is, for me, our most important KPI which we need to drive. Second, I think we as a company need to prove that we can truly integrate and scale Tangle Teezer, yeah? As I was honest to you about some early acquisitions, we didn't prove it with those exotic new businesses. So I want to go step by step. I want to show you that we can grow organically. I want to show you that we successfully integrate and scale Tangle Teezer. Then, of course, I think it would be unwise to exclude M&A as part of a future strategy.
What I do think is necessary is that we will be very critical and really understand what kind of assets fit within this strategy that we choose by focusing on beautiful and better everyday essentials. Again, back to Tangle Teezer, why is this such a great combination? It's a beautiful brush, superior product performance. It's an everyday essential. We can manufacture it more competitively than third parties, and we can help Tangle Teezer scale worldwide. If we find another one like that, I promise you we will do M&A. Yeah.
Thank you. Good morning. It's Andrei Condrea from UBS here. Only two questions from me, please. Obviously, your plan hinges on execution and you improving in that space after years of underinvestment. Can you speak more on what exactly you're doing to improve your commercial capabilities and your execution, bringing people from the outside, like I believe you've done in Mexico, for instance, or applying the learnings you've had from businesses like P&G, like Kimberly-Clark, and Nestlé, for instance? Secondly, particularly on U.S. lighters, obviously it's a very important part of your business, and it's also been one of the most challenged parts of the business. What has been lacking historically? What's hitting the business now in terms of structural declines from cigarettes, and how do you expect the shape of the improvement over the next couple of years to be like? Thank you very much.
Yeah. Thanks for your question. Commercial capabilities, I will answer, but feel free, I am looking to my commercial colleagues to step in. I want to be very clear. This doesn't go without leadership changes in our key commercial roles. Over the last 12 months, in most of our key markets, we have taken deliberate decisions to attract fresh talent with fast-moving consumer goods backgrounds in order to occupy roles. We mix that also with internal talent, but it would be foolish to not change anything and expect different outcomes. Both on our category leaders, we found a mix between internal talent and recruit external talent, but that's also true for many of our country commercial organizations. That's one. The second thing we're doing is we take our How BIC Grows program very serious.
We have launched a huge training effort in order to make sure that all our people are aware and are becoming used to this new way of thinking. Not only the commercial people, we also train our non-commercial people. Thirdly, we have changed the way we plan. We have launched a unified commercial planning process where we ask our countries to clearly describe the commercial execution plan before we even talk about budget. Over the years, our planning was more a financial exercise. What we now do, it is a commercial exercise, which then will be translated into a financial budget. Alina, if you want to add anything, but I thought those were three important changes.
Yeah, no, I think this is the main one. In international markets as well, I was talking about scaling execution. We were so much siloed, so whatever would happen in Brazil, we would not travel to other developing markets like Poland or Turkey or Africa. This is as well something that we are learning how to do it through this archetype that I have mentioned. Then, of course, capabilities like Salesforce automation, how we really track and understand what is going into the right direction and what we need to adjust. We are agile in terms of how fast we need to eventually be flexible in terms of adjustment. It's mindset as well together with tools and together with people with a lot of BIC experience and new people. It's what I would say.
Yeah. Let me comment first, and then of course I'll deal with. This is such an important question you raise on lighters in the U.S., and I know there is a concern. First of all, our lighter sales are not decreasing in America this year. Let's get the facts straight first. Secondly, we as a company have been super focused on the modern mass market, Walmart, Target, retail. There is a growing channel in America also driven by legalization of marijuana smoking. I'm from Amsterdam, but I tell you, the marijuana smoking in the U.S. is growing way faster than it has ever grown in the Netherlands. We have simply not been focused on claiming our rightful share in what Haven calls the non-measured channels. These are smaller shops, these are smoke shops, these are dispensaries.
Haven and I, we spend days in different parts of the U.S. driving from smoke shop to smoke shop, to dispensary to dispensary, and we have seen it with our own eyes. We have audited. There is white space. There is white space to be captured. Thirdly, Haven spoke. Here you go. But I'm so passionate
Right.
about your topic here. Thirdly, Haven spoke about counterfeit. I can't judge the past, but I can see what there is today. We are exposed to counterfeit, and we have noticed, and it is very much thanks to Haven and his leadership, we have started to take aggressive legal action, and we have started to communicate very clearly to customers. You better think twice before. That has yielded some first effects, and part of the plan is also that we significantly enhance our legal budgets to fight this. Please, Haven. Sorry.
Well, you've covered a lot of my territory.
I swept the floor.
Just a little bit of color commentary on some of the points that Rob mentioned. I think we often identify in the U.S. on the declining cigarette smoking trend, but the increasing smoking trend in cannabis that Rob mentioned is quite significant. When we look at just the number of outlets in the U.S. right now, we estimate there is 15,000-20,000 outlets that have really not been a priority, a focus area for us up to this point in time when we think about dispensaries and smoke shops. That is significant opportunity. We have to execute differently, right? We have to make sure that we have the right selling organization structured to penetrate those channels. We have to make sure that we are providing the right executional guidance in terms of the right assortment and the display activity that we need to show up in those channels. Okay?
Tremendous opportunity for us on a go-forward basis. The other thing that I will mention regarding commercial capabilities also links to our selling capabilities. We mentioned increased opportunity in North America on our stationery business, and this is about recreating the model that has been proven effective in improving profitability in Europe around gifting, entertainment. That means we need to have presence in amusement parks like Disney. That means we need to have presence in museums like the Met. That requires the right selling organization and selling structure. Hopefully that gives you a sense for just the upside capability, or capacity that we see when it comes to cannabis, and the capabilities required to penetrate some of these new segments.
Even in existing segments. What is the number two retailer in the U.S.? Number two largest retailer in the U.S. Costco. BIC is not in Costco. We are not in Costco. Nobody can tell me we do not have distribution opportunity in the U.S. There are quite some wide spaces, and I do not know if you are familiar with Costco, and Haven knows that I very much would like to enter Costco, as you can imagine. These are very sizable opportunities, and of course, I will not challenge on cigarette smoking, although that goes also quite gradually, and there is cannabis smoking. For all these reasons, we clearly believe there is growth to be found.
One last point.
Yeah. It is a bit of competition now. Who gets more arguments.
It is. Can you tell that we are passionate about the opportunity on lighter? One of the points that we have not mentioned is the fact that we have been increasing our partnership with a handful of U.S. retailers to quantify the upside potential of simply expanding our presence.
Yeah.
As an example, we see upside potential of expanding the distribution within retailers where we currently have presence from the front aisle, commonly associated with smoking at checkout, to placement in the kitchen aisle, to placement i n the candles aisle. These all represent significant upside opportunities for us, even in the U.S. marketplace.
Yeah, now to come back on your execution question, I think we were clear on the commercial part. I think it's important to bear in mind that we will be very nimble with your capital. First of all, we have created a transformation office that tracks 100 initiatives, how much we spend, and how much those deliver. We will apply strict ROI criteria to make sure that they deliver, and we'll be ready to adjust as we go to make sure that we are using your capital appropriately. That's pretty important. The incentives will also be aligned on delivering those. The accountability that you will have in the plan will be very precise. I thought that was important in terms of execution, execution that Rob mentioned earlier.
Thank you. Alessandro from Kepler Cheuvreux. I have two questions on geographic expansion. You mentioned that 90% of volumes are outside of BIC, and I assume a lot comes from China, India as well. Those two countries particularly have proven difficult to penetrate, to gain market shares there. Which countries or region are you specifically targeting when you talk about geographic expansion? What makes you confident you can grow market shares there? The follow-up would be on the pricing strategy in those regions, because some of those countries have lower purchasing power. Are you going to chase volumes or focus on margins on those regions? Thank you.
Yeah. Great. Thank you. To be very clear, we're not going to India, and we're not going to China.
Yeah.
Very simple. Very high competitive intensity. I think we have just divested our Cello business last year, which hopefully gives enough proof that we do not have what it takes to compete effectively India or China. That's one. We have analyzed in which markets do we have attractiveness and where do we have a right to win. It's a very selective approach. To be concrete, in Asia, we are targeting Vietnam and the Philippines. Why? Because we already have some infrastructure, we have some brand equity, we have the customer relationship. It is about accelerating there by putting more feet on the ground, simply hiring more of your own salespeople. That's Asia. Bear with me. The majority of our expansion is targeted in key African markets. Again, markets where we already have presence. We have also a supply chain footprint in Africa.
It's about increasing number of salesmen, merchandisers to get control over point of sales and drive distribution. I think you had a question on price points.
Yeah.
So-
You want me to take it?
Yeah, because I know what you're going to answer.
Okay. Thank you for the question. Affordability, it's a key point when we go into geographic expansion, for sure. But it's not about discounting or low price points every time because it's about really understanding the value proposition in that market. What it makes sense. We have different option. There is different formats, different packaging, entry price points that make sense, local manufacturing and sourcing. It's a combination of factors of mix, and what kind of portfolio we bring to this market, and how we understand exactly what the local consumer and shopper want through the specific channel, being the traditional trade in many cases in this market. We have proven, as Rob was saying, African markets, we are already there in many of the markets. We know how to unlock it. And we are successful in many of the African markets.
Asia, as Rob was saying, is very targeted. We have developing markets in Europe like Poland, Romania, Turkey. It's not only about some of the continents. Latin America, we talked about Brazil, but there are so many other countries like Chile, Peru, where there is potential. Mexico is booming. We are doing so good there this year. It's pretty much understanding the formula that is local, understanding that we have some specific drivers that we already know that they work. It's proved already.
On lighters, another complementary thinking and numbers. When we see the level of concentration of our sales in the U.S., you divide sales by number of inhabitants, and you make the calculation by areas, but you will find out that mathematically, in most of the areas, we have between 10% and 30% of market share in most of our markets if we take out the Asian countries where we are not. When you are at 15%-20%, your brand is well-known. You are available, you are present, but then you need to work visibility, you need to work route to market. But the effort from being present, known, and a well-known brand and product into double the market share is much lower than the adventures of building a new business in China, in Asia, generally, in white spaces.
My message to you is when we are present, we know which markets we can have a good return of investment, right balance. And those are those markets that we're going to push in the years to come.
Thank you. Hi, Cédric Rossi from Stifel. I have three questions as well. The first one is regarding the brand perception overall. I think as you said that BIC has a unique positioning, and I think part of it stems from the unique value proposition that you were offering to consumers. Since you are implementing this premiumization strategy, which is a necessary strategy, how are you going to deal with this strong value proposition, carrying on the premiumization strategy without jeopardizing this strong value for money image that you have in the consumer's mind? That is my first question. The second one is regarding the supply chain. In FMCG, we are seeing more and more brands, digital brands on TikTok or on social media, which are very agile, fabless, surfing on one or two products that go viral and then shift to others.
Since you have this integrated manufacturing footprint, how are you going to deal with this competition, and do you also plan to reduce your lead times? The third question is on the margin improvement. We talked a lot about operating leverage. Does it mean that you expect gross margin to remain at similar levels, or do you also expect an expansion there? Thank you.
Thank you very much. I will take your first question concerning the brand. What we show today is that we want to rejuvenate the brand and to connect with younger consumers. I think I called it to make it cool again. It is not necessarily an automatic premiumization strategy from the brand perspective. It is about a great value for money proposition.
Now, pricing is highly conditional. I informed you today that our best-selling distribution point of the 4-Color pen is Disneyland Paris. The price is EUR 8, and people consider this a fantastic value. This is great. I think we have to evolve our thinking of being, in all cases, the most affordable player. No, we have to be great value for the particular occasion. Let us face it, we pay EUR 6 for a little bottle of Evian in the airport, while it costs EUR 0.50 at the Franprix.
This is the type of thinking we want to implement here at BIC, and I do sort of see where you are going. Of course, when a product and the packaging, and it looks more attractive and more cool, it will offer opportunities for additional pricing. But that is not the main intent behind this brand rejuvenation project. Because clearly, Greg, you also mentioned that we want to have a healthy balance between volume and value in our growth.
This happens not only to the EUR 8 product, but also in back to school or outside of back to school. Do you believe that the kids today, they want just the EUR 0.20 BIC ball pen? Or they want a colored pen, attractive that they will have it. They will be EUR 2, right? We are not talking about EUR 0.20 or EUR 0.30. We are talking about moving and offering a breadth of solutions, on the pen, where we have a good mastering of the quality of the product of all the industrial processes. We are adding design, as we mentioned. We are adding features. You have seen the French people here, you have seen it in 4-Color. How we have been evolving 4-Color over time. We will do it also in Cristal and in our main hero products.
What you do is you bring attractive products that can be sold not in Euro Disney, but in the Carrefour. At a higher price, capturing volumes and capturing margins, because that is new consumers for us.
I think your second question was concerning our agility in the supply chain to launch quickly new trends, which you described some of competitors do that on TikTok, I believe. This plan is about our hero SKUs. We are not developing new products. We are dressing the brides more nicely. That is what we do. We have unique capability here at BIC, where we can very quickly change our packaging sleeves, our decors, and make the look and feel of the product very differently. I have a great example. You all know that Spain won the World Cup, right? Our team in Tarragona, where we have also production, was able to have World Cup Spain lighters and pens in market one week after the goal was scored in the final. That is amazing fast capability, and that is something we want to apply to all our categories.
I do not want to steal the gross margin question, but you can guess the answer already a little bit maybe.
I can complement because we already have this capability, of course, strong in Tarragona, but we already have in Mexico, we have it in Brazil, and we are building in Africa. It is exactly the strategy to be closer to the consumer and to really attend their needs and this ongoing added value.
Grégory, before you speak to margins, I think one other consideration related to, I think it was your second question. Yes, you asked about supply chain, but embedded in that question, you also referred to digital-first businesses, digital-first competitors. Across our markets and all of our categories, we are continuously monitoring the digital brands that are trying to pop up and move into our categories. As we think about living into this new support plan, this new model on our 2020-2030 time horizon, as Grégory mentioned, a huge part of that is increase in our brand investment. That increase in brand investment is very much digital first. I wanted to make sure that you fully understand, yes, we are very aware of those competitors who try to play in the digital space, but at the same time, we are actually bringing our brands to life in a digital-first way.
Finally, Cédric, for the model, I would not model any increase in the GP. Our objective is to offset inflation here. We will be cautious on the GP outlook. That is what we have in the model.
Thank you. Is there any last question before we close the session? Okay, Alessandro, one last one. Thank you.
Thank you. Yes. Sorry, I had one last one on circularity. I thought that was interesting. Do you plan to sell maybe refurbished products with the things you collect, or how does that circularity plan look to will increase value for a company?
Yes. Thank you for the question. The answer is yes. At the end, this is what we want to. The test we did with this lighter precisely in which we included 80% of the value of all lighters into a new lighter, in fact, proving that we are able to do it and at scale. The level of performance and the level of safety is equivalent to those of BIC, meaning that we are able to put them on the market and to sell them. The question is, how do we use them? We could use it, and this is still not defined for the time being in some channels, which we want to push or in other geographies where we want to be more aggressive. This is not defined for the time being.
Priority is to come at scale in collection and to come at scale as well in industry. Okay? Those are the two key levers. I would say as well beyond lighters, because I talked a lot about lighters because this is where we made it happen, but the objective is to make it transversal. What we want to aim at is that, and we are pretty confident about that, it took us 10 years to reach where we are in lighters. We think we can do the same on the three other categories in a matter of four years, allowing us then to gain scale and to potentially propose if we succeed, and I do insist on this one, this is not for sure, a range which would be recycled range for sale.
All right. Thank you very much, everyone, for this very interesting Q&A session. Rob, back to you.
Yeah. I think I want to say a big thank you on behalf of me and my team, on behalf of the company. We are very pleased with your interest in our company, and we thank you very much for being here with us today, either in person or online. We have outside the conference room, an area where we have displayed many of our products, of which we have been talking about. We are very happy there to receive you and have a snack and have a drink, if I am not mistaken.
A drink.
A drink only. The snacks have already-
Busted
have already been eaten, probably. So no, big thank you for being here.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.