Okay, I see that we can start. Good morning, and welcome to all of you to Beiersdorf's Capital Market Day. Well, that's a special day, as it's actually a very long time, actually never that we had such an event outside of the typical reporting pattern. It's our pleasure to have you all here in the auditorium and of course, with all you in the webcast as well. Will be an exciting sequence of events today. We are going to have two blocks of presentations. We are going to have two Q&As, so I'm really looking forward to that. It will be our CEO to kick it off today. You all know Vincent, of course. Vincent has been Beiersdorf's CEO for more than a year now.
Actually, he joined Beiersdorf in 2017 as a board member in charge of the Beyond Business. The Beyond Business, I'm sure you know, comprises La Prairie, Derma and the plaster brands. Before joining Beiersdorf, Vincent worked for many years for L'Oréal in skincare. Let us now take a look at strategy and transformation, and I hand over to Vincent Warnery.
Thank you, Jens. Thank you so much. We are extremely happy to see you today. This is a premiere, obviously, but this will not be a dernier. It will not be the last one. We are really happy to meet you. We know that you know very well the company. You've been following the companies for a long time, much longer than us in a way, but perhaps also you don't know know us very well because, you know, based on our northern German culture, we are not that transparent. We were preferring to stay alone in Hamburg. This is why today is a change.
We want to create a stronger, I would even say, intimacy with you and be sure that you know our brands, that you know our company, that also you know the leader of this company. What I'm gonna do now is to take you during the next 30 minutes into four different points. I want to talk about our transformation 'cause we are transforming this company, which is today celebrating its 140 years. We are transforming the company in order to deliver an even stronger results and even stronger performance. This is why also I will take you through the update on C.A.R.E.+ to show you not only what we have done, but also what we are doing.
We will then spend a few minutes on external growth and speak briefly about Coppertone and Chantecaille. I know you're waiting for that to give you a guidance, not only for the quarter, not only for the year, but also immediate term guidance. You know, when I took over the Beyond brands, the Beyond Blue brands in 2017, I was able to experience pretty quickly a pretty good performance with the brand. Of course, 2020 have been impacted La Prairie, but being able to overperform versus the market and especially in the last 18, 24 months to really become one of the best growth driver, not only of Beiersdorf, but also in comparison with the rest of the industry. The recipe was pretty simple.
I'm a strong believer in the fact that beauty brands should be globally driven. That we are not in a world that this requires, you know, to be locally driven, to be close to, you know, local consumer needs. I believe that in the beauty world, there is no consumer needs which are not fulfilled, that we are creating consumer aspiration. This is why being able to have a top-down approach on beauty, no matter, you know, the retail environment of the brand is making a difference. As a consequence also, this global leadership of the brands led to having much bigger innovations, not only because they were better, but also because the fact that everybody had to launch them and put full energy behind those brands make them also bigger.
One of the best example, and we've been repeating that again and again, is the launch of Thiamidol , which was clearly a game changer for Derma. We are also much more ambitious in terms of white spaces. While, you know, over the last 20 years, there were no significant launch of Derma or healthcare brand in the world, we decided to attack the biggest geographies. We launched Eucerin in Brazil in 2019. We launched Eucerin in China in 2020. After three attempts, which were failures, we were successful. Also this year, we are launching Eucerin Sun in the U.S., the U.S. sun market being by far the biggest sun market in the world. Last but not least, digital.
Even before COVID obviously facilitated the development of e-commerce, Derma was extremely strongly sold online, and you will see later that it has become the biggest growth driver of our online business and one of the best performing brands in the market. What do we want to do with the team on NIVEA is just to in a way use the same recipe to build, you know, to regain what this brand used to be. You know, when we were marketers a few years ago in another company, NIVEA was the brand to follow, was the brand that was inspiring all of us.
Every time NIVEA was launching a new product, we were saying, "Damn, you know, they're always coming with something new." This is something what we want to recreate on NIVEA and being sure that we overperform the market and get back to this leadership in growth that we used to have in the past. Our transformation, what it is? You know, first it's important to remember, and again, it's great that we can have you here in the place where everything started 140 years ago. We are proud of our heritage. As a matter of fact, we invented modern skincare. NIVEA was the first mass market or accessible or modern skincare brand created in 1911. That's, I think, well known.
Perhaps what you don't know is Eucerin was the first ever dermocosmetic brand he created, huh? Hansaplast, 100 years ago, we created the first plasters. Coppertone was not belonging to Beiersdorf at this time, but Coppertone invented the U.S. sun filters and was really the pioneer in the sun protection in the U.S. We are proud of this heritage, and we believe that it's important that we regain, you know, say what we used to be, the leader in modern skincare. We are also in a changing world. Yes, obviously, COVID, lockdown in China, war in Ukraine, material price increase, but also the fact that there are a lot of new competitors. Of course, you know the usual suspects, you follow them also. They are there and they are strong.
There are also some digital brands, there are also some own labels, there are some private labels, and this is obviously something which is making the competition even fiercer and we need to react, we need to leverage any opportunity to grow in the market. We were not that good in the past, and this is something clearly that you know even better than me, I can read in each and every report. We were fragmenting our attention. Too many small launches, too many local launches, whose objective was more to please the local country manager than to please the local consumer. I think this is something which has made that we launch a lot of things, they stay on shelf a few months and then disappeared, and making, you know, the feeling that we were not innovative enough.
This is something we want to change. Why do we want to change that? We want to become not only the leading skincare innovator, but we want also to outperform the industry by 2025. What does it mean concretely? The first thing, you know, is very simple, make NIVEA a global brand again. You know, to be sure that there is a top-down guidance of the brand, and this is why, together with the supervisory board, we created for the first time this position of President, NIVEA. Grita is not a CMO, she's the President, NIVEA, and she has the full authority on the brand, and not only on the launch plan, not only on the communication part, but also the way we drive the brand across the world. The second element, I mentioned that already for the beyond brands, fewer, better, bigger.
Fewer, clearly, we will decrease the number of initiatives. Better, because by focusing more on those initiatives and spending more time on fine-tuning them, on sharpening them, they will be better. Bigger, because everybody will have to launch them. We are moving away from the traditional opt-in approach of Beiersdorf, where every country could decide what to do. Everybody will launch everything and maximize the support beyond the brand. We are also in a world where, again, when we were marketers 20 years ago, was pretty simple. We had to shoot a TV commercial, 30 seconds TV commercial, put on air at 30, and then hoping that it will sell our products.
We are in a world, and you know that better than me, where the move to digital even more, and the complexity of the digital world is asking us to change the way we drive communication. We want to develop best-in-class communication, and we have this acronym, OTIF, On Time In Full. What does it mean? It mean that we have to deliver in full to deliver all the digital assets that are required. You know, it's again, moving away from the one TV commercial. For the biggest campaigns, we are delivering 70 digital assets, because the way you will communicate on TikTok, on Google, on Amazon, on Tmall is different.
70 digital asset and also on time, because we had also a habit of delivering the material, the communication material a bit too late to the countries, which was, of course, a fantastic opportunity for them to show their own TV commercials and to increase non-working media. That's ending, and from January 2023, we will deliver global communication package. Last but not least, being much more daring in terms of white space. You know, so in the past, we did open new countries with NIVEA, but often one or two categories, often deodorants and shower, often in emerging markets, and not really, you know, attacking the big markets. We have an ambition for the U.S., for China, for Brazil, for India. This is where the skincare market is obviously the bigger.
This is also a red ocean, but this is clearly where we'll make a difference in terms of growth for the brand NIVEA. That's the transformation. Why do we want to transform? Because there is clearly the C.A.R.E.+ strategy. I'm extremely attached to this strategy. I was member of the board already when we designed this strategy together with my colleague. I believe, and I hope I will also convey this message in the next few minutes, that we picked the right development pillars and that we are delivering against our promises. The first one, win with skincare, you will not be surprised. This is absolutely essential. Core to Beiersdorf, we are the only company being absolutely focusing on one single category, which is skincare. This is how we want to win in the market.
We are already strong. You know, if when you look at the number of positions of NIVEA across the world in each of the categories, you see that in most of the cases, we are number one or we are number two. There are some categories, for example, body, for example, lip, where clearly we own the market. You know, this is clearly most of the number one, number two positions are owned by NIVEA. There are other markets, in two, particularly, where we can do an even better job. Men, for example.
MEN, yes, we are number one, number two, but there is a huge opportunity there and I was perhaps the only French guy happy with the championship final in Paris because, you know, we were having in front of us Liverpool against Real Madrid, both clubs that we are sponsoring. We were at least sure to win, you know. This partnership, which started already 15 years ago, is also a fantastic opportunity to target consumers across the world, in the U.S., in Brazil, in China, and this is something we'll leverage further, particularly with new digital project. Face care. Face care is the name of the game. This is the objective, the number one priority for the company, the number one priority for NIVEA. Launching successful product, I will come back to that.
Entering new markets, and China is a good example. Being sure that we are bringing the added value that our R&D center is able to deliver. Eucerin also is a very interesting case. Here we are historically very strong in body, and it's mostly driven by the U.S. and by Europe, where we are market leader. Also over the last years, we invested a lot on face care in China, Thailand, in Latin America also. We became, you know, one of the key leading brands into this category. Sun care also very strong in Latin America, very strong in Germany. The new frontier for us is obviously the U.S., the biggest sun market in the world. We are entering this year with Eucerin Sun, and Patrick and Oswald will give you some news.
What is the best example I can show you in terms of success story? I know that we are a bit hammering this W630 Thiamidol every call because this is a fantastic success story. I mean, I come back to my first comment. There is no consumer need linked to hyperpigmentation. I mean, nobody is waking up in the morning saying, "I have an issue of hyperpigmentation." We created a consumer aspiration. We told a story about hyperpigmentation. We told a story on different brands, talking about luminosity of the skin with La Prairie, talking about hyperpigmentation on Eucerin, talking about luminous skin on NIVEA with a more affordable positioning. The good news that we made a fantastic success story. We will sell this year EUR 250 million of W630-related products.
You must know that these figures is not including mainland China because until mid of 2024, we cannot launch this product in mainland China. Already China cross-border e-commerce is the number one country for W630, and this is why we believe that these figures will continue to grow in the years to come. A great story, success story started with R&D here in this office just a few floors above. They found this molecule out of 50,000 compounds, and they made the success that we have today, both on NIVEA, Eucerin, and La Prairie. Second element, you know, win in white space. I wanted to zoom in on three countries. You know, the U.S., for example, we are successful, but we were small.
I mean, the size of the market is so huge. Yes, we have a very strong NIVEA Body and Men. We are strong position there. We have a fantastic Aquaphor. For the ones who know a little bit the U.S. business, this is a jewel, you know, a huge profitability, grows every year, you know, and a brand which is really absolutely amazing and without competition. We launched Eucerin three years ago, and we are gaining market share every year, and obviously La Prairie, but Patrick will come back to that, where we have a strong position, but we are currently, you know, transforming this brand into an extremely successful brand in the market. That was not enough, and this is why the acquisition of Coppertone was a game changer.
Not only because we could buy a brand, an iconic brand, you know, a brand, as I said, who invented the sun care market in the U.S., and also because, you know, we just had to wake up the sleeping beauty, and this brand had been losing market share year after year for 12 years. We shuffled this brand, and Oswald will talk about the latest news. What also we got into the package was a fantastic top-of-the-art R&D center. You know, we had a beautiful R&D center that Bayer, you know, gave us together with the brand, and we were able to transform this Coppertone R&D center into a broad sun and body research center based in New Jersey.
This is thanks to this R&D center that we were able to launch Eucerin Sun because you might know that the sun, the U.S. sun filters are different from the one that we have in Europe. You need to have the local know-how in order to develop a proposal which is validated by the FDA. We launched Eucerin Sun. It would not have happened without the presence of Coppertone. The last news, the last kid on the block is the acquisition of Chantecaille, a beautiful brand. I think you will discover that perhaps for some of you later in the booths.
Beautiful brand in this huge space which we could call premium skincare between the derma and luxury, and we are clearly have a lot of hopes for this brand. U.S., clearly, we have a multi-brand approach which is paying off. China also. China, same story, perhaps less successful on the left side with the big and the unique exception of La Prairie, which is, as you know, extremely strong in China. We had a NIVEA business, not the most premium one, not the most online one, but we had something in face cleansing and men. We had also Maestro that we got together with C-BONS when we bought these brands a few years ago. That was clearly not enough to succeed. Here, you know, interesting approach.
First, you know, we developed in 2020, we created, in the middle of COVID, a R&D center in Shanghai, and we are focusing on Asian skincare. We also relied on partners, and I will come back to what we are doing with Tmall, with Tmall Innovation Center. In order to develop the right innovation, because what matters, and this is the right part of the slide, is to develop our portfolio in premium skincare. It's about Eucerin. Patrick will describe that later, but we are extremely successful with Eucerin in China. We are very successful with NIVEA LUMINOUS. Again, you know, only in cross-border e-commerce, and just for your information, cross-border e-commerce, it's 8% of the total e-commerce in China. LUMINOUS is already the number one country for NIVEA.
Very successful NIVEA LUMINOUS with a price positioning which has nothing to do with the legacy business on the left. Also a lot of hope with Chantecaille, currently only sold online cross-border, that we want to launch in China mainland. What is interesting also that we were able to reinvent a little bit our operating model. Beyond, you know, the silos, La Prairie, Derma, NIVEA, here we said we are too small to divide our strengths, so we're gonna put together the skincare experts of La Prairie, of Eucerin, of NIVEA, and work together, of course, together with R&D. In order to develop not only the new products which will fit Chinese consumers' expectations, but also to prepare the big Chinese launch of W630 when we'll get the regulatory approval.
Second element also, we are also very proud to be the only global skincare company having a double captainship, you know, with Tmall. We are a big data captain. Our big data for Tmall, it's 900 million consumers which are covered by Tmall, so we have access to the data. But also, we are also captain in everything which is about innovation, agility and e-commerce effectiveness to be sure that we have the right positioning, the right concept, the right advertising campaign. The products you see on this page, on the right part, are the products we are launching right now, and which were created thanks to this partnership with Tmall. There is also a country which we are very interested in. You know, India is clearly a success story.
We created the first Indian business in 2006, and was a very smart approach launching, you know, new category, one after the other, opening a new factory. Today, what is absolutely amazing is that we are the number one trusted skincare brand in India. Is it good? Yes. Is it enough? No. There is, and you will not be surprised if I tell you that there is one big piece missing, the face care market, 27% of the market. The third biggest emerging market, face care, and we want to be there. We want to launch NIVEA. Of course, we will have to reinvent a specific offer.
We cannot do a copy-paste of what we are doing in Latin America or in Europe, but this is, for us, a new El Dorado, and this is clearly a country in which we want to invest in the future. A lot of opportunity in white spaces and clearly the ambition to target, you know, the places where, you know, it matters. Last thing, the third thing, sorry, digital transformation. I think, and appreciated in most of your paper that you saw the success, the transformation of Beiersdorf in terms of online growth.
We are not only growing every year double digits, but also first quarter 2022, we were overperforming the market and overperforming our peers, you know, which was the first time it was happening, growing globally but also growing on each and every brand. You know, growing on NIVEA, growing on La Prairie, Eucerin, which is the biggest online business we have in terms of share of sales and growth, and even on Hansaplast growing at 48%. We are growing everywhere, and we are growing, you know, double digits in each and every geography, building on partners. I mentioned Tmall, I could mention Amazon, but also some dedicated specialist partners like Shop Apotheke, for example, in Germany. Online is not only about, you know, the e-commerce.
Something also we discovered, and you may say we discovered it perhaps a bit late, but we discovered Precision Marketing. Again, far away from the idea of having one TV commercial for everybody. Over the last two years, we've been able to move dramatically on investment, not only from TV to digital, but also from traditional digital to Precision Marketing. Precision Marketing is an interesting story because we are able, thanks to the digital media and also all the data available, to deliver a targeted approach to targeted customers. We give you four examples. South Africa, W630, we became number one face care brand with NIVEA in South Africa by delivering specific messages for mature skin, for pregnancy related issue, for sun-exposed skin, and being able to deliver specific execution, specific campaigns with specific media.
Other results, sell-out +60% and media efficiency, so the cost of GRP -24%. That was a great example in South Africa. Also, again, if I come back to India on a core product, which is NIVEA Soft, here, so the target audience was reduced, if I can say so for India, because we are talking about students, college students. Here we were able to adapt the media pressure to the importance of regional influencers. So when we had a strong regional influencer, we are putting more media, but also the distribution of the product. Here we were able to increase sell-out by 97% and improve the efficiency by 13%.
Another example also close to here, you know, one of the historical frustrations that we were not market leader in Germany with NIVEA and Sun. Last year, we developed an approach, you know, again, building not only on very different targets, could be sport, could be family, could be festival. I think we had up to 240 executions. Also being able to adapt our media presence to the temperature, above 15 degrees, and to the sun, to the sunshine. Being really able to have something which at the end did not only improve dramatically our market share, we gain almost 2 points, but also improving the efficiency, the cost of delivering this message by 50%.
Last but not least, very interesting also, again, a core franchise, Q10 in the U.K. Here, a lot of execution, 300 execution, different target groups, and also here, +20% sell-out and - 50% in terms of cost, so +50% efficiency. Last but not least, sustainability. Sustainability is very close to our heart. You know, when we developed our pledge, you know, two years ago, we thought we are perhaps going a bit too far. You know, we promised to deliver -30% CO₂ emissions, 2025 versus 2018. Having in mind that we are also growing. The good news that we are delivering against this promise. Last year, we deliver -12.7% CO₂ emissions.
This is 4x what you will see with our competitors, so - 12.7%, and which means 42% of our engagement, you know, our commitment is already delivered in one year. We will clearly deliver 30% less CO₂ emissions in 2025 versus 2018. Well, how do we do that? There is a clear simple story, which is the 3 R, you know, the 3 R rule. Every time we do an innovation on NIVEA, but also on Eucerin, and even on La Prairie, reduce, recycle, reuse. You know, so with reduce, for example, any shower gel you find today has 25% less plastic. When you look at recycle, we were the first big beauty manufacturer launching a 100% recycled aluminum range. So on MEN and on shaving and on deodorant.
Also recently launched a very interesting eco-refill on soap. You just have to put a tab in lukewarm water, you shake, and you have a hand soap product. That's what we're doing, but we are also doing some interesting thing. You know, this is something I find extremely interesting and a bit technical. It's a new method, in fact, for making use of carbon. We collect carbon dioxide, you know, at locations like industrial chimneys. It is then fermented, and this is processed into cosmetic ethanol, and we use this ethanol as an ingredient in a new moisturizing balm that we are launching in Germany. This is the kind of thing we love to do. With the idea clearly that we have also a very precise roadmap, you know.
We are doing everything we can to reduce the CO₂ emissions, and I come back, you know, to this - 30%. Obviously it means that we have to measure the CO₂ emissions we are doing for each and every product, each and every factory, each and every range. We reduce dramatically the CO₂ emissions, coming back to the 3 R. Then what is remaining, because we cannot go to zero emissions, we are financing specific afforestation projects in order to be able to offer to consumers climate neutralized range, and you will see, for example, later, the example of NIVEA Soft. All of that is our strategy. This is the C.A.R.E.+ strategy. We believe that this is the right strategy for Beiersdorf.
We believe also that we are delivering against this strategy, and this is why, you know, we will continue and succeed with this company. You could remember four big ideas. First one is win in skincare W630. The second one, white space. This is the U.S., the launch of Eucerin Sun in the U.S. Digital, you saw the use of Precision Marketing and the dramatic increase of digital spending behind the brand. Sustainability, we are delivering against our pledge. Also, acquisition, you know, it's true that we had this history of C-BONS, and perhaps we overplayed it a little bit because I'm not sure you know the market better than me, that you can quote a lot of big companies having successfully integrated and grown Chinese beauty brands.
If you have some names, I'm happy to listen to them. At the end of the day, we have a fantastic brand, which is called Maestro, profitable, growing market leader. We have a fantastic factory in which we can produce tomorrow's skincare, and this is, I think, a pretty good legacy. This being said, it took us 10 years to go back and to be more daring in terms of acquisition. We bought Coppertone, you know, filling this extremely important hole in the portfolio in the sun U.S. market, and we had recently the acquisition of Chantecaille. Together with that, we have also a venture capital, and I'm sure that in one of the next calls, I will be happy to share with you a few ideas. Where are we there?
I will not spend too much time because it will be presented later by Oswald and Patrick. Super happy with Coppertone. We turn around the brand in 2021. First year since 2012 where we gain market share. We are launching now, right now, a fully revamped packaging. Really because there had been an addition of different renovation, but creating a kind of messy look of the brand. We are also changing our factory. We used to be produced in the U.S., moving to Mexico to benefit from a much better cost of goods. Chantecaille, you will also discover the brand later. We are extremely happy with the new kid on the block, and we are expecting a lot. When I see Patrick, the sales of May, I feel extremely optimistic about this brand.
Fantastic complementarity to our portfolio between Derma and La Prairie. Great opportunity in the most important skincare market, U.S., Korea, and China. A lot to do. We have the family with us, the family Chantecaille, and this is something where we have a lot of hope. This is what I wanted to share with you, but I will not let you go without updating you on the guidance. Regarding the Q2, we have a very good performance on NIVEA with skincare performing faster than personal care, and the trend is led by sun care and by face care. We have a tough second quarter on La Prairie, but Patrick will give you some already first figures of June.
We know that, you know, the model of the brand and also the history of the brand makes us optimistic, not only for the semester, we'll be positive, but also for the Q3 and Q4. Derma is flying. This is why, based on those good news, we are expecting mid-single digit growth. Now we want to be more specific. It will be at the upper end for consumer in the Q2. First guidance. The second element was on the guidance for 2022. Here, there was a lot of questions in your reports about the price. Was very interesting, Grita and Oswald.
We got yesterday the April market share, which is very good 'cause this is the first market share where there is a true price effect, the true implementation of the price increase that we have put in place since the beginning of the year. The good news that we are growing strongly, but Grita will say more, in units and value. We can clearly say that at this stage, both in emerging market and Europe, we are not suffering from any issue linked to the price increase. That's very important. Second element, you know that Shanghai and Beijing are reopening, and we have some good news both on NIVEA, Eucerin, and La Prairie.
You see also that, you know, Derma is flying. What we are doing is, we want to slightly update our guidance for the full year 2022, which means that for the consumer segment, we will end the year at the upper end of mid-single digit organic sales growth for the full year. I confirm loud and clear that we maintain our guidance to deliver a slight EBIT margin improvement supported by pricing, mix, and efficiency. For the total group, this means that the sales growth will be at the upper end of mid-single digit for the full year. Last but not least, it was also the number one, you know, promise of this capital market day, the medium term outlook.
When we look at, you know, the situation, the success of our brands, when you look also at the ability we have to deliver to go beyond, you know, the price increase, we see that consumers like our product. We see that the implementation of C.A.R.E.+ initiatives works and is paying off. We want, we will continue to grow above market with each and every brand, and we still have, as you know very well, a lot of money to invest in M&A. This is why, you know, combined with our progress in mix pricing and efficiency, we want to increase consumer EBIT margin by at least 50 basis points per annum from 2023 onwards. On top of that, at the same time, with the set of measures, we want to lower the tax level under 28%.
This is what I wanted to share with you today. I'm sure there will be some questions here in the auditorium and later in the room, but I wanted to give you a perspective on Beiersdorf. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you, Vincent. We are now moving into the brand section, actually, and we will be starting with Patrick Rasquinet. Patrick had been CEO of La Prairie for more than 10 years, after a number of positions in the Beiersdorf world, including North America, Brazil, Russia, South Korea, and Belgium, his home country. Now he is a member of the executive board, and we will hear from Patrick about La Prairie and Derma, our very successful consumer businesses beyond NIVEA. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Jens. Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Indeed, quite a premiere for this capital market day at Beiersdorf, but also a premiere for me, so very exciting moment I have to say for me. Also first time to meet all of you physically, so I think it's great. You know, we had the chance to talk virtually in the first quarter report, but now, you know, it's really great to have an audience as well. It's not so common today to have an audience listening to your presentation. Allow me to bring you into two absolutely beautiful brands of the portfolio of Beiersdorf, sorry. For many different reasons. I will talk to you now first about La Prairie.
La Prairie, which is definitely the most desirable, the most exclusive, the most luxurious skincare brand that is out there in the world. I will bring you through maybe, a few topics. The first topic I would like to bring you through is to explain you a little bit the ecosystem that we have built around La Prairie in the last six years. I would jump in and zoom in into two strategic markets for us, which is China and United States. I would like to address a specific point, which is the local clients everywhere in the world. Let me bring you into the ecosystem of La Prairie.
We started our journey back in 2015, and why you know these numbers are 2015, 2021, because we started our roadmap 2020 back in 2015, and it took us these five, six years to establish where we are today with the La Prairie brand. We started reducing our assortments by around 50% on the period 2015-2021. In skincare, we moved from close to 100 SKUs to less than 50 SKUs. If you go back even to 2010, we had back then around 150 SKUs in the portfolio. You can imagine that we reduced by two-thirds the assortment over this period of 10 years. We did this also by creating innovations. We increased prices.
We trade up, you know, our clients from lower collections to the more prestigious collections. You may know some of them, like Platinum, like Caviar, like Gold Collection. We launched very innovative products, and here on the picture, you see two of them. One is the Skin Caviar Liquid Lift, which is a real icon for the La Prairie brand. You have the latest collection that we revamped, which is the Gold Collection, with refillable vessels. This allowed us to increase the average price per unit sold from around EUR 220 to EUR 420 . We increased the average price of the units sold by 70% over the period 2015-2021. It means that the average, you know, basket probably of a consumer is today at EUR 1,000 or more at every single purchase.
This we did at the same time as cleaning the distribution and operating in a fully curated distribution today. We reduced our distribution by 60%. It means we reduced the number of doors we have from around 5,000 doors worldwide to 2,000 doors today. You can imagine, of course, that while we were reducing this distribution, the only objective was to make sure that we provide the right environment for our clients, meaning in a store design that is really adequate in expressing the brand values. Also making sure that in every single door, we do have beauty advisor able to advise the client, but also by offering cabins, treatment cabins, and I'll come back to these, treatment cabins a little bit later.
Of course, obviously, and you may also say maybe, better now than later, but indeed, we started really expanding our online business. It took us time to really understand how to express the brand online the same way we want to express it offline. We found the right formula now, and now we are really expanding in this channel online. During this period of six years, you see that it was all about reduction, about making sure we offer the right distribution, the right assortment, and the right service, exclusive service to our clients. In this period of time, we multiplied the sales by two, and we multiplied the EBIT by three, showing that it was definitely the right formula. This put us in a unique segment of the market, which is the most luxurious part, the uber-luxury part of the skincare market.
This we did as well by refusing to enter any promotion, refused to enter in any special aggressive initiatives to promote the brand. This is one of the reason why in 2020, when the COVID arrived, that we suffered. We do not behave with the same code as the skincare industry. Our business is about luxury. It's the luxury. We are a luxury house in skincare, which is totally different. It means that in 2020 we were not scared, you know, not entering in any promotion just in order to compensate sales. We care about the brand equity. We care about the value that we give to our clients, and this is all what count. We work for the long term, and it proved to be successful. This is to set a little bit the scene, you know, for the La Prairie business.
Now let's zoom into, you know, the two bigger strategic markets of La Prairie. You see here this is a projection. We are not talking about the past anymore, but about the projection 1925 of the premium skincare market. You know, the projected skincare market by Euromonitor, and this is the premium skincare market, is around EUR 80 billion. You see here that China will represent 40% of the total premium skincare market, while United States is still maintaining a good position, being the second-largest market in the world with a 14% share of the total premium skincare market. I'll dive in now into China. These are the numbers of 2021.
You know that in China we operate in different channel, the first channel being the department stores, and I'll get back into more details later, where you see that La Prairie outpaced the market growth in 2021. We have a little bit similar to the department store, but this is the standalone boutiques, and we have La Prairie around 30 standalone boutiques in China. These are really boutiques that are fully operated by La Prairie, not depending on a retailer. This is typically in a big shopping mall. You may know some of them like IFC. There as well you see that we have grown quite dramatically with a growth of 59% in a market that is growing by 41%. Of course, the third channel of distribution extremely important in China is Tmall or the e-commerce.
We started first with our own e-boutique, the La Prairie e-boutique. Very successful, really making sure that we were offering also the right environment, you know, for our product to be displayed online. Then we moved on to Tmall. You know that we moved on to Tmall in late 2020, but we did this extremely carefully. Carefully in the sense that they have to respect all brand guidelines. We are controlling the full brand assets. We are controlling the way it's distributed. We are controlling the service that is provided to the clients, the way we deliver to the client, white glove service, secret code service to make sure that you deliver to the right person, special packaging, and so forth and so forth.
You see here that in 2021, the market is at 23%, and we outpace the market by 209%. Finally, travel retail, and I'll also get into a little bit more detail of travel retail later. Of course, everybody knows here Hainan, you know, a little bit the miracle that happened that could compensate, you know, the rest of the world in terms of travel retail. The market growing at 21%, and we grew by 111% last year. Of course, Hainan very important, but not only Hainan, there are some other points of sale or some other doors in China that are extremely important for travel retail. I'm thinking of the airports of Shanghai, airports of Beijing, Hangzhou, and so forth.
Maybe let's dig into the brick-and-mortar or department stores and boutiques footprint that La Prairie has in China. Now I'm really entering into the reason why we believe there is a huge potential still for La Prairie in China. In the market in China, in the local market, we do have 84 points of sale, so 84 doors. You can imagine that at the scale of China, 84 is extremely small. Majority of our competitors are rather on the 200 or even more doors in the market, and these 84 doors are in 37 cities. When I say 37 cities, you can immediately connect to the classification of the tier cities. Tier one cities, if I'm not wrong, there are four cities.
You have 15 new tier one cities, and then you have around 30 cities that are tier two, and then you have tier three, tier four, and tier five. The total of tier one, new tier one, and tier two cities is 49. 49 cities in total, and we are only present in 37 cities. We want to build our distribution up to 120 doors by 2025, meaning nearly increasing our footprint by 50%, and to reach out still focusing on the tier one, new tier one, and tier two cities, so not yet touching the tier three cities. Next to this potential, of course, you know I mentioned earlier we have some online business, and we want to explore further opportunities that the online business is offering in China.
We are only with our own e-boutique and Tmall, as I said earlier. Travel retail, we believe that Hainan will continue to grow probably at a more moderate pace, nevertheless, but still growing. Surprisingly for us, in Q1 and Q2 of this year, we are growing close double digits in Hainan. Despite all the lockdown and the peculiar sanitary situation that China is facing today. This is for the brick and mortar. If we move into the online world, and more specifically on Tmall that we launched back in 2020, it was a very, very important tool for us to step in. Why? In fact, 66% of the clients we have on Tmall are new clients. These are clients that were never exposed or purchased.
Existing is not the right term, sorry, but never purchased the La Prairie brand, so 66% of new clients. It's clearly a platform where La Prairie recruit. On top of this, 30% of these clients are coming from cities where we do not have a counter, so it can be tier two cities, it can be tier three cities. We are reaching out, of course, much further or farther than what we can do with our brick and mortar doors. Interestingly, the client profile of a Chinese client of La Prairie is three to four years younger on Tmall than on the local market, I mean, on the brick and mortar business. Three to four years younger. Clearly, with the online business, we are targeting much younger consumers.
Very interestingly, thanks to an incredible CRM tool that we're having, but also thanks to the agreement we signed with Tmall, we are collecting all client data of our Tmall business. When we drive these clients onto the offline, we manage to multiply the average annual spend of every single client by four. This omni-channel approach is definitely a real success for La Prairie. This is about the online opportunity that we still have. By the way, just to give you maybe some numbers on Tmall, you know that Tmall is rather flat today in skincare in China. We are growing still by over 50 points in the period January till end of May. Let's move now to the world of Hainan. Hainan, I mean, some numbers are just incredible.
You know that in 2021 we had 81 million single visitors in Hainan. It's a huge window, I mean, for any brand to be present in Hainan. Hainan is a little bit bigger than the size of Switzerland, so sometimes people believe, oh, it's a small island, you know, you have a few casinos and a few shops, but it's a huge territory, mainly separated, you know, into three cities and two major cities, where we have today 11 doors. We adapted very quickly, and we opened 11 doors.
Nevertheless, when I say we expand quite quickly, it's always, again, respecting the brand guidelines, the brand equity of La Prairie, always making sure we have all store design, that we have all beauty advisors, that we are able to provide the service in a cabin, and also making sure that we are able to collect data. What we did there is to create, you know, also kind of an ecosystem, you know, for the travelers to Hainan. We connect with them before they travel through several apps that are existing, like of course, WeChat, but also RED, for example. We connect with them whenever they come into our stores in Hainan, and then we connect them with their local counters in their local city. We have a loop, if you want, where we bring back this traveler from Hainan into the counter in their original cities.
It's also, of course, a very important platform for us to recruit. All right? At the same, I mean, the same line as Tmall. Let me give you maybe some flavor on the China COVID situation. Of course, you know April, May, severely hit by COVID, especially in the big cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou. We had around 15 doors on average closed, which represent 27% of our business in China. Fortunately, our warehouse could reopen quite quickly. We had incredible dedicated employees sleeping at the warehouse and still working to make sure that they were able to distribute in the full country. Q2 definitely will be negative, no doubt about this. However, I would like to give you some signals.
You know that back in 2020 when the COVID hit the Chinese market, as soon as the COVID stops, there was this, what they call this revenge purchase. The Q2 of 2020 showed numbers like +45% or +57% even in Q3. We expect the same in 2022. I would like to give you just one number. This is the Shanghai. This is the one-week sales of the first week of June in Shanghai. Despite the fact that the traffic in the stores is only at the level of 30% versus previous year same week, we were able to generate a sales 20% higher than the same period last year. Quite impressive. A lot of shops are delivering directly to the consumer.
You don't need even to go to the shops. I think it's the last numbers I've seen is between 50%-60% of the business is delivery to the client's home. We are quite optimistic even to deliver a positive first half with La Prairie, and we expect a very strong rebound in Q3 and Q4 for La Prairie. Allow me now to move to the North American market. There we have clearly an acceleration of the La Prairie business, and this is mainly based on three pillars. The first pillar, and this is unique in the skincare industry, we are able to capture client data in every single door. When I mean every single door, it means doors from retailers like Nordstrom, Saks, Holt Renfrew through Bloomingdale's and so forth.
We are the only company, the only beauty brand that manage to capture client data in the retailer's door ourselves. We do not depend on the retailer, so we have our own client data in every single door. This is absolutely an incredible power. Just to give you two numbers here, the average transaction spent. After we implemented the system, you know, in Nordstrom, after a certain period of time, we noticed that the average spend increased by 61% just by establishing this relationship with the client. Same in terms of items for purchase, we increased by 47%. This is the first pillar, but the most important one, and we know this is a learning from the COVID, be connected, engage your clients, and maintain this relationship with the client, whatever happens, you know, outside. Second pillar, new store design.
We have now around 55% of our distribution in the United States with the new store design. We have already 30 doors, you know, equipped with treatment cabins. This is another very interesting number. Whenever we have a client or let's say a prospect coming into one of our cabin, you have 65% chance that this client will buy. This is an incredible, you know, tool to really make people buy the La Prairie brand. It's to live the experience of La Prairie, and then once you live it, you are convinced, and you purchase. We plan, of course, to expand this new store design from 55% up to 95% by 2025. The third pillar, this you will not be surprised, this is the digital pillar. We will expand our online footprint. We are entering into an agreement with NET-A-PORTER.
We will start our cooperation with NET-A-PORTER that belongs to the Richemont Group as of July 1st. We also now implementing, and this is quite unique as well, online beauty advisors for each online retailers. We have beauty advisors answering the questions of the clients that are buying even on nordstrom.com, bloomingdale.com, and so forth. Dedicated beauty advisors. This is about North America. What I can tell you is that year to date, we are growing over 30% in North America, so quite outstanding numbers. This is clearly much faster than any competitor in the distribution where we are in, and this is around probably 15 points faster. Last but not least, it's even faster than the overall premium skincare distribution in the United States.
All these learnings that I shared with you know, and also this potential we are showing you in North America and China is also valid for all the other markets in the world. I would like to get to my last slide, in terms of learnings for us, and this is really focused on the local clients. You know, COVID taught us that it's a very volatile world. You cannot rely, you know, necessarily on travelers. You cannot rely on Chinese traveling to all the countries. You cannot rely only on brick and mortar. You need to have, of course, a very strong omni-channel approach. What we did by negotiating special deals with all these retailers that I just explained to you, like in North America or in travel retail, we do the same with the retailers in Europe.
I think there is no one in the industry that can say that they have managed to get client data capture on their own with retailers like Douglas, Marionnaud, and so forth in Europe. We focus on the local clients. We make sure we connect, we engage, we build this relationship with every single client. We know every single of them. Europe is also now on its growth way or path. We strongly believe that we will reduce our dependency on the Chinese consumers also by enforcing this overall approach, you know, outside China and North America. Let me summarize, you know, in a few words what I just introduced to you. We have a unique and strong brand equity. This is unparalleled. We have the most luxurious brand out there.
We have an incredible ecosystem that allow us to negotiate striking deals with retailers. We have a massive growth potential in China. We only have touched a fraction of it. When I say a fraction, I will just give you one number. We have today in China 100,000 clients, and you all know, I assume, how many high net worth individual there are in China, over 5 million. The sky is the limit. We are accelerating our North American business, and we will leverage our client data capture or CRM programs that are quite unique in this industry to leverage the local clients everywhere in the world. Of course, we will continue to enlarge, you know, our digital footprint.
You have seen the very successful example of Tmall, but also that we are entering into a new agreement with NET-A-PORTER, for example, but even further, you will see soon. This was about La Prairie. I think I need a little breath, you know, before moving into Derma, which is a totally different business. Yeah. Derma. When I arrived one year ago, I have to say I was totally astonished by the passion of the people that were animating the employees of the Derma brands of Eucerin and Aquaphor. It really surprised me, and I understood very quickly that Eucerin is not a simple cosmetic brand. It's a brand that is addressing real issues of real people in life. Everybody I've met, and I've witnessed, you know, a few testimonies from customers, consumers.
A mother that was really desperate because her baby was crying all night, suffering from eczema. We are able to help her, to support her, to solve the issue of her baby by treating the eczema of the baby. Another example of a person 25, 28 years old suffering from very dramatic acne. It is terrible, and we are also able to support her to solve her issue of acne. We feel like we have a mission with Eucerin to really solve the issues of people and to change their life. We believe in the life-changing power of dermatological skincare. All our teams are motivated to really discover products that are able to solve people's life. I've witnessed this, and it is absolutely incredible to see all our employees, our R&D people working just to find product that can help people.
I would like to focus today on three areas, and you know that the Derma strategy is very aligned with the C.A.R.E.+ strategy of Beiersdorf. I will focus on innovation on one side very quickly, then I will move to win in white spots, and then in the digital area. You've seen in the presentation of Vincent that we really leverage this incredible innovation of Thiamidol. We started in the anti-pigmentation, and we became the absolute number one leader in this market in hyperpigmentation and even skin. We start to leverage in other segment of the markets like anti-aging, but we also start to enter in other categories like sun or like hand care. Now lastly, end of 2021, Well, we didn't move.
We added to our blue ocean strategy, the red ocean, by entering in the protected garden, as we say, of our largest competitor. We entered into the acne segment with Thiamidol. Leveraging this in innovation of Thiamidol, they developed a product that is fighting post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation, and these are the post-acne marks. You know, these marks that after having acne, you know, you have in that stage, you know, forever. They developed a product addressing this topic. You may know as well that acne is the number one indication in the dermatologist office, so it's really one of the biggest territory in dermocosmetic. With this revolutionary product, we were able to provide an efficacy that was unseen in this market. You see here a very simple picture of before and after treating these post-acne marks.
We are again changing the life of our consumers, and it pays out because immediately you see the results. We have in a very short period of time, and I'm talking now a few months, climb a few positions in the acne segment in Europe, but not only in Europe. I think the growth in Europe was spectacular, moving from the fifth position to the third, for example, in United Kingdom. We had spectacular results in Latin America or even in Thailand or other Asian countries. I'll give you the example of China in a second. I would like to move now from innovation into winning in white spaces. There clearly, Vincent also addressed it earlier in his presentation, we decided to focus on three huge dermocosmetic markets, Brazil, China, and U.S. Let's start with Brazil.
In Brazil, you know that we were present till 2017, then we exited the market. We were really unsuccessful. We decided to come back with a totally different approach in 2019, and we decided to do in a very focused approach. Why focused? Focused because we entered only in the face care category and really focusing on Thiamidol, so on hyperpigmentation. Focused because we decided to enter only in two states in Brazil, the state of São Paulo and the state of Rio de Janeiro. We wanted to make sure we are successful in these states before doing anything else. The third focus is focusing on the power of the digital distribution in Brazil. Thanks to this very focused strategy, after one year and a half, we became the leader of the hyperpigmentation segment in Brazil.
We are the number one brand in the even skin category. We are today part of the top three recommended brands by dermatologists in Brazil. We are now expanding. Thanks to the success we are having in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, we expanded now in Minas Gerais. After Minas Gerais, we will go to the United States and go nationwide. In these two states, we managed, you know, to gain incredible number of positions and entering in the top players in the dermocosmetic arena. Finally, in terms of digital leverage, already 25% of our business in Brazil is done online. We are now opening even our own Eucerin boutique online in Brazil. Let's move to the Chinese example. As also Vincent said earlier, we are only on cross-border online platform.
Recently, we launched the Spotless Brightening Serum, and in a very short period of time, we became the number one serum sold on cross-border on Tmall, online. Thanks to this product, thanks to the penetration of Thiamidol, again, we are able to increase the brand awareness and the brand desirability of Eucerin, and this is a very good preparation to what's come in the future for us in China. Last but not least, you all know we entered one of the biggest sun markets in the world with Eucerin Sun. Of course, it's very early to give you numbers, but we got extremely good welcome from the trades. We build up distribution very fast with some very good planogram. We are already in CVS, in Target, but in Walmart as well.
We have reached a level of weighted distribution of around 60%, moving up to 70% in the coming weeks. Of course, the investment will start now. We got very good reactions from the consumers, very high rating, as well on the online rating platforms, but also dermatologists starting to recommend the Eucerin brand in the sun category. Let's move to the last part of this focus area, which is digital. You know that obviously e-commerce is very important, like, you know, for anyone else, and Eucerin is the brand having the largest share of its business online within the Beiersdorf portfolio. We're already above 20%, 21%, 22% of our business worldwide that is done online.
This is thanks to our rollout of own Eucerin boutique in many countries in Europe to start with, but also to agreements that we have signed with, as you said earlier as well, Shop Apotheke. This is one thing. This is the e-commerce. I would like to talk to you about two touch points that are different than the online e-commerce. This is the dermatologist and the consumer. We use digital as well to connect with the dermatologist, and you know that they're extremely important to recommend our brand to the consumers. We have what we call IQMED. IQMED is an e-detailing tool that...
You know, you will remember that detailers, they used to go with their books, you know, with documentation, sitting in the waiting room of the dermatologist, going into the room of the dermatologist, speaking five minutes, selling your product, then okay, hoping that he will recommend your product to the next patient, and then moving out, and of course, meeting the 15 other detailers from the 15 other brands waiting in the waiting room of the dermatologist. We have changed this totally. With this tool, we are able to connect and to engage with the dermatologist. We know what kind of patients he's treating. We know what kind of skin disease he's dealing with. We know also what is his interest. We connect him with the conference. We connect him with KOL. We connect him with our scientists.
There is a real relationship being established with the dermatologist. We make sure that we are always top of mind in the mindset of the dermatologist and that he's recommending our brand whenever he's dealing with issues that we help him, you know, also in terms of information. The first numbers are spectacular. I don't want to spend too much time on this chart, but the engagement we have is by far beyond, you know, any of the standard practice or benchmarks. You know, it's really incredible. We have really changed, you know, the way we work with the dermatologist. The last example is of Dermanostic. I don't have my iPhone. I would like to show you. I take the iPhone.
Thank you, Vincent. This is an investment we did in a German startup doing an online consulting tool, you know, in the area of dermatology. You have an app on your iPhone. You have an issue of eczema or acne. You take a picture on this app, and it's sent directly to the dermatologist that, in a certain frame of time, will come back to you and give you know, advice, maybe prescription, all online. Of course, the intent of being part of this program is not to control what the dermatologist is prescribing, but it's to get to know what they prescribe, what is the regimen, what are the skin disease that he's currently treating. It's an incredible source of information for our marketing team.
These two tools, the IQMED tool and the Dermanostic tool, are like Precision Marketing if you want. This is ORC with the dermatologist. It's an incredible source of information for us to drive our business in the future. This was it for the presentation of Derma. Maybe just sort of you have understood that we are very ambitious with Eucerin. We want to be, by 2024, the second EUR 1 billion brand in the portfolio of Beiersdorf, and we want to claim the number two position in the market by 2024. Very ambitious program for Eucerin as well. Thank you very much for your attention. I hope you will have the chance to discover as well the La Prairie, Chantecaille brands later in the booth. Thank you.
Thank you, Patrick. We are now opening the first round of Q&A. We have microphones in the audience. They are just arriving. I can see the first hands. Please always just wait, have the microphone before speaking, so we have everything also on the webcast. Please, go ahead.
Hey, thank you. I'll start with two. I've got lots of questions, and thank you very much 'cause lots of stuff, good stuff there. Thank you. The boring question I guess in some ways, the 50 basis points on the margin progression from 2023. So one question is that 2023 that you're gonna have 50 basis points of increase? Is that the
Yes
Current base case? Okay. I guess the time frames. In the current base plan, is that two years, three years, four years, five years of circa 50 basis points every year? Go on. Do you wanna go do that one? Do that one first, and then I'll follow up.
To comment, I leave it open, and you also heard my comments, at least 50 basis points. We have some room to grow. We know also what to do, working on mix, working on pricing, working also on efficiency. We just released, you know, the first ever early retirement program of Beiersdorf, you know, ensuring also that we have new people joining company. We are clearly willing to act also on these elements.
Okay, great. Thank you. I guess related in some ways, the level of A&P in 2021 I think hit circa EUR 1.7 billion, and then SG&A was sort of EUR 365 million levels. Both a bit of a step up and sort of a bit of volatility around COVID. Is that the new base level? 'Cause I guess a lot of what you talked about all seems quite expensive in many ways, lots of things you're targeting. Is there another jump to come within that framework, or is that where you start and then we should progress from that base? Thanks.
No, I think the 27% of A&P, we believe, is the right ratio. We look at the portfolio of Beiersdorf and the size of luxury versus mass market versus dermocosmetics. We believe 27% is right. You understood also that the work we have been doing over the last year is to decrease dramatically non-working media to the benefit of working media, but also to move from a traditional TV buying into digital media, into Precision Marketing. To give a perspective, you know, the efficiency moving from traditional TV to Precision Marketing is 100%. For each euro, we have 100% more efficiency than what we used to do with TV. This is why 27% is the right ratio.
SG&A, because also we want to act on our SG&A while obviously growing, this ratio will decrease, obviously.
Thanks.
Thank you. Chris Pitcher from Redburn. Encouraging that your M&A is part of the growth story, and I appreciate Astrid isn't on the stage, but can you give us a sense of how much extra resource you've brought into your M&A department? Because after a 10-year hiatus in M&A, I imagine perhaps it had slipped as a core competence of the group.
No, it's a very good question. There was a huge improvement and huge professionalization between what we did at Coppertone and what we did at Chantecaille. I must say at Coppertone, we didn't dedicate a team except, of course, the head of M&A, and we saw clearly that it was good enough. This is why we have put on Chantecaille a dedicated team. There is obviously a full-time post-merger integration manager, who's a veteran of La Prairie. We have dedicated resource in legal, in finance, in tax. Of course, working also with external partners. We have today a team which is able to take over any new M&A projects coming to the market.
Forgive me if you mentioned it. Can you give us a sense of the pipeline, of what sort of visibility, how many sort of active engagements you're in terms of M&A, to give a sense of whether that pipeline has picked up in the last two years or?
I'm absolutely unable to tell you or unwilling to tell you, because obviously, first I want to succeed with Coppertone and Chantecaille, and I've really to demonstrate our ability to develop that. Then we are looking at a lot of options. One of you gave us a very interesting list of 50 options, you know. Some of them we know, some of them we are looking at. We have the money, as you know. We have now the professionalism to make it happen. We have the support of supervisory board. We'll act obviously in the years to come, but I don't want to commit neither on percentage or timing.
Thank you.
Good morning. It's Guillaume Delmas from UBS. Two questions for me. The first one on the white space initiatives. It's often a double-edged sword in that there's a short-term boost to top line, and then eventually things unravel and could end up in a profit warnings. I mean, Beiersdorf experienced this in 2007, 2009. My question is, what gives you confidence that this time around this is not gonna happen, that it's not gonna be the typical cycle of SKU expansion followed by some rationalization, and that because it's quite expensive to fund this white space initiatives, you're not gonna end up underfunding your core business?
No, I mean, it's. Just look at the recent past. You know, we created NIVEA face care in Brazil, and we financed that within the P&L of Brazil and emerging market, and we didn't do any profit warning. Launching Eucerin Sun in the U.S. is not a walk in the park. It's a huge investment. We are financing that with the P&L of Derma, and you didn't see any profit warning. The thing we are doing, which I think is a pragmatic approach, is what we did on Derma, and Patrick was alluding to that.
When we are not sure of succeeding immediately, because we had the track record, which was not that successful, we said, "Okay, in Brazil, we're gonna focus on Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, 50% of the market, but at least it's a reduced area. If it works, we expand." In China, we don't go offline. We go only online, and we go only with Tmall, and then because it worked, we open to jd.com and to other partners. We are doing that in a wise way, being sure that we don't burn money before being sure that we have a winning proposal. We feel pretty secure, not only in what we are doing now, but also the project I was mentioning, for example, NIVEA face in India.
My second question is on the margin guidance you provided for 2023 onwards. Why would you provide a margin guidance? Because it seemed the last time Beiersdorf did it in 2019, you ended up withdrawing the margin target, almost regretting it. Again, why this time around it's not gonna curtail necessarily your P&L flexibility, particularly, you know, against an incredibly volatile, unpredictable backdrop? Like, doesn't it put Beiersdorf at a competitive disadvantage to have this ambitious margin guidance? Also internally, doesn't it confuse a little bit your employees? Is it about top-line expansion, aggressive white space, or is it about significant margin improvement?
I think it's a great question. I think we perhaps three months ago would have been not in a position to give such a guidance because there were still big question marks. One of them being, the lockdown in China impacted NIVEA, but even more La Prairie. Also the ability of NIVEA particularly to sustain an extremely dramatic price increase. Many of you were doubtful about the ability of the value for money NIVEA to be able to sustain a price increase. We can today say positively, and you will see also in your Q2, that we are ticking the box. We are able to compensate or to recover from lockdown in China.
We see today in emerging market over the last six months and in Europe over the last two months, that we are able to go through a price increase, first thing. Second thing, the dynamics of the business. We are coming to a moment when Derma is profit accretive. We are coming to a moment when emerging market are becoming also very positive in terms not only of top line, but also on bottom line. We are also coming at the moment when you develop NIVEA skincare, more NIVEA skincare than NIVEA personal care, you have a big difference in terms of gross margin. We are coming at a moment when moving the factory of Coppertone from Cleveland to Mexico has also a huge effect on the profitability.
We are so willing, and that's a common objective of the board, to be much more daring in terms of looking at efficiency. I mentioned the case of digital media, but I'm also clearly having in mind the people, you know, the head count. You know, the fact that in some areas we have been growing head count without challenging really the need of having an increase in head count in region, in Beyond Blue, in headquarters. All of that is making us feel not only safe or not safe, but safer, but also committed to make it happen and to go to a level of profitability, which is the profitability we should reach knowing the size of Beiersdorf and the business in which we are.
This is why we feel today this is the right moment, and this is why also we wanted to have this capital market day to make a commitment in front of you with a new board of Beiersdorf, with also the support of the supervisory board, to commit in front of you in this direction.
Okay, we have an early hand here also. Exactly. Two early hands here. Thanks.
Good morning. Good morning. Bruno Monteyne from Bernstein. A bit similar going back in history and trying to understand what went wrong before we give credibility to the new promises. You sort of admitted to being quite slow in a few different things, whether it was China or sort of e-commerce, Precision Marketing, premiumizing NIVEA. There were quite a few transitions you missed. Understand you're fixing them today, but there's gonna be new opportunities, new things changing. What was wrong at Beiersdorf, culturally or structurally, and how are you dealing with that kind of probably cultural lack of capability to give us more confidence that the next transitions you'll be ready for them?
That's a great question, Bruno. Let me give you a few answers. What I feel also being in the company since already six years. I think what happened in the last years was perhaps too much decentralization, too much localization, too much local choices at the expense of the global dynamics of the brand. This was clearly the case on Beyond, and I fixed that already five years ago, and we are fixing that on NIVEA, having a much stronger drive and a much stronger also top-down approach. I think also we were not daring enough. I think the example of white spaces is a good example. We could have indeed attacked those big market that Patrick was describing a long time ago. The competitor, you know very well, did that 20 years ago.
We did it, but we didn't do it really well, and then we decided to exit before really proving that we could do a better job. I think we would have been either both more daring and also more patient because you don't enter a market like that. Coming back to your comment, we lose money when you enter a new country, you don't make money immediately. So I would say it's a mix of being too much decentralized and being not daring enough in terms of big bets. This is something, by the way, the supervisory board is pushing us to bet. You know, when I took over Beyond, I was clearly asked, you know, to invest, to put money on Derma.
Europe financed, in fact, the growth of Derma because we created a full infrastructure, and you see today the results. This is why I think today that we have proven that it was working and we feel more stronger, we feel more daring in our ability to run the extra mile.
Sir, if I follow up on that. If it's a lack of being daring, that can be like a cultural trait, how are you thinking about your incentive schemes and, you know, the objectives of your teams to make sure they remain daring? Actually thinking back about that margin, 50 basis points a year, could that be actually limiting their willingness to be daring because they got a big margin target around their head?
No, I think first, you know, the way we are incentivized as a team, there is a mix. In fact, you have two packages. One is about the transformation of the company and the ability to deliver against these four big pillars I was mentioning, to win in skincare, win in white space, sustainability and digital. If we deliver against this transformation objective, then you have the usual, you know, KPIs about net sales, EBIT and market share. That's the way we address. Profit is part of that, and growth is part of that.
I think we have the good mix of being not too much short-term minded, because again, if we miss the C.A.R.E.+ transformation, we have zero bonus after, even if we triple the growth rate versus what was expected. Also the fact that we are incentivized in growing the top line and the bottom line. I think that's a good system. That's the LTI until 2024. After we discuss about the years to follow. They are consistent also with the commitment I was making.
Yeah. Sorry, this is my last one, but I'm gonna stick with capability. You know, the previous person asked about, you know, talked about the previous margin history. I mean, you had two margin resets, but what was remarkable for me was that the justification for the second one was identical to the first one, and nobody ever explained why you needed to do a second reset for exactly the same reasons. That ought to at least show a lack of capability and finance planning, you know, whatever it is within the company. Again, what are you changing to that capability? Because if they, you know, if they could be twice wrong, and how much better is the capability to give us any confidence in that 50 basis points per year?
Bruno, you know, we are always smarter after, so it's also easy to criticize what was the reason why, you know, things were decided before. I clearly believe there are areas we underestimated. I think we were perhaps too late or too slow understanding the fantastic dynamics of e-commerce. I'm very happy that despite the fact that we perhaps started six years after the other big guy, we are now only two years late. Which in a way prove, Grita will also share some good news in terms of recruitment that will show you also that we are willing to accelerate in this area. There are other areas where perhaps we didn't have indeed the right capabilities in the country. I mean, we mentioned Coppertone.
At the moment where we integrated Coppertone, we didn't have the right capabilities in the U.S., and we learned the lesson. Now when we integrated Chantecaille, we took the best people, not only of La Prairie, but also of Beiersdorf, together with the Chantecaille family in order to succeed in the post-merger integration. Yeah, it's a mix of capabilities and also perhaps in some areas, yes, a lack of flair, you know, lack of understanding that something was happening.
Thank you.
Can we go to Harold down here?
No.
Sorry.
Jeremy Fialko, HSBC. Two questions from me. First one is on W630. It seems like this is the basis for really quite a lot of the innovations you've given the data on the kind of the growth of the products behind that brand. The question is, to what extent do you think you're perhaps almost like a little bit over-reliance on this sort of, I don't know, one ingredient for a lot of your innovations?
What sort of confidence can you give us that there are other similar sort of breakthroughs kind of coming down the pipeline so that you've got a little bit more of a sort of suite of ingredients that you can use rather than this one thing which does seem to be the base of a lot of your innovation at the moment. The second question is just a clarification on La Prairie. You spoke about reducing the weight of China within the sales. Is that implying that you think that actually the ex-China business can grow quicker than the China business over the medium term? Just to clarify that, please. Thanks.
I will answer the first question. Patrick will take the second one. You know, the magic of W630, just to make it a very simple story, it's about difference of pigments. So different pigments just when on the screen you have different colors. So might be linked to just, yes, hyperpigmentation. This is the what, for example, Eucerin is claiming. Might be also age spots, might be acne marks. So everything which has, you know, these different of coloration of the skin, which means that the sky is the limit. This is why also we have. You know, we started the story with Patrick in 2018. We have the already a EUR 250 million business. We have China in 2024, so we are good for the next five, six years.
This is what I was telling the NIVEA team in terms of success story to build on W630. Are we working on other W630? Yes, absolutely. This is also why we now have also updated our R&D strategy. We are not only working internally here in Hamburg, just above us, but also there is obviously the fact that we have R&D Shanghai, R&D New Jersey. Now they have the mandate also to work on that, and we are also developing much stronger. Again, we know perhaps we are a bit not enough open, but open innovation. We are working with partners in Asia, also in Germany, in order to detect the next W630. Message is, we have a lot to do with W630. Second, yes, there are some things coming.
I mean, you know also the way it works, some of them will work, some other will not work. We have some, a good reservoir, a good reserve of launches for the years to come. On La Prairie?
Yeah. So what we really want to do is, as I, you know, explained in my last slide, is to reduce the reliance on the Chinese consumers. You know that a lot of countries in the world, you know, be it North America or Europe mainly were relying on the Chinese consumers in order to do their sales. What we want to do is to really make sure that the local teams in Europe and North America are primarily focusing on the local clients to build a solid, stable base in their countries. I've just shown the numbers, you know, on North America where we grow year to date by 30%, which is clearly faster than the pace we are currently having in China. We truly believe that we can replicate this in many European countries.
I will not go into more details, you know, but we still have a lot of white spots as well in the world. However, there is a fact, as you have seen, 40% of the global premium skincare market is China, and this, you know, we will definitely continue to explore the opportunities of the Chinese market. I just gave the example as well of the high-net-worth individual versus the number of clients we currently have. We will continue to explore in parallel, but clearly we want a special focus on the local clients in Europe and North America to reduce this reliance, you know, on the Chinese clients.
Thank you. Yeah. Harold Thompson from Ash Park Capital. Couple of questions. The first one is on structure. I think, you know, there's an underlying current here where focus leads to better results, bigger, fewer ideas and so on and so forth. If I look at Grita on NIVEA, it's pretty clear that, you know, you said it's all about the brand. There's a brand leader, it's not just a CMO, it's about everything. Your other brands, you know, Eucerin, La Prairie, and so on are also very important. I wonder whether it's Vincent or Patrick, whether it actually would make sense to have two separate leaders running the Derma business.
I mean, you said, "I need a pause, a breath before I go from La Prairie to Eucerin." Does it make sense for those two to be really run together? Should it be separate? Would it not make your M&A integration and so on and so forth easier if that's gonna carry on? Just a structure. Why is La Prairie and Eucerin still in bed together? The second one is on NIVEA. Clearly you've shown the product mix. You know, there's the skincare, there's the more personal care part of the portfolio. I think it's 55%, 45% or something like that anyway. But how do you de-emphasize the personal care bit? I know de-emphasize might be the wrong word. Or how do you not kill the personal care bit whilst putting all the efforts?
'Cause often what happens is you do really well on the bit you're focused on, but the bit you're not focused on falls even faster than you ever thought. Net-net, you don't go anywhere.
Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's kind of a big consumer goods company question really.
Yeah. On the first question, this is clearly what we would like to do. The moment when I can fill the position of Patrick and have a big head of Derma, a big head of luxury.
Thank you.
A big head of NIVEA, that would mean that we'll have built a portfolio. I will not do that only with one brand in derma, one brand in luxury, one brand in skincare. Yes, absolutely. I think the concept of Beyond should disappear one day because these brands are no longer just Beyond Blue. They are. They have their own autonomy. Yes, we are starting with La Prairie and Chantecaille. We have today two premium skincare brand. We have also some projects on derma, so that we will go in this direction hopefully, depending also our ability to extend the portfolio. On the second point, it's a very good question, and it's very important to realize. Allow me to perhaps make a difference within personal care.
I see a difference between deodorants, which is today our number one penetration tool, especially in emerging market, where we've been able also to develop the right industrial tool. You know, we have huge factories in Brazil. We are also opening a huge factory in Leipzig, you know. We have mass, we have critical mass, we have ability to produce, to have the right ICPs, and we are winning in the market on deodorants. Here it's a question of allocating the right amount of money. It's perhaps more promotional than advertising in terms of mix, but we want to develop this business.
The other business are much less strategic. Shower is not a strategic business for Beiersdorf. Hair care is not a strategic business for Beiersdorf. You know, we have some. Positions in some countries, and Germany for example, for hair care, also for shower. This is not something where we want. We have an ability to win. We don't have a unique, you know, innovation story. We are not big enough. We will clearly privilege, you know, the profitability versus the growth in order to be sure that we invest on the right platforms. That's absolutely clear.
Just a tiny follow-up for Patrick on Eucerin and Aquaphor. You talked a lot about Eucerin. How does Aquaphor fit, whether it's in the U.S. story or, you know, in your derma portfolio? How is it blurred between the two with Eucerin?
Right. First, these are two distinctive brands. Clearly, we have the Eucerin brand and the Aquaphor brand. They both play into the dermocosmetic field, and they have their own identity, if you want, playing, you know, in slightly different segment of the market. A little bit like, I don't know, maybe, you want to.
No, in fact, you know, it's. I tried something, and I'm not totally happy with what I did. I tried to also play Aquaphor as a sub-range of Eucerin. When you go to a French or German or British, you know, retailer, you will see a sub-range Aquaphor under the name Eucerin. It's okay-ish, but I think we can do much better on Aquaphor outside the U.S. It's flying in the U.S., great. It's okay-ish in the rest of the world. I'm sure there is a story that we can build behind Aquaphor as a unique brand also outside the U.S.
It's a bit confused.
Sorry?
It's a bit confused.
Yeah. It's a bit confusing. Yeah.
This I cannot say in front of my CEO.
It's just because the promise that Aquaphor was offering could be fitting with Eucerin, but it's not a huge success so far, so we can do better.
Mm-hmm.
I think we can still take one or two questions.
Yeah, yeah.
on what we just saw. NIVEA actually, Harold, is still to come, but yeah. Do we have any early hands we should take now?
We have Celine.
I see Celine. I see Ian. Yeah.
Thanks, thanks very much. A couple of questions. I mean, you know, I guess with your shares up 7% since you've started speaking, people have taken their own view on what you had to say about top line this year. Longer term, you talked about growing top line ahead of the market. Would you care to give any sort of indication as to how much outperformance we're talking here or what the medium-term expectation of your category growth is? Because, you know, we spent quite a lot of time on margin, but longer term, it ultimately tends to be top line growth that creates value and perhaps anything more you could say on that would be useful. Secondly, Chantecaille, could you just at a high level tell us what would success look like?
You know, three years from now, you're standing up on the stage, you're telling us what you've done with Chantecaille, what would you like to be able to say? Then perhaps just lastly, sticking with the M&A theme, you know, for many years, previous Beiersdorf management teams talked up the scope for M&A to create value, but they never actually did any M&A. After kind of over a decade of that, we've now seen two, you know, reasonable-sized bolt-ons in recent years. What's changed? Is it just that the asset availability wasn't there before? Or, you know, you're more able to make that strategic case to the supervisory board? Any insight would be welcome. Thank you.
On the third point, sorry, I missed it. You're talking about M&A, huh?
Yes. For many years, we had Beiersdorf management say that they've got great M&A opportunities to create value and then no M&A ever happened. We heard that for over a decade, and you're actually doing M&A rather than talking about it. I'd be interested to hear what's changed there.
The question on Chantecaille. Clearly, you know, first of all, when we acquired Chantecaille is because we truly believe it has a tremendous potential. It has a beautiful positioning. It's a brand in the mainstream, if you want, you know, also expressing a true belief in values, you know, like protection of the wildlife, clean beauty, botanical ingredients, and so forth. It's a brand that has been extremely well managed, I have to say, but still, you know, with very small capabilities and capacities.
Mm-hmm.
They expand the distribution very carefully. They have today a very curated distribution, mainly in North America, a little bit in Asia, and only one or two other markets. The window of opportunity we have with this brand, thanks to the experience we have with the La Prairie brand or, you know, within Beiersdorf in different aspects, is enormous. Leveraging the structure, leveraging the capacity, leveraging the know-how we have in the selective market, we are convinced that we can bring this brand, you know, to a new level in the coming two, three years.
We will do this step by step, like we did with La Prairie, and I would like to draw this parallel with La Prairie, where we build the business step by step, you know, having in mind, you know, what we want to deliver on the long term. Allow me not to disclose everything, but you know, we are only, if you take the footprint, just take the geographical footprint. We're only in five, six markets with the Chantecaille brand, but we know that people are looking for this brand. They are willing to buy this brand.
Mm-hmm.
It will be a question of expanding. It will be a question, you know, of giving the capacities to structure maybe some of the functions like supply chain, like R&D, and so forth. A lot of potential.
On your first and third question. First question, I don't want to give you guidance per brand, you know, just the forecast today. The beauty market is growing 4%, 5%. This is on average, you know, what we have in mind what happened. You have pluses and minuses depending on, obviously, COVID. We want to do more than that. Simple, you know? After, in the portfolio, obviously, I'm expecting more from Chantecaille and Derma than local brands in Germany. Overall, we believe that we will overperform the two CCUs objective. On your third question, you're right. I mean, I think we censored ourselves, you know, because of this Chinese acquisition. Well, in the last three years, we bought Coppertone, we bought Chantecaille. Just watch us, you know.
Just see if we are able to walk the talk, if we are able also as a team to convince the supervisory board and our shareholders that we have the capabilities. Come back to your question about the capabilities to integrate. We believe we do, but the jury's out. The way we're gonna drive, you know, the business not only of Coppertone, but Chantecaille, we'll prove it to you, but also prove to our supervisory board that, yes, we have the brain and the muscles, you know, to make it happen.
Thank you.
Let's have the last questions now on.
Celine
in this round. Celine?
Yeah, Celine Pannuti, JP Morgan. I want to come back on the first question, on the top line. You said the market is 4%-5%. If I think about Beiersdorf over the past decade, it probably has struggled to even do 2%-5%. You know, I think you have quite a big exposure to mass market. Is it really 4%-5%, your exposure? Because you're not exposed necessarily to the more premium end of the beauty market. Let's say only in a small part. I just wanted to understand that, and why you didn't choose to specify for your team as when internally a growth target, while you choose to specify a margin target. On the margin, that's my second question. Is M&A included in margin?
What happens if there is a dilutive M&A? That's a small one. Maybe more for 2022, you continue to say a slight improvement in the consumer margin. I understand that the mix is a big impact, and La Prairie is not gonna do well, at least in Q2. How shall we think about that? Maybe is it H2 recovery that you expect? Will there be an imbalance in the margin in the two halves? Thank you.
No, on your first comment, I think it was on the slide and in my picture. We clearly, it's about growth. It's about the obvious growth that you know already, which is the growth of Derma, of La Prairie, and soon Chantecaille. It's also clearly about NIVEA. I think one of you also in this paper mentioned the fact that was at the moment when we, NIVEA grew, that suddenly the share price doubled. The Q1 results of NIVEA was very good. The last year results was very good. Let's see the Q2. Clearly, this brand, if we focus on the right categories, on the right geographies, is able to overperform their own market. We have to show you that.
That was the first question. The second question was?
The margin drivers, right?
Margin driver. To be honest, it's much more pricing. You know, this also where, you know, as Churchill used to say, a crisis is always an opportunity. You have to use a crisis. We never been so bold into price increases. This is the first time ever we are bold in price increase, not only in emerging market, which was used to be the case always, but also in Europe and North America. Oswald has been extremely strongly pushing his country to increase prices. The results are there. We are increasing prices in a way which has never, ever happened in, on Beiersdorf. The good news is also that we are not losing any sellout. On the contrary, we grow in unit and itself.
Today, yes, you're right, in terms of mix, it's less than expected because of the Q2 of La Prairie. Thanks to the valorization we are doing on NIVEA and Eucerin, we feel comfortable with this slight increase in EBIT. I would say number one, by far pricing, number two, mix, and number three, efficiency. That would be the key triad, you know?
Okay. Well, this concludes the first round of Q&A. Thank you very much. I'm going to invite you to a little coffee break now. I would say we should be back five to one and then resume the session. Thank you.
Thank you.
Now we go. Okay. Welcome back to our second round of presentations. We're starting it with Grita Loebsack, in charge of NIVEA in our executive board. Grita joined Beiersdorf actually at the beginning of this year, returning to her home country after having worked in the U.K. and France for Unilever and L'Oréal, also in skincare. Today, Grita will speak about NIVEA, our biggest brand, obviously, and I'm excited to hear from her where we are with NIVEA and actually where are we going to go. Please go ahead.
Okay. So here we are. Good afternoon, everyone. Very excited to be here and to be sharing with you a little bit our ambition on the NIVEA brand. I think Vincent already alluded to it quite a lot at the beginning. Yes, really happy to be here. Oswald will speak about Europe and North America. What I'm gonna take you through today is two parts. One is to reiterate that we are skincare and that we're going to continue focusing on skincare. I liked some of the questions on personal care, but, you know, maybe in the Q&A we can talk about it because, of course, it is also a very important part of the brand and we're not going to neglect it. The second point is about globalizing and modernizing the NIVEA brand.
You know, I think of it sometimes a little bit as a sleeping beauty, this NIVEA brand. I think, again, Vincent has already talked about it a lot, but I think we realize and we recognize that we have still lots of potential. We are skincare, and just I got very inspired by what Patrick said, that, you know, La Prairie was a luxury brand that happened to be in skincare. What I want you to think about when you think about the NIVEA brand is that we're not just another skincare brand, we're actually an icon. You look at this tin, this beautiful blue tin, and it is an icon. It immediately stands for something. I would invite you to think about which other icons in the industry there are, but there are a few, but they're actually not that many.
I remember sitting in another room in another country working for another company when NIVEA came out with this blue agenda and talking about the round logo and putting it on every single item of our packaging. I remember thinking, "My God, that is genius," right? What I want you to think about is NIVEA is the iconic skincare brand. We're not just created, we're not just from the company who created modern skincare, Vincent has mentioned it, but certainly something that has inspired me a lot. Then if you look through our history, and the idea is not here to go through or take you through the archives, although if you're ever interested, Vincent, as I was thinking about joining, him and the company, took me into the archives of the company and it's absolutely, I mean, unbelievable.
Because every single time we started a product, we actually very often open an entire category. Okay? We invented the lip care with Labello, which means beautiful lips, of course. We were the first to start a body lotion, which was just taking the idea of the iconic cream, making it more liquid, and then putting it all over your skin. We invented sun care with the first oil that protected you from the sun, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not gonna bore you through all of it. The first aftershave balm for men, which opened NIVEA MEN, and it's, you know, a very big brand right now. We also started personal care.
When we started the first deodorant, it was effective, yet mild and gentle to the skin because as you know, a deodorant very often irritate or can irritate your skin. There was a real sweet spot that the NIVEA brand found in doing deodorants that are skin-caring and skin-loving. We opened Vital, which was, you know, absolutely unheard of at the time to target women of mature skin, you know, with a model that had gray hair, very short hair. This was in the 1990s. Absolutely astonishing success.
NIVEA Soft in 1994, we're gonna talk about it again, you know, with the claim, "As fresh as the summer rain." I mean, that still rings true today in India, anywhere around the world, and our biggest challenge and opportunity today is to make sure that product that we created in 1994 is as relevant to my 15-year-old daughter as it was when it was first launched. Then Q10. Here in this auditorium a few weeks ago, there were more than 200 scientists gathering about the Q10 advances. This is not just another anti-wrinkle cream, it's actually real solid science. To all of your questions, are we just putting too much on W630? Yes, W630 is very important and we're going to double and continuing, but we also have some other really, really strong assets.
Black & White, I mean, of course, I need to mention Black & White. You know, a first deodorant that protected against the white and the yellow stains. Really finding a, you know, again, a sweet spot in a skin-caring way, and that's still true today. I think, you know, the NIVEA brand, the NIVEA company, has a track record of really strong innovations, and they really were successful when they found a sweet spot, and it is always about skincare. We will continue focusing on skincare. Skincare is, of course, a very important part, and we can still double, of course, where we are in face care in particular. I think Vincent, again, alluded to it earlier on.
If you think about where we came from, I mean, NIVEA was always a face care company, but I think maybe in the past at one point we got a little distracted from that opportunity. I think now we're very clear that it is an absolute key priority, but we're not going to neglect, of course, all the other skincare categories where we're very, very strong. We want to increase global innovations. I think a lot was already said. The LUMINOUS success is showing that it's possible. It's selling, you know, at a very high premium to the rest of our range. Yes, we're gonna be obsessed about innovation. We will double innovation as related to sales, but we will also support the core. Some of the blockbusters that I've just shared with you now are still very, very strong, and we need to make them future-ready.
We need to make them, you know, give them to the younger generations and make them more sustainable. Also here, I think we're taking really strong strides that are going to change probably the name of the game. We will seize opportunities. Again, it was already discussed, China is an obvious one, the U.S., India, and Brazil. Today, if you think about it, we're missing some key markets, of course, where the brand is still very small. So this, of course, fills me with a lot of joy and optimism because we have room for growth. Again, I'm here to manage with the team the NIVEA brand as a global brand with everything that that means. Of course, speeding up the digital agenda, again, a lot was talked about already, and a lot was already done, in fairness.
In Germany, we have a really cutting-edge team there, in emerging markets as well, but we're not yet playing it at a global level. Of course, in order to make more bang for our buck, we need to become more of a global player there as well. Our performance is accelerating, and particularly in skincare. You see on the left the MAT. You see that we're significantly outperforming the market in year-to-date also. Vincent has already alluded to it. The latest April figures were just shared with us last night, and I'm very happy and proud to say that our MAT at April is the highest it's been in three years. Really strong. Also another really important point on skincare, we have a very high share in the month of April.
The third thing I wanna say is that we're growing both in volume and in value, which is obviously absolutely key to not just be growing the value, but we're also growing in volume. The markets are of course coming back, but very importantly, we are winning share. Not just at a global level, but also in every single region in the world. Of course, the market shares are very different in parts of the world, but we really are seeing a great picture and it's accelerating as we speak. You see the last month was actually the highest growth share that we've had versus the year-to-date picture and the MAT. What's been the remedy or the secret sauce of our success? We have been growing our skincare in particular.
Here, in order to also share with you know, this is not just a COVID phenomenon, so you really see the comparison to 2019. Face care up 21%, the body, where we are number one, +23%. Sun, yes, we are at the pre-COVID level, which I think is a pretty phenomenal result given, of course, how susceptible the sun category is to travel. Year to date, May, we're at +30% versus last year in sun care. You know, I'm not answering the question here, but here you also see that it is by having a really strong skincare brand that we're probably also outperforming in some of the other categories. In face care, you've heard it, but this is really just the beginning. LUMINOUS is the number one serum in Europe.
It's our best-selling face SKU in the catalog, and we have some big other blockbusters. I think there were quite a few questions in your papers as, "Can NIVEA really sustain such a high price point?" I think we're proving here that we can. The serum is retailing at around EUR 23, which is 2.3 x more expensive than a Q10, or versus an average moisturizer that's at EUR 3 or EUR 4. I really think with the right proposition, with the right, of course, ingredients, I think we're really proving that we can. We will continue, so there's still many, many things we can do. If you think about it, I think we shared it earlier, the Eucerin brand today is making more sales with W630.
We really believe on LUMINOUS, we still have a lot of room for growth. We will have more launches also next year. Another really important pillar is Q10. Q10 invented it sort of working with your own skin. Q10 is a coenzyme, which is why there's still so much scientific excitement also around this ingredient. I mention it here in this room, we had more than 200 scientists that come to us talking about an ingredient that is also part of our franchise. We are the number one anti-wrinkle brand. Q10 will also really be, and is today, our largest share in face care. It's still our pillar, and really, really important.
We need to, of course, continue innovations there, and we're coming in with a very exciting premium product within the Q10 range later this year, and we're also making it future-ready. Another example, because also you asked the question, we have also Cellular, which is premium to Q10, and is also talking about advanced skin science for younger-looking skin, of course. Here, really very encouraging also with cleaner formulations. I want to say here, our R&D teams are really at the forefront of trialing out and making new formulations that are still absolutely amazing on the sensory. Some of them, and some of you who are visiting and using, hopefully, a lot of our products, I hope you get to try some later on.
They're really amazing, and they have, you know, formulated out microplastics and silicones and some of the critical UV filters. This is really, I would say, a heartland and something that this team really is very good at. This was on face care, but of course not forgetting the body. Body is a really important category because, of course, it drives penetration. When you use a body cream all over your skin, there's also an emotional connection that you make to the brand. Here again, you know, I think we've been showing and really seeing that we're continuously growing the blockbusters. You know, the three products you see here in the middle of the slide, we are, you know, more than twice the next brand in this market.
We also want to make sure that, of course, we're appealing and we're out in social media and everywhere. We've been really growing over the last years our core. We will not stop there, so we're coming up with a new relaunch later this year. This will always be absolutely core in making sure, you know, because this drives the penetration, the love, and the trust that this brand has. We need to, of course, make sure that it's always front of mind and really everywhere in the world. Sun, I mentioned it before. I mean, absolutely astonishing how NIVEA Sun is continuing to really lead the way. Also now growing in face care categories within sun, which is obviously huge growth of opportunity, maximizing the core, and also really driving sustainability.
I mentioned some of these critical UV filters, and I really would say here we're absolutely at the forefront and very, very competitive. We also know that the sun, the sun category drives trust, proximity, and real skincare expertise. Absolutely key for us. This was on, you know, continuous thing, focusing on skincare. Now, you know, some first observations, how will we globalize this brand and modernize the brand? Just a glimpse, you know, in the 15 minutes that I still have left with you. You know, we are absolutely first in consumer's mind, in 12 out of the 15 markets where we measure it. You know, of course, in times of crisis, you know, you could say this is absolutely, you know, awareness is everything.
Not just awareness, when you look at what are our key attributes that we're famous for, are the ones that are nourishing, you know, from the core of the brand. It's protecting the skin, trusted brand. We are for everyone and products for the whole family, and usually very high up is also the value for money, that comes in. So really strong trust drivers, which also, if you think about it, the crisis volatility, you know, prices going up, people will go back to the brands that they trust and that they love. We are, according to Kantar, also the most chosen skincare brand worldwide. On the opportunity, I think we see very clearly, you know, in terms of awareness and purchase, that we over-index on the 35-year-old plus.
We have room for improvement and opportunity in making sure that the younger generation also adopts the NIVEA brand. We will do that with our core products, but also of course with, you know, bespoke initiatives. It's absolutely key, and we already know that, you know, skincare is in. People are talking about skincare. Skincare is a topic that interests the younger generations. With the digital transformation that we will embark on, we really believe that we can sort of pump up the volume a little bit on this brand while making sure, you know, that we still stay, of course, trusted. We are very strong where we play.
I mean, these are the categories that we play in, and you see that, you know, in six out of eight, we have number one positions, and you can see that we still have opportunities of growth, of course, in face care and face cleansing. Our clear objective there is also to ultimately become the number one brand. Very important to say, of course, where we're playing, we already hold very strong positions, including in some of the personal care categories. I think this is where probably the beauty of the NIVEA model is because of the very strong skincare brand and equity. We're also able to, of course, be relevant big brands in some of the other categories. Moving ahead.
One of the, you know, and Vincent said it in the beginning, I think at one point, you know, NIVEA was not really managed as a sort of global brand. Had many great initiatives around the world. You know, one of my first findings, and I guess, you know, was coming into this job, is when I looked at, you know, the NIVEAs around the world, you see a real fruit salad. I mean, call it however you want to call it. The only unifying thing in all of these products that you see on the screen is really the round NIVEA logo, right? There was really something that, you know, I would argue and we will see is, you know, not yet that consistent brand equity look and feel that we want.
That's true for the packaging, that was true for the communication, and that was true for many, many things. These are one of the things that we really want to step change now by making it more global, by of course, also increasing thereby the size of the price of each of these initiatives, but also by thereby increasing, of course, the brand consistency and the non-working. This is what we want it to look like tomorrow. You know, we will work on a more consistent look and feel, make sure that we are in each category playing the games of, or the name of the game, but making sure that the brand stays consistent and that there is a real global look and feel, not just in the packaging but also in the communication of the brand.
That also goes to making fewer campaigns. You know, we had so many different campaigns around the world because each region, each country could really, in a way, reinvent its wheel. Vincent had said it before, you know, it was very often also because the global team were not necessarily giving, you know, the countries all the means that they needed. You know, I would argue, and we're seeing it, there was an inefficiency in the system. That's something we're changing now. It's part of our transformation that the company has embarked on. We have very clear KPIs, how to test the campaign, how to make it happen. Of course, that will give us more muscle and more weight in the market.
We're reducing the number of campaigns, and that's before, of course, and integrated into each of these campaigns are, of course, the Precision Marketing ones. We want to make them better, so on time in full, we test them in key markets to make sure that also, you know, whatever we are producing is relevant. From before 20 assets, you know, now a global asset is 70 assets. Meaning also, of course, we can go full force, full focus, and also make sure that there is a link between the categories. Because sometimes when you looked at, you know, communication from one piece of the brand, it looked very different on another one. We want to double, of course, the size of each of the products that we also advertise. Really going for much more impact for the brand.
That's sort of on the fewer, better and bigger. The digital priority. Don't worry, I'm not gonna talk about all of these. We alluded to them a lot already. First and foremost is mastering Precision Marketing at scale. I mentioned before we had pockets of excellence already in many, many markets, but we were not working as a global team. Of course, if you do Precision Marketing in the right way, you need to, A, have the data. They need to be connected to the same bricks. They need to work in full, sort of together. Then making sure that everything that we produce, of course, does not get produced 20 times, but only once, and then you adapt it around the globe. That's number one.
We want, you know, 80% of our digital marketing to be precision marketing, and we will increase the weight of digital marketing every year. That's point number one. Point number two is, of course, winning those consumer connections. I mentioned to you before, skin is in. People are talking about skin. We today do not have our fair share on the skin conversation. For that, we need to work with influencers to have regionally relevant influencers global, and we're aiming to have around 25 million of these influencers around the world. We want to outperform eCom. We also see all the C.A.R.E.+ strategy, and we've seen we doubled the eCom already.
It's also a great platform because, of course, when you're visible on Amazon and you have the right marketing tools that are there, you know, we can also leverage on that. We want to build a true digital marketing function, you know, because also our marketeers are asking for that. That's the absolute key, and on that, I have some news to share. Of course, data, first-party data. We actually have a really great example of a German initiative of how we do that, which is something we want to do everywhere. Very happy to share with you today that we have a new member joining our team, Axel Adida, who is joining us on the 1st of July, so he's not even here yet. He will be the Chief Digital Officer reporting to me.
He will bring with him, of course, a huge wealth of experience, having done something similar somewhere in France, where he did exactly that job a few years ago, where he was part of that team and really led the whole Precision Marketing initiative. Then once it was done, it was obviously handed over to the brands and to the regions. Axel will be joining us on the 1st of July and is moving to Hamburg with his family and his four kids, who are all super excited to come to Hamburg. We're really super excited to have him and to bring outside talent in when it is justified in order to help us transform, of course, that digital marketing powerhouse that we want it to be. Here are just some examples of these.
I mean, I think it was quite similar to the example that Vincent already shared. We do it, of course, on our big innovations, but not only. We also do it on Soft. You know, I keep talking about Soft. I mean, if you're ever short for a great moisturizer, use Soft. It's unbelievable. I always tell the story that my husband, who accompanied me throughout many years of me having worked in different industries, always went back to Soft whenever he was allowed. So now he's super happy. He's allowed to use Soft and is using it. You know, people put it even on their hair. This is the beauty, of course, you know, of a great moisturizer.
You know, it's once you start pushing that, this is where I say you can really pump up the volume because the products are there. You just need to modernize a little bit the way you talk about them, but they're as relevant today as they were when they were first launched. That's just another example. Another really exciting example is first-party data. We all know that's what we need, of course, in the world without cookies, so everybody is working on it. I just wanted to share one example that I think is really relevant. It's the Skinly. It's a measurement with which R&D, it's actually made out of this team here, which measures your skin data. We have 450 million data points, which is giving us a lot of tech and information.
That piece of information was then used to create a SKIN GUIDE app. You're gonna say that there are lots of people who have skin guide apps, but this one was based on the measurements of these 450 million data points that we have. Here we're rolling the skin app out. What's in it for the consumer? You get immediate advice. You know, you take a selfie. We have now more than 702 million already uploaded. Then you get the routine, and that's, of course, an opportunity for us to get the data, to get to know the consumer. We're interacting with them, and we use that in order to fuel our precision marketing engine around the globe. That's just one example that I wanted to share with you, but there are many others.
Sustainability, again, you know, it's not the obvious one, but it's obvious of course to all of us. We of course need to find a way that there's something in for the consumer. We also know that for the younger generations, this is a must-have, right? Of course, they don't wanna compromise on quality of the experience. Here, this is really hot off the press. We will launch this later this year, is making NIVEA, as we say, future-ready. Soft is one example, where on the formulation, we are taking mineral oils out with only vegetable oils, and that actually gives you better moisturization. Then, you know, this is a vegan formula, which is obviously very important to many younger consumers or many consumers around the world.
That's just one very clear example of how we are renovating our core and making them, as we say, future-ready for the love both of skin and the planet. We don't just do this on our sort of blockbusters. We also do this in the more premium products, which I really think is absolutely a first-mover advantage, at least in the mass market, of having superior formulations. We will never, though, compromise, of course, on the anti-aging benefit or even on the sensories as I mentioned. These are just some examples of what we're doing in order to make NIVEA future-ready. We will also shout about this because I think it's something we can be quite proud of. Of course, we will always, but always under the premise, of course, of making sure that the skin benefits are there.
The key messages, and then I will hand over to Oswald, is we are really sitting on an amazing brand. I mean, this brand has so much potential. I mean, you know, we keep saying the sky's the limit, but truly, I mean, think about it. NIVEA still has so many white spots. You know, China, U.S. we're very small. I mean, if you think about the skincare market, and you know that most of these markets, you know, are still for us to take. We will continue focusing on skin, not just on face, on skin. Of course, we want to grow our market share on face care. We know it's gonna be tough, right? Because there are many people out there.
We feel, of course, that we have, you know, the equity that, you know, most skincare brands would die for. We will continue doing innovations while rejuvenating the core. That's really, really important. We should always talk about both and make sure that both are strong. Seizing some white spots, global brand leadership, increase our marketing effectiveness, because I think as you can hear, we have some room in order to make our marketing more effective and more efficient. Then of course, making NIVEA future-ready. Thank you. I will now hand back over to Jens, and I'll be here of course for the Q&A, and look forward to your questions.
Thank you, Grita. Yeah. Okay. We today so far heard about strategy. We heard about La Prairie, about Derma, about NIVEA. I think it's time to take a different perspective now. In a minute, I'm going to hand over to Oswald Barckhahn. Oswald has previously worked in the U.S., and in Latin America, and in Switzerland for JDE, for PepsiCo, for P&G. He joined Beiersdorf last year. He's in charge of Europe and North America, and that's also the title of his presentation, obviously. I'm looking forward to hearing his view about the regional perspective. Thank you.
Hello, and good afternoon. I joined about six months ago, and my entire family already tells me that I look younger, so my commitment to the company even increased in the last month since joining Vincent and the team. You'll hear two sections from me today. I will give you a deep dive into the European business, and then I will also like to give you a little bit of perspective on North America. For Europe, it's predominantly NIVEA country. Just to give you that perspective, Europe, 90% of the European business is NIVEA when it comes to cosmetics. I want you to keep that in mind as we go through it. You will also see a lot of things coming back that Grita and Vincent alluded to.
As we all know, Mother is the repetition of mastery, so we hope that some messages will land. But super excited to talk about Europe. Why am I excited about talking about Europe? Because Europe, by any means, is the cradle of the company. It's where it all started. This is where the company was founded. This is where the brands were founded. This is the anchor of everything that you have seen today during the presentations. Not surprisingly, obviously, you have a business today in Europe that is phenomenal. It's not only one of the profit strongholds of the company, but it's also an absolute powerhouse when it comes to what it stands for. It's a brand that's penetrated in Europe with 52% penetration according to Kantar. There's only one brand with a higher penetration level in European households, and that's Coca-Cola.
That number is not much higher than that, just to make sure I mention that as well. We obviously are the leading skincare brand in Europe based on market share. We have by far the highest purchase and loyalty data in Europe today. We have the single highest top-of-mind awareness, aided and unaided. When you think about what we call CCUs, which are country category combinations, the crossing of them, out of the 200 biggest country category combinations, we are number one and two in 170 of those. That's actually what we ruthlessly focus on, making sure that we permanently look at how do we become the number one and/or two in the given categories in which we play in.
When it comes to Europe, I would like to mention that we have obviously been looking at this business now since the longest of times, but we have also been making some adjustments in the course of the last few months. This is why we call it revamped strategic priorities to accelerate profitable growth. I will take you through the numbers in the last few years. They have, by any means, not been stellar. There's a few things that we want to course-correct on. The first one is face care, which is something that was already here before. We know that we have a number two position globally.
We also have a number two position in Europe, and we do believe that based on our heritage, based on our equities, and based on our innovation power, we absolutely have the right to become much better at that and aspire for more. Broader skincare is also where we need to win. I do think that it's fair to say that we have deprioritized in the recent past, actually, body, all-purpose creams, and also face and sun to a certain extent. Some of it harmed, obviously, by COVID. This, I think, we're going to be doubling down on, and we're already seeing first results of that. Not necessarily entirely unrelated to this is what we call the core, and I will talk to you about that as well.
That has been something that is not working perfectly well in the past, and this is something we will focus a lot of energy on in the future. To drive the core assets, what Grita mentioned as being the icons of the company, we do think there's a significant upside potential by driving them much harder into the future. Revenue growth management and return on investment focus certainly will be right and center of everything we do, especially and most importantly this year. I don't need to tell you how volatile the world is these days. I don't need to convince you that we need to take pricing and that we need to become much more diligent about how do we manage every single euro we put out there in the market to make sure we get the biggest return.
One area that I will not deep dive today, but just to repeat what Grita said, boosting digital and e-commerce is at the center of everything we do. It's one of the four pivotal parts of our C.A.R.E.+ strategy, and we will make sure that gets executed across the board in every single brand, in every single country. Let me take you back to the growth trajectory of NIVEA in Europe, to my European business today. It's very clear that if you normalize the data of 2017 and you index them with a number of 100, we had 2% growth in 2018, we had 3% growth in 2019. Obviously, we suffered through the losses, mostly driven by COVID, 94 index in 2020, but also only a 96 index in 2021.
The refocused and the sharpened strategies we have put in place very clearly we think are helping us to accelerate the business. If you take a look at the index of Q1 2022, which is on the right side in the middle bar, we're seeing 5% like for like growth versus last year, and we're seeing in higher acceleration even for Q2 right now. Let me take you through some of the nuggets that we believe are working and give us a lot of confidence looking forward. Here again, master of the repetition, face care. Last year in 2021, we were the single biggest driver of growth in the retail channel in Europe. Number one contributor to growth, which is a great selling story to sell to the trade, so our salespeople are very, very happy these days.
We grew the business of NIVEA in face by almost 11% year-over-year. Along those lines, very logically, we have been growing penetration in the largest markets, be it Germany, France, which for the longest time we have not managed to succeed in, Italy, and in Spain. I think you heard a lot about Thiamidol, W630, LUMINOUS. This is a brilliant success story for Europe as well. It is the number one serum in Europe today, which again proves the strength of the proposition. We're selling this at a 5% premium versus the NIVEA anti-age average. Even within our anti-age platform, we managed to establish a price premium here as well. The second very important platform within skincare is body together with all-purpose creams. I would like to focus on the middle of the chart first.
We have clearly made a conscious decision to invest significantly more in the last six months behind those platforms, behind what we call a refreshed engagement model, leveraging everything you heard from Grita when it comes to precision marketing and also getting more and more into social channels that have even more relevance for the younger consumers, like TikTok, for example. The results have been following. In Q1 of 2022 on the left side, you will see that we have the highest ever market share in body in Q1, and the trend continues in Q2, if I may say. We hold by far the number one position in that segment, three times the size of the next competitor.
Equally on the right side of the slide, you will see that on all-purpose creams, which is the classical blue tin cream and our soft proposition, we're also here holding a very strong number one position in the segments and growing a little bit more than 1.5 percentage points versus year ago. Sun, super excited to see the return and the comeback after the COVID hit. You well know that this category is critical for us. We have in 2021 had the strongest sales growth since three years, so we grew by 40%. The one thing that makes us even more excited, though, is that in 2021 we gained yet again two incremental number one positions in two critical markets for us. We gained the number one position in Spain and in France.
Now if you take a look at the top 15 markets in Europe for sun, we're leading in 13 out of the 15 biggest ones. Q1 obviously makes us equally happy. We're seeing that in Q1 2022, we are the number one brand in the segment, two times the size of the next competitor, and expanding our share advantage by 260 basis points as well. To close the loop on skincare, the last one, which is NIVEA MEN, a very, very important platform that I think is very, very close to my heart as well. We're expanding our number one position here, while also making the first entry into owning and growing the face anti-aging segment. Men are clearly lagging women in everything in life, with basically the face care development and anti-aging for decades, I would say.
The time has come now for us to actually establish this segment and actually educate men that they can also look a little bit better than yesterday. Well, you can see that we've been gaining share for the last three years. We grow by about 100 basis points in 2020, by about 50 basis points in 2021, and we're 15 points ahead of the next competitor in terms of market share. I quickly alluded to the growth in anti-aging. We are driving the market. We are helping to create a segment in anti-aging. We grew the market by 9% last year by growing our own business by 25%, and we have a phenomenal pipeline of products that are coming to the market now, but also next year. Obviously, we're leveraging our very strong partnerships. Vincent already talked about the Champions League final.
You saw Real Madrid there, you saw FC Liverpool there, but we also have a collaboration active with Paris Saint-Germain, which we greatly leverage, especially on social media. I would encourage you, if you go actually on the Internet and Google some of the Liverpool videos, phenomenal, great work with an incredible engagement by the teams and the players, by the way. This is not something where we go to the clubs, and we need to beat them up to make sure they do something for us. They have a passion for the brand. It's just phenomenal assets, especially on the Liverpool side. When you have a minute, look at it. Then we have this very charming young man, I wanted to say, because he's my age, but he's not really young. Mr. Jürgen Klopp, who obviously is a very successful soccer coach, also working by coincidence for Liverpool.
He's now basically our spokesperson for NIVEA MEN in Germany as well. He has been following the old coach, Mr. Löw. Very excited about the partnerships as well. This is skincare, and this is why we have so much confidence that we're on the right track, that we have a lot of territory to cover in the future as well. Let me very quickly talk about what I mentioned before, which is called core. This clearly has not been a growth platform for us in the future. Last year, this was negative, and last year, it dragged on our total results, eating up a lot of the innovation work that has been done with the new launches. This is something we need to step change.
When I talk about core, let me tell you what we mean by that. We're talking about 50% of our net sales, and we're talking about all those SKUs that almost have iconic character and have an incredibly high rotation per cumulative weighted distribution point, and for the most part, are margin accretive. What we have done differently in the last couple of months is we have significantly stepped up investment. We have done more efforts in terms of consumer engagement, and we're expanding some things that have been working phenomenally well in some of our markets, namely cross-category activations and conceptual sales in the store that worked phenomenally well for many years in Germany. We're taking the European and expanding that to make sure that we have four to five events in every single store every single year, leveraging our cross-category presence.
We also believe that there's still ample opportunities for us to expand our cumulative weighted distribution for some of the best sellers. We're convinced of that, and that's what we need to drive with ruthless sales execution as well. The results are actually proving that we're not entirely off. We see that actually year to date, we're growing the core by 8%, which again, even underpins even more that the incrementality of innovation can have an even greater impact on our business if we keep the foundation solid. This is the slide where possibly you will have a lot of interest in. This is talking about how on earth are we going to navigate inflation. We're sitting today in a very, very difficult ship to steer. The world is uncertain, volatility is unprecedented, and honestly, nobody even dares to say what's gonna happen tomorrow.
The only thing that is for sure is inflation right now. This is why we have been advancing, and we will continue to advance some of the most aggressive price increases we have done in the recent history in the company. It's unavoidable. I would like to repeat what Vincent said. Early indications after the first round of price increases are showing us that volumes are holding up fairly stable. We're getting more price materialization, and as a result, we're obviously seeing the net sales being very positive. That is clearly helping us. We're also, in all transparency, advancing incremental price increases for the second half. In some markets, we're going for round two, in some markets, we're going for round three.
Obviously, we'll need to see how the market reacts, but we have also been conducting in-house research to try to assess the elasticities we have on our brands. We feel very confident that if there were elasticities to be noticed in the future, which only become relevant if nobody else takes pricing, which will not be the case to start with. We know that we're at the low end of the elasticity curves in the marketplace, which makes us very confident that we will actually go through this and come out much stronger than before. Mix, absolutely essential. Grita, Vincent talked a lot about driving skincare. Skincare is accretive for us.
It is margin accretive, so whatever we do on skincare will help our margin average. On the right side, I really don't want to spend too much time on it, but we're going to be even more ruthless in the future in terms of driving return on investment optimization. Looking at every single budget line and really asking ourselves, are we really getting a return on that? There are two things we're going to protect, marketing budgets and strategic investments in C.A.R.E.+. Just to be very clear, has been mentioned by Vincent, I want to reiterate and when you read the line of budget austerity. We're going to focus even more time, especially today, on promotional spend optimization. Today, our promotional share in Europe is about 30% of the volume is being sold on deal.
That's pretty stable actually for 2021, although the entire market decreased by 0.3 percentage points. We're seeing a slight uptick in promotional activity at the beginning of this year. Very clearly driven first and foremost by the return of some COVID categories that are more promo-intensive, like the odor and shower. Those categories are recovering at a stronger pace from COVID. Secondly, you will also see that some trade partners are investing a little bit more money to make sure that they get some of the traffic they lost to e-commerce players back into their stores as the world reopens again. We do think there will be a normalization, but again, the changes are not big right now.
One thing we're actually establishing for the first time in the company, and we already are through with two markets, with Germany and with the U.K., is the introduction of Commercial Mix Modeling with advanced analytics in our key markets, not only including all of the marketing mix parameters, but also including the sales parameters to make sure that we can really say, where do we get the most return across our brands, across a promotional spend, across a marketing campaign on TV, across a marketing campaign on digital marketing and/or Precision Marketing. We're also going to get a much better understanding of halo effects between campaigns, between brands, and that certainly will give us yet one more step and one more advantage to make sure we can optimize the return on every single dollar. I'm not going to allude more on Precision Marketing and in-flight media optimization.
I think Grita explained it very, very well. Just to summarize Europe very quickly, and I'll try to make it very brief. We are reshaping the strategies. We are focusing the agenda more on skincare in the broad sense. Within that, obviously, face care. We are re-energizing the core, and we think there's plenty of opportunity to make sure that by executing that well, we will sit on a more stable foundation, we will drive our icons, and the incrementality of innovation will be even greater on our total results. We need to be ruthless when it comes to taking pricing this year, obviously staying very vigilant and not being stupid and going out there without thinking about it. We are going to be very observant of what happens in the marketplace.
We see that the market is moving up as well, and this is why cross-brand and cross-price elasticities worry me a little bit less as I look at the market right now. We need to make sure we're very cautious about the return on investment of every single euro we invest. The agenda on e-commerce and digital is self-explanatory. This was a quick snapshot to snapshot about Europe, and obviously I'm going to get your questions, and now I would like to move to North America. Similar picture, I don't want to confuse you, but it says North America. North America, it's all about accelerating profitable growth. It is one of the biggest skincare markets today, and we're a subscale player. It is our utmost duty to make sure that we become a dominant player in the decade to come in North America. It's a huge market.
We have great assets, we have great brands, we have every right to be there and to become a scale market player. Before I do that, let me maybe explain to you the total portfolio we have in the U.S. today. It's roughly 90% U.S., 10% Canada. When I take a look at the split by business units, you will see that it's a fairly balanced business between cosmetics, half of it, 50%. You have 40% on derma. You have roughly 9% on selective, which is La Prairie, and also in the future, also the inclusion of Chantecaille. You have 1% on health, which are basically our plasters business. Very balanced, very beautiful portfolio. Just to make sure that I don't confuse anybody, Patrick still manages the selective business. He owns the strategies, he owns the P&Ls, he does everything.
I'm just showing it for completeness purposes, but he drives the selective business in the future. In the Derma business, which Patrick also owns from a strategy and from a P&L perspective, we do the go-to-market through our cosmetics organization. This is why you will see a little bit of a blend, but we're good friends. We hold hands and we align very well. We feel very confident that this is a great go-to-market, especially because the Derma and the cosmetic brands, for the most part, sit in the same stores, which is very different than in Europe. You will see actually the Derma products in a pharmacy, our products more in retail. In the U.S., when you walk into a normal retail store in mass, you will see both brands in the same shelf.
That's why it's incredibly efficient for us to go to market together, having one unified, strong retail sales force. When we think about the strategic priorities for North America, there's here again, a few changes we have been making. The first one is to refocus and accelerate NIVEA. This is the brand that we need to lead to greatness in the future in the U.S. I think we have been toying around with category plays where we had no right to win. That will be very specific. We've been putting a lot of innovation money, a lot of investment, a lot of R&D focus to play in shower gels, which is a huge category in the U.S., but we have zero right to play there. That's an animal that we killed at the end of last year. We decided we're just going to manage that business absolutely tactically.
It's a promotion business. We're just going to play to participate, not more and not less than that. The focus on NIVEA will be on two categories. It will be on body, which is skincare, and it will be on men, which is skincare. There we think we have a sufficient footprint to make sure we can accelerate. We have strong enough equities, and that's where all the firepower will go. Second priority, there was a lot of discussions today around Coppertone. Absolutely critical, relevant acquisition for us. In the U.S., it's all about getting scale. Scale to make sure you can afford a better sales force, you can afford better shopper and customer marketing teams, to afford better key account managers, to have more strategic horsepower, to have a better employer proposition to make sure you get better talent from the marketplace.
Coppertone was a brilliant acquisition in terms of giving us that, expanding our expertise in the sun segment. In all transparency, the business still is dilutive to the rest of the portfolio. Our teams are working extremely hard on making sure that we turn around the profitability of the business. Vincent already alluded to some of the actions, but absolutely strategic platform for us. Broadening the Derma footprint, critical. Patrick already alluded to that, and I will just give you one slide on that later as well. You will see a very, very similar agenda, only with punctual differences when it comes to revenue growth management and our return on investment focus. If you take a look at the past, and this is just giving you a little bit of an idea of the performance over the last periods.
2017, again, normalized at a 100 index, led to a 7% growth in 2018, 7% growth in 2019. You see a jump, which is basically the inclusion of the acquisition of Coppertone. We moved to a 121 index in 2020. Then 13% growth in 2021. Let me also tell you, obviously, that 2020 is possibly a tale of two stories because obviously we had a little bit of a downturn on some of the premium propositions like La Prairie and an overproportional positive effect of Coppertone. You see how actually the portfolio managed to balance out actually some of the disruption we experienced through COVID. A 13% growth in 2021. When we take a look at the refocused plans right now at the beginning of this year, again, Q1 2021 normalized at the 100 index.
We're seeing 23% growth year-on-year for Q1, and we're also seeing a very strong double-digit growth for Q2 in the outlook, which again gives us confidence that we are putting the right actions in place and to accelerate the business for the future in the right manner. On NIVEA, as I said it before, it's all about body and men. It's that simplistic. The portfolio is way simpler than what we have in Europe, where in big markets like in Germany, we're playing up to 10 categories at scale. Two categories, 78% of the revenue, and ample opportunity for us to expand our market positions. We're number three brand in body. We have ample of opportunities to leverage the global innovation pipeline, the global assets, all of the global learnings to make sure we can become a number two or number one.
On men, we're the number one across the board. This is a total proposition, but we do have an incredibly unique stronghold in the sensitive segment. We're the number one, and we're going to play that card much, much harder. When it comes to activation, we have reshifted the funds we invest in the past, for example, on shower. We put all of that money on body and men. We're developing significantly more targeted campaigns, leveraging Precision Marketing for different subgroups of the U.S. population. We have campaigns for, I would call, mainstream Americans. We have campaigns for the Hispanic community, where we're over-indexed, and we are also developing tailored campaigns for African-American consumers, where we're also over-indexed. On men, we're increasing the focus on the sensitive lineup. We have a lot of relevant innovation we can leverage from Europe.
Here again, we're also leveraging the partnership with Real Madrid. As you might know, soccer in the U.S. among kids below 12 years is the number two sport after American football. It surpassed baseball. It surpassed basketball. That's the future sport in the U.S. We know that especially among the Hispanic community, there is a huge, huge interest in Real Madrid, so we're leveraging that, and it's yielding very, very positive results. What I mentioned before, it costs about cross-category activations to drive the core, which is what we're expanding across Europe. We're doing the same in North America as well, and it's helping us. Year to date, we're growing the business on NIVEA by 8% on net sales and growing up by about 1.4 percentage points in market share. That's in one slide, the focus on NIVEA.
Let me change gears and move to Coppertone right now. I don't know whether you're aware of this, but Coppertone is an iconic American classic. When you take a look at some of the things we own with that brand, we're the number one brand with unaided brand awareness metrics. We're obviously by a long stretch, the number one with aided awareness as well. When you take a look at some of the equity levers on the right side, we're the most trusted brand in sun in America. We're also leading on providing unbeatable sun protection, excellent sun care for outdoor activities. We lead the sports segment hands down by a long stretch, and we're also good for the whole family, which is where we originally came from, and where we're also expanding into the future with new innovation.
We're also the number one pediatrician-recommended brand as well, just in case you didn't see the logo down there. That also helps us a lot to make sure we drive again, this trust ownership with the brand in the U.S. Vincent already alluded to this. We're basically been changing everything. We went through a very successful integration process, and now basically we're relaunching the entire brand as we speak. There's new positioning, there's new packaging, there's new creative assets that are going to the market right now. The season started last weekend. Between Memorial and Labor Day, that's when the season takes place. That's where you need to win. That's all we have been preparing for. Innovation, we're entering one segment where we're underplaying today, the general protection segment.
This is in fact where the brand started, and we actually shifted away for a long time, and we have a great launch called Complete. It's called Coppertone Complete. Just to give you a little bit of an insight, it got 100% listings from the trade. Hands down, we did not even discuss it for too long, so we feel very confident this will work for us as well. Oh, by the way, I forgot to mention one thing on the relaunch. On the initial like-for-like rotation numbers, it's high double-digit compared to prior to the relaunch numbers. In stores that are like-for-like comparable, we see that the new relaunch proposition gives us high rotation. That again is one other point that gives us confidence that running into the season we'll be doing well.
Brilliant execution is another thing we're putting a lot of energy behind. We're getting more distribution. In 10 out of the top 12 customers in the U.S., we got better shelf resets than we had before. Again, in 10 out of 12 customers, we get more shelf space, we get more displays, and we get more promotions. 2021 was the turnaround year by any means. For the first time since 10 years, we managed to grow share. We grew the revenues by 23%, which is great. Year to date, we're growing 12%. In terms of market shares, I would like to tell you because that is something also that was mentioned in your papers, that we had experienced some share losses at the back end of the year. That is absolutely correct, and that was intended.
As you well know, when you manage a relaunch in the U.S., you need to make sure that you de-stock the trade. You de-stock our own warehouses to make sure that you don't run into remnants and ugly write-downs, and write-downs in the U.S. can be very expensive. We have been consciously de-stocking. On top of that, obviously, we also experienced some supply chain issues, but we know that right now the time starts to count now. We're going into the season, we're going into the season strong. We're getting all the implementations of the trade. We have the product ready, and we have very low remnants of the old products in the stores as well. We're very confident that this will be a very good season for us, and that we're going to win in the season and in the total year.
Now let me give you one slide on Derma, which is nothing but a smashing success. Patrick, obviously, and the team in North America can take the credit for that. You see that we're outperforming the market across every single category. Net sales are up year to date 37%, and we're gaining 120 basis points of market share. The team is focusing an incredible amount of effort on driving the medical recommendation focus. They more than doubled the Derma detailing team in the last four years. Aquaphor, which is a uniquely strong brand in the U.S., is the number one dermatologist recommended brand in six key skin conditions. Eucerin, again, the second brand in our portfolio, is the number two dermatologist recommended brand for eczema and for body moisturization.
The big play, obviously, right now on the table is to win in wide spots, namely with the sun launch as we speak. I will now talk about how do we navigate inflation in the U.S. It's the same story. We're taking very aggressive pricing there. We're driving everything else we're doing in Europe as well. The only difference on the very right side is that we're shifting part of the Coppertone sourcing to Mexico to get better cost and improve the structure of the P&L. Again, we're reshaping and refocusing the investments on NIVEA. We'll continue to turn around Coppertone, not only from a top line, but also from a profitability perspective. We're broadening the Derma footprint, and we'll continue to drive revenue management, pricing, and return on investment.
Last but not least, I would like to close with one slide, which is the U.S. must be our first EUR 1 billion market. That's our intention to get there in the midterm. To do that, it's very obvious that we need to continue to drive in a very sharp manner what needs to be done to drive the core growth on NIVEA and Derma. We need to deliver the full see-through of the Coppertone turnaround. We will be expanding into new white spaces like we're doing it right now with Derma into sun. As soon as we feel confident enough that we established a more solid base on NIVEA, we're also going to be confronted with the question, what do we do next with NIVEA? Which is the next segment we go into? Is it sun? Is it face? We will see.
There's more news to come. Revenue management, super important. We will invest in necessary capabilities and skills. It is absolutely essential, very similar to what Grita mentioned, that we need to bring in the needed digital experts into the house to make sure we can accelerate and excel. We're going to be doing the same there. For sure, we will be looking at M&A in the future on top of what we did. Coppertone, we still have work to do. We're very focused on that. I think Chantecaille is just a jewel that the M&A team and Patrick's brought into the house. I think that's going to be a smashing success, but there's plenty opportunity for more once we prove that we can do those very, very well. With that, thank you very much.
Cool. Thank you, Oswald. We are now again opening the floor for questions.
So, um-
Could you please reach in the microphones? Yeah. We're going to Fulvio, please.
Yes, sir. Good afternoon and thank you for taking my questions. I've got two, one in Europe and one for North America. In Europe, I recognize from your presentation that the pricing environment has been very solid. No impact on volumes, but there's a rising list of questions from investors about the outlook. Particularly if we do have a scenario of a recession, how could NIVEA and your European business in particular cope with that? Have you prepared for such an eventuality? Is there any sort of differences that you'd want to flag versus, you know, the last precedent, call it 2009? My second question is, you have some very interesting ambitions in North America.
We don't have many companies that, certainly I can think of, European companies that have been able to successfully crack the U.S. market. Maybe could you just, again, elaborate on, what makes you confident that your strategy is unique and it's different and it, you know, what underlines your confidence behind that? Thank you.
Very good. Let me talk to the first one first. Yeah, for sure, we're also thinking about what would we do if we really go into a recessionary environment. I mean, that's our bread and butter business, so we absolutely spend time on that. Let me give you a few insights, and maybe I start with previous crisis first before I move into the situation today. Our global sales teams have been looking at what has happened in the last periods in which we went actually to major crisis being 2009 or even prior years in emerging markets. We do know that NIVEA, with its unique stronghold in terms of what it stands for, value for money, we are a fundamentally democratic brand. We cover many, many price tiers. If you think about Europe, even today, we sell most prices between EUR 3 and EUR 25.
We do have plenty and ample opportunity to make sure we can play the entire portfolio. Even when consumers trade down from a EUR 10 price back to EUR 5, we have options for them. We do know that the pricing pressure on private label will be comparatively higher than on branded goods, so let's be very clear about that. If you take a look at their strategic margin structure, they will also increase out of proportion of their prices. We have seen that in some markets, like for example, Aldi in Germany as well. Going back to the last crisis, we knew, for example, that we managed actually during the last big crisis and to grow our revenue by about 1.3 percentage points, if I recall the number correctly. Vincent will keep me right here.
We feel very confident that we're well-positioned, great value for money proposition, a democratic brand. We play across many price partitions and price tiers. Obviously, I mean, we also have the tool of adjusting our commercial policies when we go to market to actually play with our featuring activities according to the necessities of the marketplace. When it comes to Europe specifically, again, I told you that we see no impact right now after the first price increase. We need to see what happens after the second price increase. There is movement in the market. Most key players are taking their prices up, and that's very visible in the market data that you can read yourselves. We feel very confident that the consumers will go with this. There might be a little bit of hiccups.
I'm personally more worried about the trade than I'm worried about the consumer. I do think that especially in difficult markets like Germany and France, we might face trade disruption. They just don't like price increases, and they will certainly actually take some features away, maybe, discontinue some SKUs at the tail end of our lineups. That's something we have planned for. That's something we have factored in, and we just need to go through that. Does that entirely respond to your question or?
Yeah, no, very good. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Second question was on.
That was the U.S.
The second question was on North America, what gives us confidence. First of all, Unilever, I think has been doing a pretty good job in the U.S. I think they're a scale player. They're very, very strong in the other end. I think there's examples for a European company succeeding there. I think L'Oréal is also doing a pretty decent job, if I may say. I just believe that we should go one step after the other. For me, it's not about what have others managed to achieve. I think we're sitting on some things that are really working very well. I think we have strongholds on NIVEA.
I think we also complemented our portfolio with local brands, which I think will help us in the U.S. because buying Coppertone, it's not like we're trying to enforce a European brand onto American consumers. We're bringing a native American brand that is, I mean, as anchored in their hearts and minds as any other American brand. I do think we're in a really good place. Chantecaille is essentially the same story. I mean, it's a brand that was born in the U.S. It plays to the cues of the local culture. It's proven to be very successful. I feel very confident that we can win. Again, I mean, we're not promising the moon. We're not doing any stupid things. As Vincent said before, we need to do one piece of our homework after the next. We're going to turn around Coppertone's profitability.
We're going to get NIVEA to number two and one position some body care. We're going to be successful on sun or Eucerin, and then we're going to go the next step. Nothing stupid. There was a question before, I think from the UBS colleague, in terms of investing too much money ahead of the curve. We're not gonna do that. We're going to go then when we have a proof of concept, and we're going to invest wisely to make sure we get the returns not in 10 years, but in one or two years.
Thank you.
Yeah. Can you over?
Hi. Emma Letheren from RBC. Thank you for the presentation. A question on NIVEA. I was wondering adapting all the products to, you know, be more sustainable, what effect does that have on the margin profile, and are you able to actually get better pricing from doing that which offsets any potential extra costs?
That's a great question, and, we factor that in. Yes, you're absolutely right. Some of the sustainable formulations or recycled packaging, because there's a lot of demand for it, you know, puts pressure on the pricing. That's why, as I said before, it's so important that we're able to claim up. The NIVEA Soft example being one, you know. We're now able to do a 48-hour claim on moisturization, so we factor that in, and that gets tested and evaluated before we do it.
Okay. Thank you. Just, sorry, a second one on the wider strategy. Given the growth opportunities in La Prairie and Chantecaille, your increased focus on M&A, I was just wondering if you're looking 10 years into the future, how do you see the brand portfolio at Beiersdorf and its exposure to the different categories?
No, I think, you know, what we did, you know, with Coppertone and Chantecaille are good examples. Coppertone, we had a unique opportunity to buy an iconic brand in a market we know pretty well, sun care, so we bought it. If there are other Coppertone allowing us to complement the portfolio, we are interested, and we are not obsessed by the idea that they should be global brand. Obviously, when you are in the U.S., local in the U.S. is big enough. There are the other kind of acquisition, like Chantecaille, where we know there is a huge space, you know, between the derma environment, $40-$50 or euro, and the luxury world of La Prairie.
I mean, the value is around EUR 25 billion, where there are some brands which we could acquire, you know? Chantecaille is the best example, ticking a lot of boxes. U.S. brand, premium skincare, profitable, strong in U.S., China and Korea. This is typically the kind of things we will look at and we are looking at already today.
Thank you.
Hi. David Hayes on from Soc Gen. Grita, from the outside, it potentially looks like you've taken this role to make the key brand work better and sustain, let's say, 4%+ top line. Then Vincent was telling us today that you've got no more step up in investment to make that happen. Is that a fair summary of what's kind of gone on over the next few months, and how was that? Did that create tension, and how has that tension been resolved? Then I guess secondly, maybe related in some ways and kind of coming back to this morning, we kind of touched on this earlier. There's lots of investment plans, but the margin outlook lift is, you know, being promised as the ambition.
You've kind of alluded to lots of cost savings as well. You talked about Mexico, you talked about the pension plan, headcount reduction, maybe reading between the lines on that and so forth. The question is, some companies or, well, some other companies may have said, "Well, we've got a gross cost saving plan of X, which is part of the whole algorithm." Is that what's going on here as well, or you're just avoiding being headline about that because you don't see the necessary, you know, to say, "I'm gonna save EUR 250 million," whatever it is? Or is that a misinterpretation of the kind of the outlook for the next two or three years? Thank you.
Do the first question.
On the first question, I think if I understood the question correctly, the tension of, you know, making sure that NIVEA is sort of outperforming again and investing enough. Was that the question?
Yeah, exactly. If I was in your role, I would think you want me to deliver on NIVEA doing better.
Exactly, yeah.
That's gonna cost me some money.
Yeah. Okay.
I'm not convinced there's any final money.
Yeah. Okay.
To have that discussion.
Yeah. Okay. I think the first place where I think we have maneuvering room is within the own NIVEA P&L, and I think we talked about that quite a lot, right? There's a growth margin by focusing more on skincare and then by making choiceful investments and of course making bigger innovations, you know. Then, you know, the marketing mix modeling that Oswald also talked about. You know, we really have room for improvement. You're right. I mean, of course, we're already investing in China today, and we will continue to do so. Today we feel we have enough room in order to make that growth.
Complementing this answer, I mean, are we just to put the fish on the table, are we talking social plan? No, we don't need that. Are we talking working on efficiencies? Yes, and we can. We know that it has never been high on the agenda of Beiersdorf, and we know that it's about digital marketing. I mean, simply, moving, as I said, from traditional TV to digital to Precision Marketing, 100% efficiency with the same euro. Already if we're doing that and doing that so far, we have done that on 30% of our investment. We want to do it on 90% of the investment. You see the potential. Structures, yes. I think we are.
As I said, we officialized last month the first ever early retirement program in Hamburg, in headquarters. Never been done before. You know, we were more challenging the regions and the countries that the headquarters. We did it, and it was well received, and we signed, you know, an agreement with the union, so we can do that. We are still looking at others efficiencies in each and every department, each and every function. And we know or so that there are some opportunities here to find few points of net sales. This is what were gonna do and this is why we feel pretty confident in our ability to deliver at least 50 basis points EBIT improvement in the next few years.
Here.
Are you asked already?
Okay. Take over here. You did. Thank you.
Yeah, exactly. There. Very good. Thank you.
Hi. Olivier Nicolaï from Goldman Sachs. Just a question on NIVEA MEN. How big it is as a percentage of sales for the NIVEA brand today, and do you see potential in Asia, or is it just a focus on Europe and the U.S.? Also, you mentioned the premiumization of the NIVEA brand with LUMINOUS and Q10. Do you see the same potential for premiumization for NIVEA MEN?
I don't think we split out the NIVEA MEN brand. I'm not sure I can reveal the number here, but you know, it is a very big brand. No, it's not just in Europe, it's also actually in China, I think as Vincent said. Yes, the skincare strategy on men, we absolutely see as a huge growth driver. You know, there's ample of growth there that we're seeing on skincare.
To complement your question. In China, yes, we are also premiumizing NIVEA MEN. You know, we are today too cheap. We are too offline. We are changing also. We are launching new franchises that are much more expensive, much more valorized. We are cutting also some tail business, which is pretty cheap. We are indeed dramatically improving the premiumization of NIVEA MEN in China, and it's part of this overall premiumization of NIVEA in China.
Also focusing on skin more because, you know, I mean, shaving is great, but, you know, we also know shaving, there's some pretty heavy competitors out there. You know, the growth we really see is on skincare.
Skincare. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Bruno here also.
Yeah. Go ahead.
Thanks, Jeremy Fialko, HSBC again. A couple more questions from me. First of all, when you look at NIVEA and the core, I guess one of the things you have was maybe quite a disappointing 2021, then 2022 obviously looks a lot better year to date. You know, you're saying your April market shares are the sort of record ones so far. But obviously we're looking at quite short time periods, and also very sort of messy period in terms of the base. I guess, you know, you were probably a little bit underweight e-commerce, and so perhaps that penalized you a little bit in 2020 and 2021. Now bricks and mortar is coming back more, perhaps that benefits you in 2022.
What I really wanna know is kind of like how can you disaggregate a lot of these very, I'd say quite messy factors within the base and say, "Okay, you know, we can really see the, you know, kind of the brand equity is stronger, the purchase intent is stronger, the innovation's hitting hard." Just maybe flesh out some of that, a little bit more on NIVEA and the core. And then the second one on the NIVEA range is, certainly your, you know, you plan to rationalize the range a bit. You've gotta do all of this, kind of harmonization. Is there some sort of a drag on sales you expect to have from that? Kind of how big it might be, and when you think that process will be finished? Thanks.
Take the first one?
Yeah.
Let me talk about the core. I'm not entirely capable of fully separating the 8% and tell you which are the things that are driven by the comeback from after COVID from e-commerce into the real stores. We do see a slight skew on categories like deodorants and shower. They are coming back a little bit stronger post-COVID, so that certainly is something that is coming as a factor into the growth rates right now. As I said before, we're also growing share pretty significantly. If I were only talking about the revenue, obviously I would be more nervous, but we're also gaining share in all the critical segments and sub-segments we're looking at. The other thing I would tell you is we see significant, and there was a third point on the core chart, we see significant opportunities to also expand our distribution.
That distribution, when factored with the fact that these are some of the SKUs with the highest rotation per cumulative weight distribution points, gives me a lot of confidence that moving forward we will get more scale and higher rotation. Can I promise you right now to sustain the 8%? I will not do that. Do I believe there's a significant upside? Absolutely, yes. The other thing I would like to underpin as well is that execution is critical. The cross-category activation ideas we took from Germany, and they're expanding into Europe and also into the U.S., have the potential to yield significantly better returns, more upside, more share gains, with less structural investment into promotions and in-store activations. I feel a lot of confidence that the underpinning drivers we're putting in place will drive growth and market share gains.
To which extent, we will discuss it in the next Analyst Day here.
Grita on the-
To your second question, if I understood it correctly, let me just rephrase it. You were asking whether we should expect sort of a big sale as we are putting more consistency and coherence within the brand. Was that the question? Sorry.
More just if you go through a sort of a rationalization process, whether
Okay
There's some sort of a drag on your sales because you're discontinuing.
Yeah
SKUs
Okay
deprioritizing them, that sort of thing.
I think we will focus of course on the key, you know, sort of SKUs, but we're not going to, you know, stop things that are doing extremely well. I think as we're globalizing our mixes, and that's the key point, I think we will alleviate both the supply chain, the R&D teams, and everybody else by having a more pruned assortment that is more global. I think what we're having at the moment is sometimes very different assortments from one region to the other, and I think we will evolve towards something that's more consistent. We're not stopping, you know, any category, at least not for now.
I think Chris Pitcher from Redburn . You've set the target for EUR 1 billion of sales for the U.S. business.
Mm-hmm.
I'd imagine on an organic basis, the German and the Chinese team would be putting up a decent challenge for that. Does that reflect that the U.S. is going to be a disproportionate focus for M&A to get to that target ahead of those other two markets? Following on from that, if we look at profitability for the consumer business, it's lowest in the Americas. Is it purely a function of scale, or are there some structural considerations to be mindful that would mean that margin wouldn't naturally expand as you get to that EUR 1 billion target? Just confirm, it is a EUR 1 billion target, not $1 billion?
EUR 1 billion. We like euros better in this company. I think the investors as well. If I were working on China, I would possibly tell you the same story, but that's my boss who runs China. I just believe that we have every right to be a EUR 1 billion business there. We sit on very strong brand equities. We have proven that we can scale up that business in a very significant manner. It's just continuing to do our homework one day after the other. I have a lot of confidence in every single brand we have. I think we have made massive investments after the post-integration in terms of scaling up our capabilities and skills as well. We have been over-investing in resources, in capabilities.
We have also made an investment in G&A, which by the way, relating to your second question, is absolutely scalable, but we made the choice that we need to have the right people on the ground to create the right skills to sell things into their trade, to have best-in-class marketing. The U.S., by the way, is the third market with the single highest level of investment in digital as percent of the total marketing spend. You know, the U.S. TV environment is very, very difficult, but we are leading the pack there as well in some digital areas too. Those are skills that we brought in because we believe in the future of that market. Absolutely essential. On your second question, I think it's both. I mean, very clearly, there are cost lines that are scalable.
G&A certainly is one, and it's absolutely essential, and we need to make sure we drive the top line to make sure we get the benefit out of that and reap the fruits. There are also some structural challenges, and the biggest structural challenge today is very clearly Coppertone, where we took over a business that was under-leveraged, under-managed in the past. We have made some very positive inroads, but we have some big duties at the table right now. We need to take significant pricing. We need to become more efficient. That's how we invest the money, especially also on promotions. Customer deductions are a big challenge in the U.S. as well, that we're getting under control too. We also need to work, for example, on the supply chain and the logistics.
Very clearly, this is something we're not very happy with today. Shifting some of the production to Mexico will help, but there's more help needed as well. I think it's a mix of both. We need we cannot afford to work on only one angle to drive the profitability in the U.S. up. We do know that we have a true North Star there. I mean, the Derma business is very profitable, and that's basically the benchmark for the rest of the businesses to move to.
Thank you.
Yeah.
We had, I think, questions from all of you, so we can just as well then go back to Ian, please.
Thank you very much. A couple of questions from me, if I may. Firstly, I wondered if you could just say anything about Brazil. You highlighted it as an opportunity for NIVEA, but I think LATAM is a market you've made great growth in in the last few years. What are the sort of lessons there? What's left to go for in Brazil? Secondly, in terms of taking NIVEA into new categories in the U.S., I think a few of us were sat in this room 11 years ago as you announced the sort of exit from various categories in the U.S. as NIVEA had become overextended.
How do you think about ensuring that when you are entering categories in the U.S., they're places where you have the right to play and it's not stuff where a few years from now you'll actually, you know, found that you've spent a lot of money on it and you're subsequently pulling out. Thanks very much.
You want me to take the LATAM question? I mean, what can we learn from LATAM? I mean, two very important thing. The first one is the production. You know, one of the reason why we are so successful in LATAM, we have two exceptional factories in three even, in Brazil and Mexico, and we are able to get absolutely good ICPs, the cost of goods, which allow us, you know, to be competitive in the market and in categories like deodorants, you know that every cent in the cost of goods is making a difference. Together with this local investment that we did already a long time ago, and we continue to increase. You know, this year we are increasing dramatically the size of our Mexico factory, also the Brazilian factory.
We were able, you know, to have a very large offer in those countries. To finance, we were discussing that this morning. For example, the launch of NIVEA Face in Brazil becoming in three years market leader in Brazil. This question about the production is absolutely vital. To come back to the answer of Oswald, it's very interesting to see that in the U.S. portfolio, we do have the second most profitable brand of the portfolio here. This is Aquaphor just after La Prairie. This U.S. setup, because also a few years ago, we decided to go from the U.S. to Mexico and to produce everything in Mexico.
The second element, which I think is essential in Latin America, the fact that we've been able to develop extremely good synergies within the different businesses of the company. You know, the fact that this is the same sales team which is selling NIVEA, but also Eucerin, and also Curitas, which is a local Hansaplast, is allowing us to have extremely good synergies, to have also a share of voice vis-à-vis retailers, which is absolutely essential. This is helping us getting the support of all the retailers. Could be Walmart in Mexico, could be all the drugstore chains in Brazil. That's making a very successful ecosystem in Latin America.
This is obviously something we are also doing in the U.S., synergizing, you know, all our brands, at least the mass and Derma brands, in order to get efficiency in the market.
On your question regarding the NIVEA portfolio, where to play, how to win, very clearly, if you go back at our experience of shower gels in the U.S., when we decided wrongly to focus on scaling up that business, we had a number 11 position in the market. Number one, comparatively, the investment in shower per case is higher in North America than in Europe, so you also need to go in there with a lot of money.
I think we launched up to 10 SKUs at some of the strongest customers, and you might well know that in the U.S., if you don't rotate after four months, Walmart just kicks you out. While everybody complains about the European trade, they're very tough in the annual negotiations. When it comes to the listings, I think the U.S. is at the very forefront. They just kick you out immediately, look at you and smile and say, "What's next?" Oh, by the way, in some of them, you pay listing fees as well. I do think that it was a very good decision to actually kill that journey and just manage that as a purely tactical business. Let me turn that around.
Even if it had worked, I would have questioned the strategic rightness of it, because when you become a scale player in shower, what equities are you building for the long run? I really struggle with that. Maybe you're a great rinsing brand, whatever you want to call it. I think it's much more strategic what we're doing right now. We're focusing on body, we're focusing on men with, again, an increased focus on face anti-aging. We're building skincare equity. We're building things that we can leverage in the future whenever we decide that the time is right to get into the next entry. Again, we're not gonna do it tomorrow. First, we need to execute Patrick's number one priority on Derma in the U.S., which is launching successfully, and the entire organization is fully buttoned up to deliver that.
If we scale up our leadership positions in the U.S. on body, and when we do it in men, and we move body to a number two or one position, and we move men while holding the number one position on sensitive to a number three, that's the moment we're gonna say, "You know what? This is the moment where there's sufficient scale, sufficient solidity, and we go into the next venture." By that time, we will have built stronger equities with men and with body that can help us to consider, I don't know, getting again into sun? Should it be face care? We don't know. But I do believe that it's the right thing to do, and we are all extremely confident that it's the right strategic avenue. Does that respond to your question? Super.
I think we can take.
I think we need one here.
You have to go down there.
Otherwise, his arm will die.
Bernstein, yeah.
Can I go ahead?
She's doing the lead.
Yeah. Well
I'll squeeze in a very quick question.
Yeah. Let me take Guillaume first and then Bernstein. I think then time should be up, actually. Go ahead.
Thanks, Jens. Two questions from me, please. The first one for Grita. On NIVEA, three focus markets of U.S., India, and China. What is NIVEA's right to win in these three markets? Because these three markets, I mean, it's probably no coincidence, but the same as Unilever's focus markets. We're talking about large markets, incredibly competitive already, where competition is also looking at maybe not increasing investments, but at least enhancing execution just like you. What's gonna differentiate you from your competitors and support that success?
You know, I think you said it right. I mean, they're very, very competitive markets, all of them. I mean, if you think about India, just as an example, I mean, the fact that we're already the number one trusted skincare brand in India, I think is incredible. That just shows you the strength of the NIVEA brand. I think from there, we can ladder up into face care, which we're not playing in right now, even though soft actually is used also on the face, right? Yes, I think all of these markets are very competitive and they will be tough. Again, I think with LUMINOUS W630 anti-aging skincare focus, I think we have absolutely right to win.
You know, we're not talking about the innovation pipeline here now, but there's some other things in the pipeline that also make me very confident that NIVEA can be, you know, very successful in those three markets. But of course, competition is there. You know, it's like when you play the Olympics, you know, and you don't have China and the U.S., you know, it's a very different Olympics. But again, time and time again, I think NIVEA, you know, can become the number one skincare brand in the world.
I think we have a trigger. You know, I was mentioning China. W630 is a huge opportunity.
Mm.
I mean, imagine, you know, if tomorrow already we're number one with cross-border Tmall. Again, cross-border is 8% of the total online. 8%. So if tomorrow we go in 92% online, plus offline, of course, and we come with a proposal which is talking about even skin, which is talking about brightening, I wouldn't even use the word whitening. You know, you are in a kind of consumer world which is absolutely fantastic for NIVEA. We will succeed with La Prairie, we will succeed with Eucerin, but NIVEA has obviously a much bigger opportunity to seduce Chinese consumer. When you look at China, the fact that in fact in this country, we didn't do any mistake. You know, when you see the build-up of the success story, we are in the right categories.
We have a factory. We are the number one trusted brand, so the next frontier is face care. It's also an opportunity. I'm not saying we're gonna launch it now. We might launch it next year or the year after, because we have to have a very precise, you know, a tailor-made, you know, approach for face care, building also what we have been successfully, for example, in Brazil and other emerging country. This is a trigger. In the U.S., you know, it's also the fact that we are not only good in body, but we have now a top-of-the-art R&D facility whose expertise is in body and sun care. That's also something we can leverage further. We used to be more into doing new galenics and new sizes for the U.S. market.
Here we can be much more daring, much more ambitious, and leverage this R&D expertise into NIVEA, into Coppertone.
Quickly to follow up on this expansion. One country that has been very difficult for European companies and where Beiersdorf has been successful is Japan.
Mm-hmm.
It seems thanks to a very successful partnership with Kao. Do you think this is a model that is replicable elsewhere? Because that would allow you to go after white spots without having a big negative effect on your margins.
First, you know, I'm flying tomorrow to Japan to have a top-to-top discussion with Kao because we are doing so well. We are celebrating this year the 50th anniversary of the joint venture with Kao. The answer to your question is yes, might be.
Might be. Might be with Kao, might be with others. You know, I think also in mind, obviously, the compliance and everything which is linked to antitrust, but we are very pragmatic. The idea that we could, you know, partner with somebody in a country where it's difficult to succeed alone makes a lot of sense. Again, you know, look at the size of NIVEA in Japan in comparison with our other big competitors. That's a proven successful method not only in terms of net sales, but also in terms of EBIT.
Okay, final question.
You've been so patient.
Exactly. Patience wins. Now Grita, I noticed on your first slide you used the two keywords for NIVEA: globalizing and modernizing. Vincent talks about premiumization or valorization. Is there a conflict between the two of you there? Or why did you not choose premiumization, which I would have thought would be the key word for NIVEA?
It's absolutely part of it. You know, no, there's absolutely no contradiction. I think it's, you know, the burning platform is to work on NIVEA as a global brand and the modernization as well. I think our move into skincare and face care will, you know, de facto premiumize it.
Yeah. L'Oréal Paris sort of quantified last year that they had a 9.5% price mix benefit from premiumization alone. Could you sort of outline either what you're doing right now as sort of price mix or what your ambition is of how much price mix? Is it similar to L'Oréal Paris upgrade or?
I think we do. I would also take my cap off head of Northeast Asia, because I think there are two dynamics. One, which is overall the globalization, the modernization of the brand. Yes, we are going into more premium categories, more premium launches, like for example, LUMINOUS. You saw the price difference with Q10. More into skincare versus personal care, more into skincare than, you know, shower. I think that's an overall movement, which is not a revolution. We will not suddenly become the most expensive brand of the brand, but we will clearly peu à peu make this brand more premium in the eyes of consumers. What I'm doing in Asia is more. I'm going much further than that. I want to transform NIVEA, and China is the name of the game.
I want to transform NIVEA in China from an accessible, I would even say cheap, offline personal care brand into a premium skincare online brand. Yeah, I'm doing this because of the legacy we have today, which is not good enough, you know. This is where the nuances are happening. Globally, we don't want to do a revolution. In China and also tomorrow in Korea, I want to transform more dramatically NIVEA because I'm not happy with the way NIVEA is sold today in those countries.
Thank you.
Okay. Well, this I think now concludes the Q&A. Thank you to all of you on the webcast to start with. We are now closing the webcast. Thank you very much for joining. If there are any additional questions or comments, then please come up to me. Thank you very much for participation. For us here in the room, we're going to have our Zoom sessions outside now. We're going to have a little bit of lunch. If you join us, we are going to move out of the auditorium, and we finish this session. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.