So we're gonna get started. Next up this morning, I'm pleased to welcome Colgate-Palmolive's CEO, Noel Wallace, to the stage. Over the past few years at our conference, Colgate has highlighted the capabilities it has been building that have enabled the company to deliver consistently strong and balanced growth. We look forward to hearing Noel discuss the strategy and scaling capabilities as the company looks out to 2030 . Noel is gonna give a brief presentation, and then I'm gonna join him on stage for questions after that.
Great. Thanks, Lauren. Great! Well, welcome, and good morning to everyone. It's great to start off with a video that really features our brands, because I'm going to spend a lot of time today talking about brand health and how we're driving the penetration for those brands. But this is more a reflection of the incredible efforts that our 34,000 colleagues around the world have put into driving sustainable growth for the company. A reminder of our safe harbor. So let me quickly recap the second quarter results, which were strong. Sales were up 5%, strong organic at 9%. We were lapping, as you remember, almost 9% last year, but importantly, that growth was very well balanced between volume at a purely 5% and good pricing as well, coming through the P&L.
Organic sales obviously continued to trend after 22 quarters within our long-term guidance, so we're very pleased with that. The balance of that business across all of our divisions and all of our categories were certainly evident in the first half of the year, and you saw that again in the second quarter. Gross profit margin expansion of 300 basis points, a function of the pricing that we're getting into the P&L, and obviously, a more benign costing environment. Operating profit up double-digit. Again, our fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit operating profit that's driving market share growth. I'm going to talk today about penetration, which is really behind that market share growth, and importantly, our free cash flow up 29%.
For the second quarter guidance that we provided, we will keep our net sales at 2%-5%, including a mid-single digit impact from foreign exchange. You've obviously seen the exchange movements a lot in the last couple of weeks, particularly the Latin American currencies. Organic sales guidance was increased to 6%-8% from 5%-7% previously. Gross profit and margin is expected to still be up on the year. We'll continue to fuel the top line with accelerated advertising. I'm going to talk about ROI and how we're thinking about that as we look to the balance of this year.
Base business EPS guidance was raised to 8%-11% from mid to high single digits, and we continue to believe we'll have strong cash flow to allow us the flexibility to invest back behind the, the business or pay our dividends or buy down debt, as well as share repurchases in the, in the year- to- go. In the first half, clearly our strategy is working, and I'm going to talk to you about what, what's working in the strategy, but more importantly, how we're going to sustain that growth moving forward. If you go back to 2019 , when we set up our new strategy, the whole essence of that strategy was to drive consistent top-line growth and getting organic back in our 3%-5% long-term guidance, and we've now delivered 22 quarters within that guidance range.
And it's critical for us, the way we look at it, to drive consistent top-line growth in order to drive the consistent EPS growth that you expect. In the first half of the year, importantly, we saw volume come back into the P&L. Despite the significant pricing we've taken over the last couple of years, it was really important to see the volume revert back into our businesses, and clearly, across the board, all operating divisions grew volume in the second quarter, while we also got some pricing. We'll continue to see pricing recede, we believe, in the near term, at least in the back half of this year. We'll continue to see volume growth be strong as we move through the back half. The driver behind that is getting the advertising and the health of our brands where we needed to get them.
We've obviously accelerated the spending on advertising quite considerably over the last three years, and I'll talk about how that's paying back in terms of brand health and penetration. But a lot, big reason behind this acceleration, behind the health of our brands, was ensuring that we're improving the elasticity of our brands as we took significant pricing over the last couple of years. And I think the strong volume growth we demonstrated in the second quarter is a testament to the fact that that strategy is certainly working for us. That has translated into all important earnings per share. Now, four quarters of teen earnings per share growth, so we're deeply proud of that progress and hope to continue to sustain a good earnings per share growth in the future moving forward. The balance sheet, an important aspect for us.
Obviously, with the inflation that we saw in 2022, it was getting the cash back to where we need it to give us maximum flexibility. You see the cash is up 63% in the 2023 year and up 29% on the year-to-date basis. So a good control of our working capital and getting the cash profits up to drive that. Again, penetration is ultimately how it's driving market share, but good to see the global market share is responding very positively to advertising, to the premiumization strategies that we put in the, in the market. I will dimensionalize penetration a bit more to help you understand what's driving this growth, but encouragingly, we're seeing great response to the work that we're putting into the marketplace.
So, the important question here is, you know, how are we going to continue to sustain this good growth that we've had over the last couple years? And what I'm gonna do is try to, in the short time I have, dimensionalize a couple aspects that I think are really important. You hear me talk a lot about brand penetration. Ultimately, yeah, market share is important. Ultimately, gross margins and top-line growth is important. But at the end of the day, it's pretty simple. If we're not putting our products into more households, we're not gonna sustain profitable growth moving forward. So we've spent a lot of time within the company really educating our marketing people, getting the insights on what drives brand penetration, and ultimately, how do we want to drive that in a profitable way? And that stems first and foremost through driving brand health.
I'll talk about three things today, our science-led core innovation and how that's driving improvements across all of our price tiers. Scaling capabilities, you hear Lauren mention that. We spent a lot of time over the last three years building capabilities, and we're now scaling those and building new capabilities into the organization that we think set us up for success long term. Then ultimately, making sure the advertising investment that we're putting into the P&L is delivering the best return for our business and for our shareholders. So let's talk with science-led core innovation. It starts with great, deep insights. If we get great insights, we can put the science behind that, and that's exactly what we're doing. So let me talk a little bit about the trends that we're seeing in the marketplace. Preventative care is systemic across the world.
This is, I think, a manifestation of the fact that consumers now are connected to so many aspects that give them an orientation of how healthy they are. It's not about going to the doctor anymore, it's about reading that continuously. We're going to play into that trend. As you see the statistic here on the right, 83% of consumers will say oral care products that provide innovative benefits, they're willing to pay more for. So this notion of preventative care is becoming very top of mind with consumers, and we have absolutely the right brand to play in for that. You're familiar with Colgate Total, one of our core businesses. We are doing a major relaunch of that business in Latin America, bringing superior benefits to that product that, I can't talk about here until they're actually out in the marketplace.
But this is rolling out as we speak, and we think plays perfectly into the trend of preventative oral care. We're gonna couple that with a new toothbrush, a high-density bristle toothbrush. This has both tapered bristles for deep penetration in the gum line and between teeth, as well as rounded polishing bristles in the middle. The high density aspect of this brush, it has 5,000 bristles in it, which this is 3x the amount of an ordinary toothbrush, which provides better cleaning and a whole different mouth feel for the consumer as well. So we love the innovation that this is bringing to market, and it really rounds out the total range really nicely.
And then we're gonna couple that with a relaunch of our mouthwash as well, and really connect into strong regimen claims that we've made on clinicals over the last year and a half, that will hopefully substantiate the importance of rounding out your oral care routine with a mouthwash as well. I haven't showcased a lot of the science behind Elta. This is a brand that's built on its cosmetic elegance and the fact that it's the number one brand recommended by derms, the number one brand trusted by derms, and the number one brand used by derms. So it sets a very high bar to continue to make sure that we're driving that advocacy with that important line of profession.
And in this case, we had a product that was leaving a sheen or a what they call a white cast on people with darker complected skin. We've developed technology to get rid of that white cast and still provide the cosmetic elegance and obviously, the superior UV protection. So a great breakthrough in terms of this innovation. We're in the midst of taking that to the market as we speak. Taking the learning that we've had in premium skin health and now translating that into the mass market. So you've seen a lot of work in premium skin health around hyaluronic acid and retinol. We're now taking that and premiumizing our Protex business in Latin America with this. This is off to a really great start in terms of how consumers have reacted to it.
Again, a lot of consumers can't pay the premium prices associated with some of those benefits. We're bringing it much more into the mainstream and leveraging the scale that we have in that market. Soupline, the first unit-dose fabric softener and our leading fabric softener business in France, where we have a number one position, not only is this delivering the superior softness and fragrance delivery that consumers are looking for, it obviously provides significantly less plastic to the environment. As you see there, 70% less plastic than their ordinary fabric softeners. So a great innovation and the first unit-dose innovation in the market. Moving on to Hill's. The derm segment is a very, very large segment in the pet nutrition category. Dogs have either environmental sensitivities or food sensitivities.
This one's specifically targeted to pets with food sensitivities, and we're providing a low-fat version, which has been a long issue with the veterinarians needing a more low-cal recipe for their dogs and cats. And we brought great innovation by providing the derm protection that they're looking for in a low-fat diet. So good, just a smattering of some of the innovations. So let me now move quickly on to some of the capabilities. I'm gonna focus on two. You've heard me talk a lot about our digital transformation and our data analytics transformation. Diana at CAGNY presented some of our AI, and what I'm excited to share with you today, how we're actually now deploying some of this AI to drive the top line and the productivity of our business.
So if I look at digital, there were five vectors, so to speak, that we were very focused on. We had to be very choiceful on the areas that we wanted to transform across the organization. We brought in a lot of core competency from the outside to help us develop these, and you can see them across the bottom, making our media work harder. Obviously, with the acceleration that we've had there, that's of paramount importance. We've really worked hard to get the best talent from our WPP agency, which is the largest advertising firm in the world, to make sure that we're bringing the best of their network into our business and building our own internal capabilities in a much more different way about brand building.
Driving digital commerce, that continues to be a fast-growing area, which is e-commerce, where our penetration affords us the opportunity to be much more aggressive, and we're doing, I think, a terrific job there. Marketing, excuse me, mastering retail media, this is a growing segment of the media market and an area that we have to really strategically think about carefully on how we're using that in the context of all the media opportunities that we have and making sure it's drawing obviously effective ROI and brand building for us. But the area I want to spend more time on today is developing effective digital content. And as you can imagine, content is very fluid.
It's dynamic and changing all the time, and we have to have systems and tech stacks in our company, working with our agency to make sure that we're addressing that and gaining a competitive advantage in the market. So let me talk about that a little bit. Here's an example of AI, where we're able now to test every piece of content that goes out in the digital medium with AI and score it versus the history of what we have. And that allows us to get far more confident that what we're deploying is particularly working for us. So again, a huge enhancement of how we think about the efficiency of our media, and that's actually in the markets today, and we're rolling it out around the world. Second is analytics, a huge area of opportunity for the organization.
But again, there are so many different spaces companies can decide to focus on. We've been very choiceful on the areas that we think are going to drive sustained top-line growth for us and improved profitability at the bottom line. So here are the five vectors there. Revenue impact, we've talked a lot about revenue growth management. We're now making it much more technical and algorithmic driven by taking data and taking conclusions from that data that AI is giving us. Media spend optimization, programmatic media is a key opportunity for us to make our media more efficient, obviously avoiding unnecessary cost as we use data analytics to determine the inefficiency. Time saved, we can use data to be much more efficient in how we make decisions and things that we're taking literally months to decide, we can make decisions much quicker.
But the area I'm most excited about is promo optimization, and that's how we look at gross to net, which historically was all very labor-intensive, where we had to look at extensive spreadsheets to really decide how things were working. Now we can put it into AI models and decide what's working or what's not. So we're using AI and machine learning to literally put billions of scenarios into our network to decide on how to optimize gross to net spending. We've just tested this now with one of our major retailers in the U.S. They absolutely love the opportunities. We're working with them to perfect the model, and as we perfect that model, we will roll it out to more retailers and more geographies around the world. But an exciting opportunity for you.
So again, a lot of the stuff that Diana talked to, we're now trying to put it into the market and deliver real benefits into the P&L. Third, a question that we get asked frequently, which is: Well, how high is high on advertising, and are you getting the ROI that you need for the business? So let me talk a little bit about that, here. Clearly, we've put a lot of investment. This is to build brand health and to build brand penetration at the end of the day. And you can clearly see the step up that we've had in the growth of the company, the consistent organic growth that we've had, and you consistently see the performance that that is now delivering at the bottom line.
In essence, yes, the advertising is working, but we're not going to sit back and simply say, "Let's spend more." We need to figure out how to optimize that spend in ways that will drive ongoing efficiency, and I think data and some of the analytical, digital work that I showed earlier will certainly unlock that. But the ROIs are improving, and this is probably the most important metric aside from the business performance, to ensure that we have confidence in the spending that we have in the marketplace. And you can see year in and year out, we have better ROI, particularly in the digital space. And as we continue to move more of our spending towards digital, we would expect this ROI to continue.
As we build the tech stacks in the company to get better at analyzing this data, we likewise will assume that those ROIs will continue to improve. So let me show you a smattering of our advertising, which I think will give you a sense for the impact we're having and how we've improved, certainly, the cut-through value of our media.
[Foreign language] When weight kept them down, science helped them soar. When morning kisses turned sour, science made them sweet. When itching kept them up, science helped them rest easy. When the world gave them setbacks, science gave them bounce backs. And when your vet delivered life-altering news, science delivered life-changing nutrition. Hill's Prescription Diet. Science did that.
He still doesn't remember us, Bruno? Fabuloso! Fabuloso. The honeymoon? The accident. Mi amor.
Long-lasting freshness to take the drama out of any mess. Fabuloso, dramatically clean.
So you recall, this is a brand we brought from Latin America, probably the better part of 15 years ago. And, we've really leveraged initially the Hispanic market, which obviously had a strong affinity and orientation, too. But now it's become a really strong brand in, in the mass market. And this chart kind of gives you an indication of the success we're having behind just a great, well-positioned brand that is obviously delivering against expectations that the market has around efficacy and, and fragrance. This is the relaunch into a super concentrated formula, where we've seen great success on that, using 50% less product at the same time, but driving enhanced efficacy, and a great success story for us in terms of getting innovation right, getting the target, and using effective content.
That spot you showed, that's a whole series of telenovela spots that we have on YouTube, so again, utilizing social media and the video platforms very effectively to drive the brand, so that's household penetration and brand health, and it really is underscored by these three aspects of our strategy, but it really permeates the entire organization on how we think about driving growth, and the penetration brand growth plans that we have are all driven by where is the penetration opportunity that we see, and how do we want to develop a pipeline of innovation and advertising content to deliver against that? What I'm going to do now is bring this all together very quickly by giving you a real-life story in India on how these strategies have come to life to drive an India business that unfortunately, had gotten distracted.
We got back to the core of what we stand for, and we really focused on shifting our marketing efforts back to the core and the science principles that built that brand over 90 years in India. We got distracted with the Ayurvedic segment. We took a step back and said: Let's get back to what we stand for, and that's demonstrated in here in how we're thinking about it. Likewise, 1.3 billion consumers, vast majority of consumers brush their teeth less than one time a day. We have a vast opportunity to drive consumption. We're going to show you some innovative ways that we're trying to do that on top of our Bright Smiles, Bright Futures, and obviously making sure that we put the advertising in there. Three core, big core businesses, our base anti-cavity business, which we relaunched with superior efficacy in the last year.
We took Max Fresh. The freshness segment is a very significant part of the Indian market, with a brand that delivers ten times longer-lasting freshness than an ordinary fluoride toothpaste. And we're premiumizing the Indian market by launching whitening and bringing that benefit and establishing that as a long-term growth opportunity for the market. So here's what we look at internally, in terms of how we think about brand health. First and foremost, it starts with: Are we getting consideration? Are consumers considering us in their buying set when they see the advertising or think of buying the category? And you can see for our individual variants, Strong Teeth, Max Fresh, Active Salt, and Visible White, the consideration over the last three years has moved up very, very nicely. You can't get in a consumer shopping basket unless you're being considered. That's the obvious conclusion to that.
But more importantly, is the health of the brand demonstrating the efficacy that you want, and are the messages resonating and cutting through? Top-of-mind awareness, what do consumers think of first? You can see that continues to grow. Brand of first choice in their consideration, that continues to grow. Best oral care expert. This was, again, a deliberate effort for us to take the brand and get back to science and get back to what we stand for. You can see the success we're having there. And ultimately, that ladders into what we've talked about. How do we get the elasticity, given the pricing that we've had, to continue to be delivered in the market and not see significant erosion? And you see worth paying more for.
Again, we think very much connected to best oral care expert, but this is how we think about brand health to ensure that that advertising money is indeed working effectively for us. The second thing, eight out of ten Indians have cavities, 1.3 billion consumers were brushing their teeth less than one time a day. And if you look at the fact that some of the habits and practices of that market, that it's just common for people in that market to finish off their evening with sweets. They go to bed, and they have sweets. So we developed a campaign to really tap into that insight and go after nighttime brushing. 80% of urban consumers in India, so think about that, 1.3 billion, 80% do not brush their teeth at night.
Here's a campaign that's going to turn that around.
[Foreign language]
Long-term strategy for the company, obviously, we wanna see this improve over the next decade. A real opportunity for us to partner with health officials in the country, but making sure that we're committed to driving per capita consumption in a very, very opportunistic market for us over the next decade. So some exciting work, thinking very differently how to tackle that. And this goes in parallel with our Bright Smiles, Bright Future program, which is obviously the cornerstone of our oral health education around the world, and a very big part of the India growth strategy moving forward. So my compliments to the India team, who's doing just a fantastic job. You saw the double-digit growth in that market in the second quarter.
Again, I think a reflection of the strategies, getting back to what we stand for and making sure that we scale our capabilities in that market as well. You can see that's paid out, obviously, on our core toothpaste growth, as well as the premium toothpaste growth, which is important for that market. Long-term, we see significant growth in the middle class in India, and therefore, that affords us a real unique opportunity to continue to premiumize that. With over a 50% share in that market, we have a responsibility to grow the category as profitably as possible. So I'm gonna finish off with a spot on Nigeria, which I think kind of brings a lot of the excitement that we have around oral care and consumption building, particularly in a huge opportunity market like Nigeria.
But let me summarize very quickly in terms of the messages that I wanna leave you with. Clearly, the strategy is working, but the important thing is we can't be complacent. We're thinking about 2030 now, and how we need to continue to dial up our capabilities and continue to make changes to sustain that growth. Scaling the capabilities is important. We're centralizing a lot of those capabilities into the New York office to ensure that we can deploy them as efficiently and consistently around the world as possible, and we're obviously continuing to look at ways to optimize our investment around the world. We love the fact that we're driving brand health.
We love the fact that we're driving brand penetration, but we need to continue to look for ways to make sure that media spending continuously delivers the ROI, particularly given the strength of our innovation pipeline over the next couple years. So with that, let me just finish off with the India spot, and then I'll open it up for some Q&A. Nigeria spot. I said India spot, it's Nigeria.
All right, everyone, make we talk. Time don reach to rearrange things so as to give una small wisdom. Una think say una sabi. Sure, my teeth brush na, but una own, abeg no be slow.
Before una go talk say my smile no reach, make una think and try first.
We no dey here to dey point una with our small finger. We show una solution instead.
Ever heard of Colgate, the number one oral health brand in the world?
One smile go find life seem true, as it supposed be.
You'll see why we are the cleanest around.
For zero cavities-
Long-lasting fresh breath.
Mom, it's your turn to brush.
Mama and papa, buy 'em, use 'em, and shine your smile.
No more cover mouth.
Because with Colgate, na do do your garbage your smile!
Great. Well, great insights there for a business that we think has significant growth potential, and a way to really involve children to persuade their parents to brush their teeth, which in this case, our education and insights suggest that we're getting children to brush their teeth, but their mother and father aren't. So great opportunity there. Over to you.
You looked at me like I was the one not brushing my teeth. Okay, great. We took a few minutes, so we'll just have a few things I wanted to maybe try to touch on. Let me start out with something closer in, notwithstanding the way we just spent the last 25 minutes or so. But just to walk around the world, I thought would be helpful, just if there are any areas, in particular, markets that you're incrementally more concerned, whether it's market growth slowing, competition dynamics changing. Let me start there.
Yeah, you know, there's no question there's a lot of differences as you think about how economies and geographies are evolving, and the fact that we do business in 200 countries around the world, we have a great exposure to that. And that's one of our strengths, is obviously the diversity of our business, and particularly the strength of our emerging markets. So if I guess, bring that down to the specific divisions and how we set up our business, let me start with North America. Clearly, we've seen a pricing recession in North America. The category is a little bit sluggish. We'll see if that was a summer impact, or whether as we come out of the summer and into the back-to-school period, whether we see that come back, but we're mindful of that.
But I do think, given the significant pricing and competitive nature of the North America market, you will continue to see some recession of the pricing dynamics there. Again, given the fact that over the last three years, there has been considerable pricing taken in the U.S., and coupled with the fact that we see coupon redemption rates up quite considerably over the last six months in the U.S. So my expectation is you'll see that business, at least the U.S. category, continue to slow or be sluggish. But again, the segmentation of that business, the premiumization opportunities are there. The mid-price, it continues to be very robust, and when you have good premium offerings, you get the share growth there. Latin America, a wonderful region for us.
Obviously, we've seen a lot of foreign exchange issues over the last month and a half, particularly the peso and the real. Consumption in general looks good. We saw a little blip in August in Mexico, which we're gonna have to watch carefully, but the expectation is that that will come back as we move through the back half of the year. But overall, there's still some pricing opportunities, given where the deval is. But again, consumption seems to be okay, and our volume and value shares are up very nicely across all of our categories in Latin America. If I move over to Asia, China continues to be sluggish.
We're not, you know, our business isn't significant there, but we do see the fact that consumers are not returning to the category nearly at the levels they were in the past. Categories have come down. Our Colgate business continues to grow share in China. Our Darlie business has flattened, and now we're starting to see the early signs of green shoots on the Darlie business, which is our local brand there, and that continues to demonstrate that it's turning around, despite the fact that we took significant pricing over the last two years. Africa, Middle East, good consumption, a lot of foreign exchange pricing going into that market.
But the team there, under Maria Paula's leadership, is doing a phenomenal job scaling our capabilities that I've talked about and doing some incredible things to drive consumption in the market, and shares are up really nicely across that division. And then what division am I? Hill's. Hill's obviously continues to perform exceptionally well. We had 2.5% volume growth in the second quarter, including the impact of private label, which brought that number down a bit. But we still see real growth opportunities, despite the fact that the category has slowed a little bit. We think driven a little, to a certain extent, some of the pet adoptions coming down. But where we compete and where we want to compete, the head space is still very good. There's new form opportunities, there's Small Paws, there's cat.
We continue to have a lot of head space, and a big part of our focus has been North America. That will continue to be our number one priority, but we have real opportunities to expand, particularly given that we've opened up the manufacturing capacity on that business, and that's afforded us a significant opportunity now to get into more recipes and different forms and packaging configurations to drive that category.
Okay, great. So let me ask one pointed follow-up, which is just, you've mentioned in North America, coupon redemptions are up. Is that what, you know, kind of what's impacting the pricing we're seeing in scanner data, or has actually, like, promotional intensity gone up?
We haven't seen a significant change in promotional intensity. As I talked about in on the second quarter call and at Deutsche Bank as well, we did have to adjust some pricing in a couple of our categories, not in oral care, but in certain home care segments and in certain personal care segments. That was reflected in the second quarter pricing. That will obviously flow through for the balance of the year. Coupon redemptions are driving some of that pricing down in the category. We've not seen. You know, there hasn't been a significant conversion in private label, and we've seen very little step down in terms of price tiers. I mean, as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, a little bit more in the mid tier.
We have not seen people going all the way down to value. As we've talked about before, private label, particularly in the oral care category, has very low penetration.
Okay, great. Advertising reaching that new high watermark that you highlighted on the slide, and probably not coincidentally, we've seen that really nice acceleration in volume growth to this peer-leading 5% level. So taking the comments you just made on what you're seeing in various markets, and, you know, investment levels going into the second half, how should we think about volume expectations from here?
I think I would characterize it, certainly, that our focus has always been how do we balance pricing and volume in the P&L, and we've obviously had to take a lot of pricing to offset the inflation that we've seen in categories. We fully expect to see the volume come back and the pricing recede, so that will be consistent through the back half of this year. The volume, though, is performing really, really well. I mean, we were leading in pricing in Latin America. We've seen our volume come back really strongly there. We saw the volume come back very strongly in North America.
We had some comp benefits there as well, but certainly, the volume shares that we've seen in North America, given particularly where our brands are positioned, have performed really, really well, and that speaks to the fact that as we took some of the pricing down, that we were not competitively priced. That is reflected well in the volume performance we've had there. If you go across the world, we're getting great volume performance in Europe, as we see the receding of pricing there, and that's delivered record market shares for our businesses in Europe as well.
So we feel like the strategy that we put in place, the years of investing behind the brands and building brand salience and resonance and bringing good innovation to the market, is helping us withstand some of this consumer softness we see in getting consumers to choose our brands over competitors.
Okay, great. We're out of time, but we are lucky to have a breakout session, so please join me in thanking Colgate, and we can move to breakout.
Thanks, everyone.