Those doors are shut. If they're late now, they will be embarrassed, right? Let's wait and see, right? 'Cause we're gonna start on time no matter what. Good morning, everyone. It's great to see you all here in person. It's actually slightly intimidating, because it's the first time I've done this in person for obvious reasons in my tenure, right? Welcome also to those of you joining online. Now, let me pause for a moment, though, to show you this picture, which is at Birmingham New Street Station, and hopefully an example of how we're getting on the front foot with our efforts to build stronger brands, and where, for the right target consumer, we're willing to put a little bit more edge into our communications. I would add, this is the one that made the cut.
There are some others that we've had that probably would be a little too edgy, even for you guys, right? Don't worry, I'm not gonna be asking you which part of your body tingles when you use Original Source, right? I won't be asking the audience on this occasion, right? Moving swiftly on, let's get to the agenda, right? I'll share some overall perspectives on progress we've made so far on our journey to transform PZ Cussons. I'll hand over to Sarah to take you through the financials and our Q1 trading update before I cover off some of our strategic developments in a bit more detail. It's gonna be over to you, and we'll be delighted to take your questions, whether you're in the room or actually on the phone as well from those joining online.
We've now delivered a second year of consistent performance and strategic progress, with consecutive like-for-like growth after years of decline as we focus on our must-win brands in our priority markets in our core categories of hygiene, baby, and beauty. We've delivered against market expectations in spite of unprecedented external challenges, and the team have worked hard to manage the challenging volatility that we and all businesses are facing today and will continue to do so. We've made good progress in addressing our legacy issues. There's undoubtedly more to do. Not all parts of our portfolio are yet where we want them to be, but overall, the business is far stronger today. I'll take you through more of the detail later, but one of the highlights of FY 2022 undoubtedly was making our first acquisition in eight years when we welcomed Childs Farm into the PZ portfolio.
Since when, I'm glad to report, the brand has been in good growth. Finally, we remain confident as we look to the future, and today we're outlining some bolder revenue growth ambitions for the business. We're ever vigilant to the near-term challenges, but our longer-term outlook is improving. Subject to the uncertainties of cost inflation and consumer behavior, we expect to deliver in line with market expectations for FY 2023. Overall, while there is always more to do, we've made good progress, and we're starting to shift from turnaround to transformation. Evidence of that shift can be found in what underpins our business and strategy, our brands, and in particular, the strength of what we call our must-win brands.
As we set out in our strategy, these are the brands in which we are disproportionately investing, and with brand investment now up more than 70% compared to two years ago. Take Morning Fresh in Australia, for example. The brand accounts for nearly half of the sales of the entire washing up liquid category. This is more than the next four competitors combined, and they include some formidable global players. Morning Fresh is winning due to its strong brand equity, first-rate product performance, and our effective retailer collaboration. St. Tropez, which is the largest brand in our beauty business, has maintained its position as the leading player in its segment in the U.S., driven in part by increased distribution with key retailers. Cussons Baby is a brand which our data shows sits in a leading position in most of the subcategories in which it plays in Indonesia.
Finally, closer to home in the U.K., Carex has grown share again in the hand hygiene category, albeit in a market that continues to normalize post-COVID. Our refill pouches, which encourage reduced consumer usage of plastic, now represent 10% of the entire category, and in fact, are bigger than the next largest competitor. These are robust market share performances, and they're supported by strong brand equity scores that set us above local and global competitors. The latest Original Source campaign that you saw earlier has helped drive top of mind awareness to its highest level for eight years. Another campaign that is about to hit the U.K.'s TV and mobile phone screens later this month is to support the relaunch of Imperial Leather. Imperial Leather is a key portfolio brand for us.
It's got great heritage and latent equity, but it lost its way in recent years, becoming too commoditized and meaning less and less for those consumers who may not be able to remember the TV advertising that some of us in the room grew up with. Along with a new rich lather formulation, some great fragrances, and distinctive packaging, we have new advertising to appeal to the new consumers looking for their chance for everyday indulgence. It's early days in the relaunch, but retailer reception and initial shopper reaction has been good. Now it's time for the marketing activation to begin.
I was born for the hustle. Here to make troubles. You watch from the side as I flex my muscles. I'm on a mission. Stop and listen. I don't need your permission. Just start a revolution. Ooh, did I hurt you, babe? I'm sorry not sorry that you feel that way. Mm, mm, mm. I was born for the hustle.
If you're old enough to remember the previous advertising, and think it looks different, you're not the target consumer, right? That's just what I'm telling you. This is a good example of how we're trying to build our brand-building capabilities, thanks not least to the arrival onto our leadership team as our Chief Marketing Transformation Officer of Andrew Geoghegan, who's somewhere in the room. Right. Right here. Right. So if you like the ad, you may come up to me afterwards and if you don't, you know you can ask the questions. Moving on, right? During the past two years, it's sometimes been hard to read the underlying performance of our business. There's been a lot of noise and distortion from the pandemic, especially on the Carex brand.
Stripping this out, you can see the underlying trading momentum has been strong since the launch of our strategy in early 2021. The chart on the left shows a rolling 12-month revenue, looking just at our core categories of hygiene, baby, and beauty, and then removing Carex because of the fluctuations caused. You'll see the dip as COVID hits, and then as our strategy, new strategy starts to take effect, continued positive momentum. With revenues today around 19% higher than it was prior to our Capital Markets Day. Then looking at Carex itself, on the right-hand side, the category has broadly returned to pre-pandemic levels, but our revenue is around 20% higher, thanks to the share gains made, in part driven by an 80% increase in brand investment in FY 2022 compared to pre-pandemic.
In the last year, we gained around 2 percentage points of market share. I'll talk in more detail about some other aspects of our progress shortly, but firstly, Sarah will run you through the numbers and our performance in Q1.
Thanks, Jonathan. Good morning. I'm gonna hope that the financials will give you as much of a tingle as the market share gains did. Now that Jonathan has anchored us back in some broader business and strategic themes, let me start with a summary look at the P&L for the last financial year, and how it serves to signal our transition from turnaround to transformation. We delivered a resilient performance in FY 2022 against a backdrop of some very challenging and well-publicized external headwinds. We also believe that a picture of more consistent financial performance is starting to emerge. We're pleased to have delivered a second consecutive year of like-for-like revenue growth, and we exited the fourth quarter up 7%, and this momentum has continued into the current financial year.
Excluding the known drag from Carex, explaining the 5% decline in must-win brands, they grew 9% in aggregate. Given the headwinds from cost inflation of some GBP 40 million and our decision to sell our low-margin, non-core five:am Australian yogurt business, leading to a decline in reported revenue, operating profit is slightly down versus the prior year. The like-for-like revenue growth and must-win brand share gains tell us, though, that the business is in much, much better shape compared to two years ago, and that the new strategy is working. Operating margin is up 30 basis points over two years, despite significant investment in the business. Net debt is GBP 20 million lower than last year and GBP 40 million down on two years ago, with cash unlocked from non-core asset sales. We also made our first acquisition in eight years, as Jonathan mentioned.
The EPS decline of 3% compares favorably to the movement in operating profit. The board is proposing a full-year dividend of GBP 6.4 per share, representing a second consecutive year of 5% growth, reflecting the board's confidence in both the strategy and the long-term business prospects. Let's take a look at the performance in a little more detail. The like-for-like revenue growth of 3% was driven by both Asia Pac and Africa. The expected normalization in demand for hand hygiene products post-pandemic impacted Carex within the Europe and Americas performance. Excluding Carex, each of our must-win brands grew revenue year-on-year. That growth has been primarily driven by price mix, in line with our strategic intent, with volume down only slightly.
That volume decline was again witnessed primarily in Carex, and we actually saw no significant change in volume across our other must-win brands as a result of pricing action. Elasticity has been low. The net effect of the acquisition of Childs Farm, which completed in March of this year, and the disposal of five:am, which completed in June of last year, reduced reported revenue by GBP 12 million. It's also worth noting that the appreciation of sterling compared to a basket of our other local currencies, particularly the naira, reduced revenue by GBP 17 million. Our operating margin declined 30 basis points versus the prior year, resulting in a margin of 11.5%, slightly ahead of consensus estimates.
The biggest movement was in our cost of goods. We saw a GBP 40 million headwind or an 11% increase, and we offset over GBP 30 million of this through mitigating actions, which I'll come back to in a moment. The 90 basis points gross margin decline here is also the result of adverse mix. With strong growth in Africa, a naturally lower margin business, and the decline in Carex in the U.K. We expect this mix, this mix impact to lessen in the current financial year. Outside of this, we saw gross margins improve last year. We continue to invest in our capabilities, particularly in strengthening our teams, some of whom are here today, with the associated people costs leading to a slight increase in overheads. As Jonathan mentioned, absolute brand investment is up significantly over two years.
The reduction in FY 2022 is due to a normalization of Carex investment after the highs of the pandemic. Investment still being up some 80% on two years ago, and also targeted reductions across portfolio brands. Elsewhere, brand investment is up versus FY 2021 and with an improved efficiency of the overall spend. This allowed for a 70 basis points benefit to margins and critically also broad-based share gains. Finally, our JV with Wilmar added 20 basis points to margin as they benefited from a higher palm oil price for much of the year. As I mentioned on the previous slide, we've offset the majority of the GBP 40 million cost headwind through a combination of productivity initiatives, pricing, and other RGM levers.
We've been continuing to take out cost that the consumer doesn't see or doesn't value, such as making savings on procurement or optimizing logistics or reducing packaging costs. We've taken list price increases, driven positive mix, and optimized price promotional intensity, and you can see how that stepped up as the year progressed. In fact, that trend has accelerated again into the first quarter of this financial year as cost headwinds track at even higher levels than the previous year. We've now also taken a look at the fundamentals of our supply chain, where we see significant opportunity for multi-year productivity gains, albeit with some one-time costs to unlock these. As you know, we have a degree of hedging and forward purchasing in place. Our freight costs are contracted annually, and we have our commodity costs largely covered for the first half.
Turning to the performance in each of our markets, something that now carries even more personal significance for us both, having had for the first time during our PZ tenure the opportunity to visit Nigeria, Australia, and Indonesia these past few months. We saw for ourselves just how very passionate the teams are about the PZ business and our brands. Europe and Americas like-for-like revenue declined 12%, driven almost entirely by Carex, which together with increased investment in our beauty brands, explains most of the margin decline. Original Source, St. Tropez, and Sanctuary Spa each grew strongly. In Asia Pac, Australia led the revenue growth with a particularly strong performance in Morning Fresh, where share grew by over 2 percentage points. Rafferty's Garden returned to growth in the second half of the year.
Indonesia revenue declined slightly due to the retailer disruption and social restrictions brought about by COVID that saw gross margins improve as we continue to focus on higher margin products within Cussons Baby. Finally, Africa grew revenue by over 20%, and this was driven by both price, with increases in each month of the financial year and volume as we expanded our distribution. Growth was broad-based with all major brands up versus the prior year. As you know, we continue to see profitable revenue growth in Africa. Shifting the portfolio to higher margin products. I'm delighted to be able to report a 4 percentage point increase in operating margin up to 10%. Because many of you will remember that Africa was a loss-making business only two years ago.
Together, our core categories of hygiene, baby, and beauty account for just over 80% of the group's total revenue, and we would expect that proportion to increase over time. Turning now to cash flow and to the balance sheet. Our balance sheet has strengthened further in the year with net debt now down to just under GBP 10 million. The combination of strong free cash flow generation, as well as proceeds from the sale of non-core assets, have funded both the acquisition of Childs Farm and a higher dividend. With this strong balance sheet, we'll continue to take a disciplined approach with capital. You should expect us to continue to grow the dividend over time with EPS cover remaining at around two times and continue to invest in CapEx.
We'll take a disciplined approach to M&A, applying strict strategic and financial criteria. While focusing in the near term on maximizing the value from Childs Farm. We'll also continue to invest to transform the business. Jonathan will provide a little more detail shortly, but we expect to make investments related to this transformation of around GBP 20 million over the next two to three years. In parallel, we'll continue to look for more opportunities to realize cash proceeds from the sale of non-core assets. Moving now to current trading and outlook. Our performance in the first quarter of our current financial year underpins the outlook, which I'll come to in a moment, and is further evidence of our strategic progress. We delivered nearly 7% like-for-like revenue growth, maintaining the strong momentum from Q4 of last year.
Price mix stepped up again and so far we've continued to see little shift in elasticity. You'll also notice a slight rebalancing away from lower margin Africa versus the exit momentum of last year. The continued strong performance in Asia Pac and Africa is due to double-digit growth in Morning Fresh in Australia and Premier Soap in Nigeria. Europe and Americas was down 5%, where again the biggest contributor was Carex, where the category does remain down year-on-year, but with the brand's rate of revenue decline improved markedly compared to the previous quarter. Offsetting this, Sanctuary Spa was up strongly following its recent restage. Original Source was also up, having benefited from the edgier brand comms you saw at the beginning of the presentation. St. Tropez was down, but was up against double-digit growth comparatives last year and remains firmly up versus two years ago.
The reported growth of 24% reflects the contribution from Childs Farm and translational FX, but is also flattered by a phasing benefit of more trading days than in the same quarter of the prior year. A phasing impact that will unwind in Q4, and so there's no impact for this year as a whole. Turning finally then to the outlook. We expect FY 2023 to represent our third consecutive year of like-for-like revenue growth. Notwithstanding the significant challenges related to both cost inflation and consumer spending, which will remain uncertain over the coming months, we do expect to deliver FY 2023 results in line with current consensus estimates. Margin delivery will be weighted to half two, reflecting the phasing of the comps plus the timing of current year input cost fluctuations and our forward purchasing patterns.
You'll see we've also detailed some modeling considerations to help you on some other line items. Underpinning the bolder longer-term revenue growth ambition, we'll be investing in the region of GBP 20 million in our transformation, primarily in our supply chain and other commercial or enabling functions. We're taking a disciplined approach to this, and I'm confident in the financial returns, simplification opportunities, and increased capabilities that these investments will deliver. In summary, the results serve to give us confidence in our plans to transform PZ Cussons into a higher growth, higher margin, simpler, and more sustainable business. With that, I'll hand back to Jonathan, who will touch on the strategic drivers behind the increase in our future revenue guidance up to mid-single digit growth. Jonathan?
Thanks, Sarah. I'd now like to cover off some specific areas of strategic progress. Around 18 months ago at our Capital Markets Day, we were clear that initially we needed to turn around the business by fixing our core. Following detailed work to diagnose the challenges that we were facing, we summarized the five legacy issues that had held the business back and what we would need to do to fix them. Today, I'm pleased to say that we've made good progress in addressing them, even against the backdrop of a set of external challenges we could not have predicted at the time we set out on this journey. We've refocused on the consumer, raising the bar on how we approach marketing and innovation. We're investing more to build stronger brands, up in total by a third since FY 2020.
We've been intentional and deliberate about where to play and how we allocate resources. We've removed the complexity of trying to implement an operating model more appropriate for a much larger multinational, and we strengthened our leadership team, while also refreshing our corporate values and establishing our corporate purpose. That said, as I told you all at the time, our problems have been years in the making, but we're getting on with fixing them, staying true to our strategy. Strategy as summarized here in ten words. Before I turn to the future and how we will continue to address remaining issues, let me update you on some of the progress delivered since our Capital Markets Day. First and foremost, we are shifting to become a brand-building company.
We have strong brands and we want to make them even stronger. We said we would focus on our must-win brands, and that's what we've been doing. Brand investment up nearly 70%, as we said, partly funded by a reduction on our other brands as our strategy drives choices in our business. Each of the must-win brands received greater investment in FY 2022 compared to two years ago, and with some benefiting from a multiple increase in spend. It's not just the quantum of spend that matters, it's also about becoming smarter in our investment choices. Marketing mix modeling analysis shows that the Carex Life's a Handful campaign, which ran across TV and digital last year, delivers double the return of previous Carex campaigns, which were already ahead of FMCG benchmarks.
Our own internal tracking showed an improvement in top-of-mind awareness, reaffirming its top spot for the most considered hand soap, partly as a result of more than six million social media views triggered by the campaign. This has been driven by better brand-building tools, stronger insights, greater use of data, and a more integrated approach to our marketing activities. The same brand-building tools that help deliver another year of double-digit growth on Sanctuary Spa in FY 2022, as well as underpin the relaunch of Sanctuary Spa that is just hitting the shelves now in the U.K. New product innovation and packaging that help offer tremendous value for those consumers seeking to enjoy their spa treatment in the comfort of their own homes as they, like others, continue to seek everyday luxuries despite the challenging times.
Here's the new TV and digital advertising that will bring the relaunch to life for our target consumers starting next month.
Self-care. Oh, no. Ugh. Oh. Yes, it's starting the day like that. It's treating your skin to a little one-on-one time. It's deciding to have two scoops instead of one. It's really none of your business. Self-care is you in your home, in your sanctuary.
One scoop or two. A really good example of how value could still be delivered at a higher price point, because there's a big saving on a trip to the salon or the spa by using Sanctuary Spa at home. Moving on. In a world of shifting retail channels, we need to win wherever the shopper shops, and we're doing a lot of work to ensure that we have the right route to market strategy for each and every brand. Rafferty's Garden, which is the number one brand in the baby food category and one of our leading portfolio brands in Australia, has made significant strides in its e-commerce offering, where online market share is now ahead of offline as a result of better online execution and improved promotions.
I would also add, for those of you less familiar with Rafferty's Garden, there's a couple of packs over there, right? It's actually a sign of the brand's strength. Right? The total market share, combined online and offline, is more than double that of its nearest competitor. In beauty, we have focused our efforts on leveraging opportunities with Amazon, and we've seen some remarkable results with key brands, as you can see here. Sanctuary Spa was ranked number one out of 15 gifting brands on the site across Amazon Prime Day. A really fantastic result by the team. Across our markets, we've also been simplifying the way we do business. In the U.K., as part of the Imperial Leather launch, relaunch, we have significantly simplified the product line-up, reducing the total number of SKUs by over 40%.
Easier for retailers to merchandise, easier for shoppers to navigate on shelf, and simpler for us to manage through our supply chain. As we've been strengthening our brand building, we've also been simplifying how we do it, moving to fewer but better agencies who are more integrated into our planning. In Nigeria, we've been evolving our route to market, and this has allowed us to simplify and improve the configuration of our supply chain, including reducing the number of distribution centers we have as we build a stronger network of distributors and wholesalers. This will provide a further opportunity to unlock value in due course, just as we have with the residential properties that we sold over the past year. A lot of work has also gone into strengthening our teams.
I've mentioned before that we've made several new hires at the executive level over the past year, and these are individuals that have now been developing their own teams. You can see some of the newly created roles and teams here, and we've upgraded existing teams too, with, for example, a largely new central finance leadership team now in place. Our new hires are typically coming with backgrounds in blue chip organizations, so they have a clear understanding of what good looks like, as well as often experience of rougher, tougher turnarounds, and hence have the resilience to bring it to life as well. At the same time, we've also sought to promote internal talent too. Our executive now is split broadly 50/50 between new hires and experienced PZ talent.
As I mentioned, we refreshed our corporate values earlier in the year, to which the organization has responded really well, and we're delighted to see improvements in our employee well-being scores, a key measure for us. Finally, growing sustainably, by which we mean not only putting sustainability at the heart of all we do, but also striving to deliver reliable and sustainable growth. We want to make sure we're at the forefront of responding to evolving consumer habits and ensuring that our products serve them well. Our growing range of refill packs are a really good example, and one that contributes to our global effort to reduce plastic usage. A typical refill pack uses 70%-85% less plastic compared to buying multiple individual packs, and encourages the reuse of pumps, which are usually harder to recycle.
Critically, at the moment, it's also better value for the consumer versus buying individual packs. We see sustainability credentials as key to the proposition on those brands where it's relevant to the target consumer and as part of our corporate brand overall. We're not looking to put purpose before profit. Rather, we're focusing on what matters most to our consumers and to where we are best placed to make a difference. Today we're announcing some new sustainability goals. The full details of these will be included in our annual report, but here you can see the headlines. These refreshed long-term goals are stretching, but we believe achievable with sufficient hard work, and they build on the improvements we have been making for a number of years. This is entirely consistent with our previously announced ambition to work towards achieving B Corp accreditation.
We're really pleased that Childs Farm achieved this milestone in July of this year. A real testament to the founder, Joanna Jensen, and her team. More broadly, Childs Farm is progressing well. It's early days, of course, but we've made good progress so far, and we're targeting the business to deliver double-digit revenue growth this year. The targeted integration of the business is on track, and we have already seen some quick wins, not least leveraging the baby category expertise of our team in Australia, where we already have strong retailer connections, thanks to Rafferty's Garden. In due course, we see significant opportunities internationally. For example, the U.S. market is around five times the size of the U.K., but we also see Childs Farm as a brand that can travel elsewhere in Europe and Asia. Watch this space.
Finally, we're investing in capabilities to deliver sustainable growth. Aside from the brand-building activity I've mentioned already, we're stepping up our focus on key capabilities which will support us in delivering sustainable revenue growth. That's a summary of what we've done so far, and I think it's fair to say we've been busy. Now let's take a look forward. While we still have elements of our turnaround to deliver, not all is yet fixed, we are ready in some areas to move from turnaround to transformation. You'll recognize this slide, setting out our strategy, including where to play and how to win, as well as highlighting those areas that will enable progress. We told you before that this will deliver low to mid-single digit revenue growth.
However, as we move to the transformation phase, with much of the initial heavy lifting now done, we see greater opportunity. In addition to the focus on must-win brands in their home markets and in their existing categories, we will also increasingly look to expand these into new markets as well as into new category adjacencies. At the same time, we will be looking to add to our portfolio of must-win brands. This could be through acquisition, exactly as we did with Childs Farm, or it could be the result of the promotion of one or two of our existing portfolio brands. We'll continue to drive the PZ Cussons growth wheel for our brands and maintain our commitment to sustainability, evolving our culture, strengthening our leadership, and investing in capabilities.
You will also see a continued reduction in the complexity of the business, thereby freeing up capacity and focus to enable the transformation. This will also provide fuel to drive the business harder. We are setting the long-term ambition of reliably and sustainably delivering mid-single digit revenue growth, building a higher growth, higher margin, simpler and more sustainable business. In summary, today, we have reported a second year of strategic progress and like-for-like revenue growth, delivering against market expectations. We've underlined our confidence in the future with bolder revenue growth ambitions. Of course, we will have to continue to manage near-term volatility, leaning heavily on productivity measures and revenue growth management, but we are firmly focused on transforming this business.
We're confident in our strategy, in our long-term outlook, and our ability to navigate the short-term challenges that we and many others in our sector face as we strive to build a higher growth, higher margin, simpler and more sustainable business. Enough of us. We would love to take your questions. We'll take questions from the room to start. Please speak into the microphone so that everyone online can hear you, even though we'll all hear you in the room, and then we'll cut over to the phone lines to see if anyone's brave enough on the phone to ask a question. I can see a few hands up already. Go on, Eric. I mean, your hand went up first.
Well, thanks, Jonathan, Sarah. Thanks a lot for your presentation so far. Maybe two questions to start with. First on Africa, where performance clearly improved, but I was wondering, do you see that as Africa things being fixed? Or what do you see there as the key risks going forward for performance? The second question is around like have you updated longer term targets? And can you maybe give us a bit more color what long term means in terms of timeframe?
Why don't I give an answer on Africa, and then maybe Sarah can address the longer-term targets. All right? You know, it was only two years ago, we were losing money in Africa, right? Yet we have a 10% margin that we're reporting in these numbers, right? It has been a sustained and rapid improvement thanks to a lot of hard work on the ground by the team. Would I declare Africa as yet fixed? No, because we have more work to do. It's probably where we have the greatest legacy of complexity from the past, and so we're working hard to make process improvements, operational improvements, as well as dealing with, for example, you know, those going from residential properties into now potentially commercial properties as we reduce the redistribution center footprint.
Yes, there will be risks of operating in Africa. FX being in Nigeria, one of the biggest issues. We're getting much smarter, thanks to some of the people in this room, actually, at how we manage our FX in and out of Nigeria, which is great. We also continue to have confidence in the brands actually. As part of the multi-year brand planning we've been doing, led by Andrew, actually, we have seen some impressive thinking as to how we will take some of our really strong local equity brands into adjacent categories, and they will then represent what we believe will be a springboard for future expansion in Africa.
While there's always gonna be risk of operating there, we're now moving through to say, "Actually, we can see this being a driver of growth in the future," while we continue to deal with the legacy issues.
Eric, let me talk a little bit around the renewed revenue guidance of mid-single digit growth, which of course we've delivered for each of the last three quarters. I think I would encourage you to think about that as a two to three-year glide path for us. I think critically it is not reliant on M&A. It will be helped in the near term by the inflationary environment if we can successfully take price, but actually what it represents over time is category performance across each of our core categories.
Ok ay. Thank you. All right.
I think Nicola's hand was up before. Damian, I will come to you, but Nicola and Pat both have their hands up first. Back row advantage, you see.
Thank you. Nicola Mallard. Couple of questions, if I may as well. Just going back to Africa, can you give us a bit of a guide on category performance within the African business? I think the electricals business looked like it had quite a good step up on revenue, and presumably profit. Also on harvesting more must-win brands, you said potentially some coming from portfolio brands. What's the sort of performance triggers that would move it from one category to the other? What do we need to expect those before portfolio brands to deliver? And finally, you did start at the beginning saying about there was a few legacy issues still left to sort of sort out, and you briefly sort of commented just then Africa as well. Could you be more specific on areas you think still require some work?
Thank you.
Okay. Why don't I have a go at all of them actually, and then maybe Sarah can correct me if I make mistakes.
Thanks.
Right? Okay. We saw a good step up in all parts of our African business. Even though we report one aggregate, we saw good progress in family care or the business that looks more like our operations in other markets, which are a combination of personal care, hygiene and baby, as we'd call them our core categories. We all saw a significant step up in our electricals business, but under the very clear framework that we were trying to improve the profitability as opposed to going aggressively for volume, right? That enabled us to see not only strong price mix improvements in both those businesses, we also saw volume improvements. This is not just a pricing story in Africa.
I throw in Kenya and Ghana that continue to have a solid portfolio role in our African business with, margins which are much stronger because they are representing more of the personal care business than necessary laundry and bar soap. Africa was across the board progress. To answer your question on must-win brands, I think we talked a bit before, right? I'm not a big football fan and a supporter, right? But I do know the difference of being promoted to the Premiership, right, and not being in the Premier League, right? To get promoted, right, what is required from a portfolio brand to a must-win brand? My predictable answer to start with would be we have a validated growth wheel for it. You remember at the Capital Markets Day, we explained the different quadrants of that growth wheel.
Essentially what we're trying to get to is that we have confidence in a repeatable model, so that if we increase a dollar of investment, we can be increasingly confident of what return we'll get for that investment. That is why even though some of our portfolio brands are very strong in their respective categories, Rafferty's Garden is a really good example, right? Until we've got real confidence that actually we have the repeatable model, then we won't be promoting a brand like that. We do look forward to making some promotions in the next year or two. Legacy issues. Let me start with a couple of them, Sarah, might add some. One is just general complexity, all right? Trying to disentangle us from some of the organizational and systems architecture that we had previously, right?
Not least the SAP implementation that looked more like it was suitable to, you know, L'Oréal or Unilever or P&G, right? That is taking time to get to, and we wanna make sure that as we do it, we are also driving up, you know, improving our controls, improving our governance in general. That's something that we are taking intentionally our time to get right. We also have some pockets of our businesses that are not firing on all cylinders yet, right? One, to be very candid, would be our U.K. personal care business, which is somehow, you know, head spinning post the Carex explosion.
Now as it normalizes, what does normal look like and how do we get back on the front foot to make sure we're not only growing share, but we're also influencing growing our category, the categories in which we're operating. That's a business that is work in progress. We made a change of leadership. We have a new managing director in place, and he's already making demonstrable progress on increasing not just reliability, but also confidence in our ability to put money on the table to invest behind it. Sarah?
I think the only thing I would add is touching on the GBP 20 million of transformational costs. A little is around the back office platform that Jonathan talked about, but it's mostly behind our footprint of supply. That is doing far more than catching up on under-investment in the past. It's designed to give us a future-proof organization in terms of growth capacity, agility, and a lower all-in cost of production to fuel our margin ambitions and underpin our revenue outlook.
Very good. Pat, go on. Damian, of course, can continue.
Hi. Pat here. Just a few questions, just kinda touching back on the personal care side of things. I mean, have you seen any down trading or private label penetration in Europe or even in Africa across your home and hygiene business? A second one, excluding Carex, what would be your organic must-win brand growth? The last one I would have would be in terms of A&P spend, is that a flex maybe to save on margin in 2020, 2023?
Let me answer the first and maybe Sarah can answer the second two. It is very early days for us to see evidence of down trading within our categories. We have seen some movement within our portfolio within a category, and the best example of that would be as we have executed the Imperial Leather relaunch in the U.K., intentionally nudging it up a little bit in market pricing and positioning to justify the fantastic formulations of lather, to justify the fragrance investment in the packaging. What we've done is create underneath it a tier that we call Cussons Creations, which is fantastic shower gel and bath product formulations selling at GBP 1 or less. Right? It's a brand name that I know and trust, but at a cracking everyday price.
Where we've started to execute that, if you like, bifurcation of those two bits of the business, we've seen very strong momentum on that value play, and I'm really glad that we've done it because it means they're staying in our portfolio and they're not going to private label. We've seen a little bit of down trading on bar soaps in Africa, right? Which is not surprising. We are looking at how we best address that. Do we play with smaller pack sizes to protect critical price points, NGN 50, NGN 60, NGN 65 price points, right? But in all of our examples where we've been looking at how do we maintain a good value offering, we also want to maintain investing in our brands, which links a little bit to the third question, so I'm now gonna steal the third question.
You can do the must-win brand one, right? Which is we want to sustain increased levels of brand investment, right? I think we said before, we were never intending to sustain the levels of increase that we made in year one and year two versus pre-strategy. Actually what we would do is over time shift to an increasing return on investment focus, and that part of that is fueled by better data and analytics so that we have more confidence, and hence why I use the example of the Carex example, that we're getting into the marketing mix modeling so that we can have a little bit more confidence of the return that we'll get. Overall, we see brand investment as a strength in our business and not over the long term to be slashed.
In the short term, sometimes you have to make the right choices, but actually what we're trying to balance in all of this is delivery versus expectation, investing in our brands, and yet still offering competitive value in the market so that we don't overprice and leave ourselves exposed to other people being at lower prices. That's the tightrope that we and many others are having to walk at the moment.
We expect our brand investment in FY 2023 to be a step on from FY 2022. In terms of must-win brands and how we think about them, Pat, they were a core part of our strategy, being both structurally advantaged in terms of their position in their categories and that future growth, but also structurally more profitable. We always intended for them to grow ahead of portfolio brands, all of which have a role to play, and ahead of the average. Our must-win brands last year declined 5%. Had it not been for Carex, which was down some 30%, they would have grown 9% in aggregate. Of our existing must-win brands, seven of the eight excluding Carex grew. You heard Jonathan talk about Childs Farm, our new must-win brand, being in double-digit growth.
In terms of Q1, a very similar trajectory, and we would expect for FY 2023 our must-win brands to grow ahead of our portfolio brands.
Damian? I'm choosing. Do you wanna put your hand up now?
Yeah. No.
Unless they've asked you a question.
Still got questions.
Okay, you still got some. All right.
Yeah. Damian McNeela at Numis. First one is around brand elasticity.
Yeah.
It by and large seems to have held up pretty well. I was just wondering whether that has surprised you and your teams, and whether there is anything, any sort of color you can give behind that. In terms of the GBP 20 million investment, Sarah, can you give us an idea of phasing and how you think about the returns profile of that? Then just last one on cost headwinds. Can you quantify what you're seeing this year? I know you sort of freight's hedged and half of this year's COGS is-
Yeah.
Just quantify it please.
Let me pick up with brand elasticity. The first would be a little caveat or disclaimer to put in is I think, you can tell me, most reactions and most of the summer's results from consumer goods players was a little bit, wow, they're surprised there wasn't as much volume elasticity as people were expecting. I think that is now beginning to change, and I think we will begin to see bigger challenges in general in consumer goods as shoppers, particularly, go into the winter in the high energy markets in Europe, etc., right? If I speak a little bit more specifically about PZ Cussons.
I think you'll remember, you know, when I first arrived, I started talking about we need to increase our focus on gross margin and this notion that we were introducing of, hey, price mix and how do you grow price mix, right? I'm glad that we were talking about that long before the inflation because it meant we were a little bit already trying to open a toolbox and learn what to do with the tools. What we have been able to do is, as we moved through last year, is we were able to ramp up our price mix without seeing increasing levels of volume elasticity. You saw from Sarah's charts that in the first quarter we had zero price mix, but then we had 8% or 9% for the next three quarters, and we had -3% volume.
If I give you the update on our first quarter now, and I'm going to exclude the very difficult, complex thing that none of you have mentioned about our extra six days of trading that were in P1 and make equalizing very difficult, right? Ignore the price mix for P1. If you look at on subsequent nine weeks, we saw price mix of 14% and volume elasticity of only -2.7%. In other words, we've been able to implement higher levels of pricing or mix, right, and still hold or in fact slightly decline the rate of volume decline. A lot of that is because either now or in the past year or two we stepped up in investment.
There are stronger brand fundamentals, but also because we're bringing news to markets in some of our brands in new and interesting ways. We're relaunching Imperial Leather. We're relaunching Sanctuary Spa. We have smarter, better promotional plans in our ANZ business who've done some really good work on revenue growth management, where they have done a lot of optimizing of should we be high-low, should we be EDLP, how do we exactly hit the right price points yet nudge up the price realization so the consumer still feels like they're getting a great deal, but we're also able to cover some of the cost inflation. That's what we have been doing with some success.
The great unknown for us and many others is as we move through the next arguably three or four quarters is exactly how is the shopper gonna respond, right? We're fighting hard to make sure that we are offering really good value, be it very cheap or at a higher price point. Value comes in many ways. It's why I used the Sanctuary Spa example, right? It's not just about selling stuff cheap to be good value, right? That's where the strength of the brands comes in. We will be different to private label because our brands are standing for something and standing for more. We're also looking at making sure our distribution footprint is playing where the shopper is going. We all noticed in the U.K. Kantar data that Aldi popped up does number three, right?
We're making sure whether it's the supermarkets or the discounters in the U.K. and other markets, we're also increasing on literally our numeric distribution. We are available wherever the shopper wants to shop.
Damian, let me talk on the GBP 20 million. To be clear, that is OpEx spend that we intend to account for as an adjusting item and will sit alongside our stated intent to also increase our level of CapEx investment in the business. We've talked around GBP 20 million across FY 2022 to 2025. You'll have seen about GBP 4 million go through in FY 2022. The majority of the spend will be across three and four, and the majority of that spend will be across our factory footprint. In terms of the returns profile, there are some, I guess, more intangible returns for us as a business that underpin the mid-single digit growth revenue ambition, and that is fixing some legacy processes, some systems, and liberating our good teams to focus on value-added work.
There's also a hard financial benefit, which is we see a lower all-in cost of production available to us, less so in 2023, and I'll talk a little bit about the cost inflation headwind, but certainly in 2024 and in 2025. It's very definitely one of the building blocks to our mid-teen operating margin over time. If I take cost inflation then, we expect the level of cost inflation increase in 2023 to represent probably a 15% increase on 2022. If you're quickly doing the math, that's some GBP 55 million or GBP 60 million. The makeup is also slightly different. Within our cost of goods, there's roughly 80% of cost inflation that is input cost, raw materials, and third-party manufacture. There's another 10% in freight logistics and another 10% in terms of the unit cost of production in our own factories.
The driver, the significant driver in FY 2022 was in raw materials, most notably palm oil and surfactants, and both those categories were up significant double digits. They are still increasing over the year, but a much, much lower rate of increase, and you'll have seen that palm oil prices are off their all-time highs. Our freight cost for 2023 will be up on 2022 as we recontract at a slightly higher market price. We're relatively, in terms of production terms, shielded from energy, but we are more mindful of the impact of energy on our consumers. We are seeing the rates of labor increase in our factories, and we are balancing that.
We're balancing both in terms of CapEx and what activities we can automate, but also where we do have good people doing good work, wanting to reward them in terms of competitive rates of pay. We've been very determined to put through salary increases and with the majority of our teams earning a bonus for the last financial year. 55-60 plays 40, but with a slightly different shape. That's a little bit, Damian, why we talked about the margin profile building in the second half of the year, 'cause having given ourselves the certainty of covering most of our palm oil requirements for the first half, they were at relatively high levels.
All right. Should we maybe move to the phone and see if anyone else wants to ask online? We can happily come back to the room, and if anyone else has thought of another difficult question. I'm looking to the back, or for anyone else who's gonna indicate. I think we might have a voice of a god or goddess come online now.
Of course. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure that your line is unmuted locally.
Either the line has failed or they really have no question.
At this time, we have not received any questions.
Okay.
I'll pass over to the room.
Okay. Let's just check. Any other questions in the room? You're welcome to ask. Not the PZ Cussons team to keep us on our toes. That's not fair. Okay. With that, I thank you very much for coming. Well, those of you joining online, thank you very much. Thanks a lot for coming to see us. I encourage for those of you who haven't traveled to our markets and actually can touch the brands you can't normally get hold of, at least take a look at those, and we'll happily tell you some stories about them on the way out. Thank you very much.