P&G would like to remind you that today's discussion will include a number of forward-looking statements. If you will refer to P&G's most recent 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K reports, you will see a discussion of factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these projections. Additionally, the company has posted on its investor relations website, www.pginvestor.com, a full reconciliation of non-GAAP and other financial measures. Here is Chairman of the Board, President, and Chief Executive Officer of The Procter & Gamble Company, Jon Moeller.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our 2022 Investor Day and to Cincinnati. I also wanna welcome all of you who are joining us on the webcast. We're happy you can join us for this presentation. We're looking forward to talking with many of you at the reception this evening. This is our agenda for this afternoon. I'll spend some time talking through the formation and implementation of our integrated strategic choices. Andre will take us through our recent results and the market realities that we're facing. You'll hear from several of our business unit leaders who will share how we're strengthening the execution of our strategy. After a short break, we'll hear from each one of our sector business unit leaders on the progress they are making in their respective businesses. Of course, we'll close with your questions.
As I mentioned, later this evening, you'll have an opportunity to talk with nearly all of our top leadership team at the reception and booth displays. I wanna start with a strong and clear statement of confidence. Confidence in our strategic choices, confidence in how we're strengthening the execution of these choices, confidence in our ability to deliver balanced growth and value creation. P&G's integrated strategy is working. Portfolio, superiority, productivity, constructive disruption, and empowered, agile and accountable organization and culture. We've identified four ways to strengthen its execution, which are clear and, I believe, compelling. Supply, environmental sustainability, digital acumen, and a superior employee value equation. The reason for my confidence is P&G people.
Our leadership team, most of whom you'll hear from today, and all of our employees around the world, what they've created, their commitment to our purpose, values, and principles, their high motivation to win in service to consumers, customers, society, shareowners, and their strong focus on excellence in everything they do. Sorry, I'm losing ground here. Given that this is P&G's first Investor Day since 2018, I thought it would be useful to start with a short refresher on where we've been and the choices we've made to get to where we are now. To deliver balanced growth and value creation, we're focused on the five strategic choices I mentioned. A portfolio of daily use products, where performance plays a significant role in driving brand choice. Superiority, product, package, communication, go-to-market and value.
A continued focus on productivity, constructive disruption, and a highly efficient and effective organization structure. Our objectives and our strategies have remained consistent for some time now, but it took us a while to get here. Back in 2012, we started our work to make productivity as integral a part of P&G's DNA as innovation. We doubled down on the strategy when we announced our second five-year, $10 billion cost savings program in 2017. As a result, we're a very different company than we were. As I shared at our 2018 Investor Day, we reduced the number of manufacturing sites by 20%, the number of manufacturing platforms by 50%. We reduced P&G roles by 23% on an apples- to- apples basis, including divestitures down nearly 30%.
We cut the number of advertising, public relations and other agencies supporting the business by 60%. We reduced the number of office buildings and research and development centers by 65% and 30%, respectively, and we reduced the number of legal entities by 60%. Today, productivity is built into our operating model and is an ongoing part of our strategy in every area of the business. We've embraced ongoing productivity as how we continue to strengthen the long-term health and competitiveness of our brands, manage through the short-term significant cost increases, and how we deliver our objective of balanced top and bottom line growth, inclusive of margin expansion. We worked for several years to focus the company's portfolio on faster growing, more profitable daily use categories where performance plays a significant role in brand choice.
We went from about 170 brands in 16 categories to about 65 brands in 10 categories. We divested about 1/3 of our categories that were not a good fit with our strengths or attractive from a value creation standpoint. We focused our investment and resources on the categories that best leverage P&G strengths, consumer understanding, branding, product and package innovations, and our go-to-market capabilities. Much more fully than the businesses that we divested. Within the 10 remaining categories, we've simplified and strengthened considerably. In Fabric Care, for example, we exited dry powder laundry in Brazil and Argentina. Across the board, we have fewer and much stronger brands, and fewer, more cost-efficient manufacturing platforms. Our 10-category portfolio has historically grown a point faster and is two points more profitable than the old company.
We're global market leaders in seven of the 10 categories and number two in the other three. This strategy continues to guide our disciplined approach to managing our category and brand portfolio. We have made some selective additions, but all in our core categories. In April of 2017, we first discussed our work to set a much higher bar for measuring the success of our innovation and execution across products, packaging, brand communication, retail execution, and value. We assessed at that time that about 30% of our portfolio was superior. We're now at about 80%. The words irresistible superiority drew a few chuckles and eye rolls initially, but no question today about their importance. Superior offerings delivered with superior execution drive market growth. Leading category growth with superior offerings mathematically builds market share and builds business for our retail partners.
We continue to raise the bar on all five vectors of superiority in all price tiers where we compete. Superiority is a moving target. When we think we're in good shape, it's time to raise the bar further. At the CAGNY Conference in 2016, we first discussed the tests we were doing on a new approach to our organization design, moving from what I used to call the thicket, 16 global business units, six market development organizations with staffing and responsibilities that overlapped with the global business units, and heavily staffed function organizations charged with helping the categories and markets, with people frequently moving between businesses, markets, and functions. The thicket. Suffocating, lots of hiding places in the thicket, very low accountability, not a fun place to work. We initially moved from that to a structure of end-to-end and freedom within a framework markets.
We tested giving our product categories more end-to-end decision-making and responsibility in our two largest markets, the U.S. and China. In smaller countries, we tested what we called freedom within a framework. The intent was for these markets to execute within predefined strategies to deliver the plans set by the categories. We refined our approach and announced the new focus market and enterprise market design at our November 2018 Investor Day. Our objective was to create a more engaged, agile, and accountable organization, which is exactly what we've done. The best proof that this organization design is working is the acceleration of growth. Sales in the U.S., our largest and most profitable market, strengthened as we refined the design, increasing from an average of 2% the three years prior to completing the design change to 8% in the three- year sale.
Sales in Greater China went from negative to high single-digit, low double-digit before the recent COVID-19 related market slowdown. At the same time, we grew enterprise markets at or ahead of the balance of the company, including growing share, and all of this profitably, building margins despite significant foreign exchange headwinds. This structure and its resulting organizational speed and focus has allowed us to manage through the challenges and the headwinds we're currently experiencing. We continue to believe this structure with the SBUs squarely concentrated on focus markets and managing enterprise markets with a separate operating unit, is the best way to navigate successfully through the increasingly dynamic world in which we all live. Finally, in 2018, we first talked about the need to lead constructive disruption.
This is particularly important in our highly dynamic and competitive industry that operates in a highly dynamic retail and media environment and is facing highly dynamic expectations from consumers and stakeholders. For example, as we'll talk later, the greater consumer expectation for products that perform while delivering sustainability benefits. A mindset of constructive disruption is even more important in this challenging environment we find ourselves in now. We continue to drive disruption in innovation, in brand building, digitization, supply chain, and transformation, supply chain transformation, and with our citizenship and ESG efforts. We're committed to lead this disruption rather than be led by others. The best way to deal with disruption is to is to lead it in a way that creates value, not destroys it. Did this litany of changes pay off?
Well, over the past four years, we've added over $13 billion in annual sales, putting P&G in the 87th percentile of the S&P 500 in terms of dollar sales growth. For those same four years, we've generated nearly $5 billion in additional profit, putting P&G in the 92nd percentile of the S&P 500 in terms of dollar profit growth. As of the end of last fiscal year, we were the 12th most valuable U.S. publicly traded company, and the 16th most valuable publicly traded company in the world based on market capitalization. We've created a company that has demonstrated it can drive strong market growth, sales growth, share growth, earnings growth, and cash flow. None of this is a reason to rest, but a reason we're confident we can continue to improve.
We have strong innovation and demand creation capabilities with potential for significant further growth and value creation by serving our stakeholders better than ever before. Our integrated strategy is working. All pieces are necessary for success. Again, a portfolio of daily use products where performance plays a significant role in driving brand choice, superiority, product package communication, go-to-market, and value. Productivity to fund and build margins, constructive disruption, and a highly efficient and effective organization structure. These are not independent choices. They reinforce and build on each other, and when executed well, they lead to balanced top and bottom line growth and value creation. The strategy and its execution by P&G people is what got us to where we are today. It will serve us well as we step into our challenges, not away from them.
We're gonna spend much of our time today on how we're bringing this strategy to life around the world, and our efforts to strengthen our execution of it. Now I'll hand it over to Andre to share more on results.
Thank you, Jon. Good afternoon. Welcome to Cincinnati. Our integrated strategies and the choices we make to execute them are aimed at delivering consistent, sustainable, and balanced growth and value creation. This is how we define winning. Our long-term growth algorithm to reach that objective calls for delivering organic sales growth modestly ahead of the underlying growth of the markets we compete in. Historically, our markets have been growing at a rate of 2.5%-3%. In a very good year, maybe at 4%. We want to do a bit better than that consistently. We're targeting long-term core earnings per share growth of mid to high single digits, which requires annual margin expansion of 30-70 basis points each year, depending on the amount of top line we grow.
While we'd obviously prefer to deliver at the high end of the range, we feel the range actually reflects the normal volatility that we see in terms of market growth rates and macroeconomic environment. The range also reflects our intention to maintain strong investment in the business to support mid and long-term top line momentum. We expect to turn these earnings into strong levels of cash generation, delivering free cash flow productivity of 90% or better every year for consistent, sustainable, balanced growth and value creation. P&G has delivered consistently strong results pre-COVID, during the crisis, and post-COVID through the execution of our integrated strategies, a focus on improving value for consumers, and growing categories with our retail partners. We delivered consistently strong organic sales growth, averaging 6% over the last four fiscal years.
In fact, over the last four fiscal years, each quarter has averaged 6% organic growth. That's 17 straight quarters of strong organic sales growth, including the first quarter of this fiscal year. Four very strong years of market share growth, with global value share in line with prior year for the September quarter. Organic volume growth averaging 3% over the last four years. Core EPS growth averaging 9%. 12% core EPS growth on a constant currency basis. The strong top and bottom line performance places us among the top in our industry with a 22% core operating profit margin. We hold further advantages in below the line costs. We borrow at some of the most favorable rates in our industry, and we have a tax rate that is among the industry's lowest.
All this yielding the highest after-tax profit margin in the industry as of our fiscal 2022 results. On the cash side, we've averaged 105% adjusted free cash flow productivity over the last four years. This high cash flow productivity has enabled us to continue our strong record of returning cash to share owners. We've increased the dividend for 66 consecutive years and paid a dividend for 132 consecutive years since the company was incorporated in 1890. After funding operations, paying the dividend, and making any strategic acquisitions, the available cash remaining within our target balance sheet metrics is distributed via share repurchases. In just the last four years, we've returned over $65 billion to share owners through dividends and share repurchase.
Over 10 years, we've returned over $141 billion to share owners, again, through balanced growth and value creation. Our results last year and the outlook for this year are obviously not as balanced as we would like due to the extreme cost and foreign exchange headwinds we continue to face. Commodities, FX, and freight were a combined headwind of $3.3 billion after tax on earnings last fiscal year, which is $1.29 per share. This year, those same items amount to $3.9 billion after tax, $1.57 per share. Over two years, that's $7.2 billion after tax of headwinds.
To put it into margin terms, this equates to $8.8 billion of operating profit, more than 1,100 basis points of operating margin hit on the fiscal year on a 2021 sales base. In EPS terms, that's $2.86 per share of cost, and from FX exchange headwinds, more than half of fiscal 2021 core EPS of $5.66. While admittedly not as balanced as we were hoping, we're pleased that we're on track to deliver at least $5.81 per share this fiscal year, which is consistent with the low end of our ingoing guidance range. Despite the headwinds we have faced and continue to face this year, the excellent execution of our integrated strategies has delivered sales growth, pricing, and productivity improvements to offset these massive challenges. Why?
Our integrated strategies, superiority in categories where performance drives brand choice, translates into an ability to deliver superior value to consumers, even at modest price premiums versus competition. Every dollar we spend driving superiority returns a multiple in value for consumers, for categories and retail partners, and consequently for P&G. We continue to invest, to create, and to extend our superiority advantage versus competition. We have consistently invested around $2 billion a year in research and development. Even as that spending is becoming more and more efficient with the use of new digital modeling and testing tools, which you will hear more about later. We also have consistently invested in the supply chain with an average investment of more than $3 billion per year of capital spending over the last four years, even with the pandemic disruptions.
This includes investment in capacity, but also automation and digitization, in addition to routine spending to maintain our manufacturing assets and facilities. Over the last four years, P&G has grown all-in sales at a compound average growth rate of 4.7%. Over that same period, working media spending grew at an average of 6% per year, an increase of more than $1.2 billion. Now, keep in mind that during this time, we were getting increasingly efficient in our consumer targeting and ad placement. As productivity improved, we reinvested all of those savings and added an additional $1.2 billion. Throughout the balance of this afternoon, you're going to hear the word productivity in every presentation, so I wanna make sure we're on the same page about what productivity means for us.
Simply defined, productivity is delivering the same or better output measures with lower spending and resource investment. In cost of goods sold, those productivity output measures include lower cost per case of product delivered to a customer, but lower cost is only one outcome. Productivity that improves quality, increases supply assurance, yields higher on-shelf availability of our products, all of which improves superiority with our customers and with our consumers, are huge value creators for our business. The same is true for marketing spending. Delivering superior, engaging, consumer-tested advertising at sufficient levels of reach, at the optimal frequency, delivered to our prime consumer targets, is fundamental to how we plan and execute our marketing programs. That's the way we build equity for our brands. More efficiency and greater effectiveness enable us to reach all potential category buyers when and where consumers are most receptive to that advertising.
This yields higher quality engagement, and when orchestrated across media platforms, avoids excessive advertising frequency, which at best is a waste, in the worst case, really annoying to the consumer. The tools and abilities we are building allow us to unlock opportunities to optimize reach, manage ad frequency, understand communication effectiveness, and drive efficiency, all of which work together to strengthen demand creation while building equity of our brands with same or lower investment. A perfect example is linear TV, where viewership continues to decline, driving up the cost per point of audience reach while consumers are actually switching to over-the-top and digital video streaming, where we can more effectively reach consumers with automated programmatic ad buying and placement.
Each brand team in each market monitors incoming feedback from consumers, reactions in social media, direct consumer comments, sales and share trends, ratings and reviews, consumer search queries to ensure our advertising is having the desired effect. If we sense that something isn't working as planned, the team can diagnose the outage and quickly work to address it, strengthening the message, enhancing brand content, changing the media mix, or adjusting the media frequency in near real-time speed. We know you can't see these measures, and we're not gonna start reporting them, but we would be missing the point of productivity improvement if we only measure the effectiveness of our brand building by the dollars we spend. Finally, improved productivity in our work processes enable us to grow the business without growing SG&A spending at the same rate. More leverage on back-office operations, more leverage on corporate overhead.
All of this while generating stronger innovation programs with higher quality business services and more rewarding jobs with larger scope and higher impact for our employees. We have made productivity part of P&G's core DNA, and it is a critical element of our integrated growth strategies. We see and continue to see significant efficiency and savings opportunities in every area of our cost structure. We're ramping back up to pre-COVID savings levels and cost of goods sold. We're continuing to drive efficiency in SG&A that can be reinvested as needed or taken to the bottom line. You will hear how we're capturing many of these opportunities in the balance of our talk this afternoon. Now, we're in a tough period in terms of input costs, foreign exchange, and inflationary pressures on consumers. Retailers in most markets are further tightening inventory to conserve cash.
Continued COVID lockdowns in China have a direct business impact over there, but they also weigh on the overall consumer confidence. None of these effects are unique to P&G, but all of them have an immediate impact on the business, and some of them will take time to fully recover. We're committed to stay invested in the business to manage through this difficult time, and we'll do this with a joint superiority and productivity mindset, strengthening our competitive advantages now to be well-positioned to lead growth in our industry on the other side of this rough patch. With that, I hand it back to Jon.
Thanks, Andre. We're doubling down on our integrated strategy to profitably grow markets, household penetration, and through this, our share. As I said before, our integrated strategy is what got us here. It will serve us well as we step into some of the challenges Andre mentioned, not away from them. One of the most important things about our strategy is that it's inherently dynamic, not static. It requires being responsive to changing consumer needs and habits. It demands we serve evolving customer needs in rapidly transforming channels. To further strengthen our strategies, there are four areas where we need to be even more intentional and deliberate: supply, environmental sustainability, digital acumen, and a superior employee value equation. First, supply.
Historically, our supply chain has been a competitive advantage for us, and we're investing significantly to strengthen this advantage and be better positioned to handle larger capacity and higher ranges of demand volatility. Just to highlight the importance of supply and operational excellence in the context of all the challenges we face, the first time I met Doug McMillon in person, CEO of Walmart, our largest customer, was not in a Walmart office, was not in a P&G office. It wasn't even a store. It was in a warehouse. I met Rodney McMullen, the CEO of Kroger, in one of their warehouses. I met with Craig Jelinek, the CEO of Costco, in one of their stores, which is a warehouse. I met with many of our European and Asian retail partner CEOs in one-to-one meetings at The Consumer Goods Forum in Dublin in June. Topic one, two, and three, supply.
Supply and being the best at it matters. We're reorienting our supply chain to one that provides greater agility, flexibility, scalability, transparency, and resilience, which is needed to react to and even anticipate the opportunities and the challenges ahead. We're calling this Supply 3.0, the next generation of supply chain. An end-to-end synchronized, sustainable, and resilient supply chain, amplified by data analytics and enabled by an organization that is at the leading edge of transformation, mastery, and leadership. Environmental sustainability is becoming even more critical. Expectations from consumers, customers, business partners, governments, shareholders, stakeholders, and society, in general, are increasing. We've integrated sustainability into our superiority strategy across product, packaging, communication, go-to-market, consumer and retail value. This means developing irresistibly superior offerings for consumers that are better for the environment. An obvious example is cold water washing with Tide and Ariel.
When people turn their wash cycles to cold, they can save up to 90% of the energy used on every load of laundry while saving money. They also get greater satisfaction because their colors look brighter and their clothes last longer. Better for the consumer, importantly, better for our planet. Sustainability can be a driver of superiority, and by harnessing the power of game-changing innovation, we can develop products that deliver irresistible superiority in a sustainable way, making it easier for people to be more sustainable without trade-offs in product performance or convenience, all while improving the environment and ultimately creating more value for consumers, customers, and our company. The third focus area is strengthening our digital acumen to drive consumers and customer preference, reduce cost, and enable rapid and efficient decision-making.
We're getting more intentional in building our digital acumen across the entire value chain in how we engage with consumers, how we innovate, how we go to market, how we operate our business. There's significant opportunity in each area. There's great promise in our ability to truly integrate digital tools into every aspect of our work. If we do this well, it will lead to more opportunities to focus on higher order work that serves consumers, customers, employees, society, and shareowners. The fourth focus area is the superior employee value equation. We serve consumers through a portfolio of superior brands. How can we, on a sustainable basis, deliver superior products, packages, communication, retail execution, and value without superior talent? How are we going to attract and retain superior talent if we don't have a superior value proposition?
A superior employee value equation for all genders, identities, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, ages, and abilities for all roles to ensure we continue to attract, retain, and develop the best talent. By definition, this proposition must include equality. To deliver a superior employee value equation, there must be something in it for everyone. These four areas, supply, environmental sustainability, digital acumen, and our employee value equation, are not new or separate strategies. They are necessary elements in continuing to build superiority, in reducing costs to enable investment and value creation, in strengthening our organization. They're part of the constructive disruption we must continue to lead. We continue to believe our strategy is the right one going forward. We're doubling down on this integrated set of strategies that have been delivering very strong results. Over the next hour or so, we're going to share how we're strengthening their execution.
We'll start with product and package superiority, how we continue to raise the bar, and how we're increasingly creating superior innovations that are more sustainable. We'll discuss how we are enhancing our digital capabilities. You'll see how new digital tools are creating opportunities for improved productivity and product quality as we discuss Supply Chain 3.0. We'll share some examples of how we're extending our advantages in superior retail execution and superior brand communication. Finally, before the break, we'll touch on the employee value equation. To start us off, here is Victor Aguilar, Chief Research, Development and Innovation Officer. Victor.
Five years ago, we made the choice to raise the bar on innovation to achieve irresistible superiority, elevating superior performance versus competition to be noticeable by consumers versus superiority that could only be measured technically. To assess and deliver superior offerings, we moved from a single metric, weighted purchase intent, to a body of evidence approach. This provided a holistic and transparent evaluation of product and packages through an integrated test, which include blind tests, conscious data tests, household panel data, and in-market product reviews. It adds behavioral data, which is far more reliable than attitudinal data that we had always collected. As Jon said, we're raising the bar on irresistible superiority. We frequently review progress and identify opportunities for improvements. Consumer trends and market dynamics continue to change. We're operating in a higher inflationary environment that requires further improving superiority to enhance the consumer value equation.
Competition continues to improve, and environmental sustainability is an increasing priority. Given these dynamics, we have raised the bar again on our innovation program and reset the level of superiority to a higher standard. We're taking four actions. The first one is one use wow. Instant gratification has become part of how consumers assess performance and value. We observe this behavior as consumers regularly share their experience through social media, ratings, and reviews, and that influences repurchase rates of our products and attracts new users. This requires innovation to be designed with emphasis on in-use delight immediately after a single use and throughout the life of the product, with consumer benefits such as superior fragrances and aesthetics. For example, Olay moisturizer aesthetics significantly influence the performance effectiveness of the brand.
We carefully balance the texture and perfume of our creams for an even application on our skin, providing an instantly pleasant feel and fragrance experience, and enabling absorption of key actives into the skin without causing irritation. Superior one-use wow leads to superior results. Olay value share grew last fiscal year and continues to accelerate as we begin this fiscal year. Here's another example: Oral-B iO Power toothbrush has a round brush head that oscillates with vibrating bristles to create a dentist-like feeling experience after a single use, particularly when combined with superior toothpastes that have long-lasting flavors and foam at the gum line and between teeth. Oral-B iO has been a significant driver of category growth. Jen will share more on this innovation later today. Noticeable superiority after one use is a significant improvement we're making across all of our products to elevate the irresistible superiority.
The second action that we're taking is to strengthen our superiority behind habit formation. Through data that we transparently collect with sensors and proprietary consumer research methods, we gain accurate observations of consumer behaviors. Daily measures of that leads to in-depth insight on how they use our products. These insights help us design product and package characteristics that encourage positive forming habits, such as using the right amount of product, using the product more consistently, or correctly applying the products in ways that provide better performance and delight consumers. For example, educating consumers on using the right amount, the recommended amount of hair conditioner based on hair length, and how to appropriately apply this product provides meaningful increases in consumer acceptance.
In Latin America, for example, advertising showing how to properly use a conditioning combing cream led to an increased usage and contributed to a high single-digit organic sales growth for Pantene last fiscal year. Using Head & Shoulders more frequently leads to noticeably healthier scalp while preventing dandruff altogether. Daily usage of Head & Shoulders for consumers with dandruff leads to better consumer experience. It grows the category and P&G results. Early tests have shown that educating consumers on how to use Head & Shoulders with every wash has doubled consumption and significantly increased consumer satisfaction. The third innovation is what we call core and more. Back in 2017, we focused on strengthening the core of our product and package superiority across all categories. This effort led to continued progress on achieving irresistible superiority.
As we raise the bar further to strengthen the core, we're also balancing the portfolio to focus on more innovation that expand brands into new sources of growth and value creation that leverage P&G core strengths to create sustainable competitive advantage. This approach led to the development of Dawn EZ-Squeeze, which is a core innovation, and Dawn Powerwash, which is a more innovation. We recently launched Dawn EZ-Squeeze in North America. We upgraded the formula across the entire core Dawn lineup and introduced a new inverted bottle with no-flip cap and self-sealing valve for easy one-hand use. With the strength of the consumer proposition, some retailers chose to merchandise EZ- Squeeze with end cap displays at full price, enhancing shopper awareness of the innovation while improving retail value in the process. In fiscal year 2021, we introduced Dawn Powerwash.
A dishwashing spray to help consumers pre-wash dishes and pre-treat difficult to clean pots and pans. This also addresses the changing consumer habit to wash dishes as you go. Dawn Powerwash leverages Dawn core grease-cleaning technologies to extend performance to more growth and incremental product in their dish-cleaning regimen. These innovations are growing the hand dish market and P&G value share in North America, up over two points in the past 12 months. We launched these innovations in Europe, and Fairy brand share in the U.K. is up 1.5 points. Here's another example. As we continue to upgrade Downy liquid fabric enhancers, which is core product, and deliver innovation with additional consumer benefits, such as Downy WrinkleGuard.
This liquid fabric softener is made with a patented formula that helps prevent creases and wrinkles from forming while providing all the fabric protection and softening of the Downy brand. However, we found that many consumers want a level of freshness that could not be delivered using a liquid fabric enhancer alone. We created Downy Unstopables using a similar perfume encapsulation technology as Downy, yet it is assigned to be used during the main wash as a scent booster. More innovation that adds incremental product to the laundry regimen, which grows the category while delighting consumers with the end results. Core and more innovation grew the fabric enhancer market high single digit last fiscal year. P&G global organic shares grew double digits with high single digits on the liquid and over 20% growth on Unstopables.
The fourth action is raising the bar in irresistible superiority means raising the bar on the sustainability of our products, packages and processes. We know most consumers are not willing to trade off superior performance for more sustainable solutions. Consumers want products and packages that deliver on the brand's core performance promise and are good for the environment. Virginie Helias, our Chief Sustainability Officer, will share more on this important topic.
Thank you, Victor. As Jon and Victor have said, environmental sustainability is becoming even more critical as expectation from consumers, customers, business partners, governments, shareholders, stakeholders, and society in general continue to rise. To address this need and opportunity, we approach sustainability as built into our work, not a separate activity that will be bolted on. We are integrating sustainability in each element of our superiority strategy. We are leading category goals with sustainable products at scale, and we are offsetting the incremental investment needed to pioneer sustainable innovation with a combination of top-line growth and productivity. 64% of consumers globally are willing to pay more for products that are better for the environment. This is not a generation-specific sentiment. All age groups value the environment, from Gen Z to Millennials, to Gen X, to Baby Boomers.
Consumers who are most concerned and are willing to act on their desire for sustainability are growing and are now 22% of households globally. The market size opportunity is over $560 billion. We know how to play in this segment, as evidenced by the examples of sustainable P&G products that are growing categories and delivering strong results for P&G. We are making progress. We see work on irresistible superiority that is sustainable coming to life across our businesses. Alex will share a few examples with you shortly. First, I want to take the opportunity to give a bit more background on how we are structuring our environmental sustainability efforts. Our true north is improving lives now and for generations to come with irresistible superiority that is sustainable. Our work is organized around four pillars: climate, waste, water, and nature.
People are the very base of the model across all pillars. This acknowledges that we cannot separate people from the planet or delighting consumers from our sustainability aspirations. I want to briefly highlight a few of our focus areas and goals, but for a comprehensive list of our goals, please visit our ESG for Investors website. Starting with climate, we're committed to deliver net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, and we've established specific milestone targets for 2030 to pace our efforts. We've already achieved an absolute reduction of 57% in greenhouse gas emissions in our operations globally versus 2010 when we started our tracking. On waste, our goal is to have 100% of our packaging recyclable or reusable by 2030, and we anticipate reaching nearly 80% this year, keeping us on track to the ultimate goal.
We are also making progress against our 50% virgin petroleum plastic reduction goal. On water, we are delivering innovation to enable consumers to use our products with less or no water. Our manufacturing sites have collectively increased water efficiency by 25% and recycled 3 billion L. We are supporting a number of water restoration projects that will provide a range of solutions to protect ecosystems, replenish groundwater supplies, reduce the amount of water diverted from essential bodies of water, and improve water quality for the communities and wildlife that depend on it. We created a new pillar to reflect the growing focus and scrutiny of industry impact on nature. We have a strong range of efforts planning responsible sourcing, and a commitment to advance projects that will protect, improve or restore critical ecosystems.
By doing so, impact over 1.5 million acres of land and deliver carbon benefits that are greater than any remaining manufacturing emissions we will have this decade. We are closely monitoring developments relating to emerging disclosure and standard efforts such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the science-based targets for nature. This is how we have organized our environmental sustainability efforts, and we will deliver our goals by executing the integrated strategy. Now, Alex Keith, CEO of P&G Beauty and Executive Sponsor, Corporate Sustainability, will share examples of irresistible superiority that is sustainable. Alex.
Virginie. Hi, everyone. For sustainability to become a value creation opportunity, we need to find the sweet spot between delighting consumers, making a positive impact on the environment, and delivering value to you, our shareowners. I'm going to take you through how we are delivering irresistible superiority that is sustainable with an example from each of the four pillars that Virginie just shared. Starting with climate. Sundar and his fabric care team faced an important question: Is sustainability a threat or an opportunity? They have the number one laundry detergent in the world with Tide and Ariel. They had the best-performing product, so good that it works to clean clothes in warm or cold water. They knew we could accelerate category growth of laundry detergents and accelerate our competitive advantage by decarbonizing laundry.
For fabric care, up to 60% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the use phase, that is from the energy used to heat the water when consumers wash their clothes at home. If there is one single thing that we can do in fabric care to have a positive impact on the environment, it is to reduce wash temperatures. Today in the U.S., only one of two loads is done in cold, and our ambition is to take that to three out of four by 2030. In Europe, the average wash temperature is 42 degrees Celsius, which is about 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Our ambition is to lower it by 5 degrees Celsius by 2025.
The impact of these efforts is expected to reduce emissions by 30 million tons every year. Consumers want to do their part to protect the environment, but not at the expense of dirty clothes. Washing in cold is the torture test in laundry, and no one beats us on performance. Washing in cold is better for clothes, keeping them looking new for longer. Washing in cold saves households up to $150 per year in the U.S., and over half of the energy bill from laundry in Europe. We are educating consumers on the benefits of cold water washing through campaigns in North America and Europe. These campaigns have proven to create value for shareowners by growing users and growing usage. The past 12-month household penetration on Ariel is up 10% since the start of the initiative, with organic sales up 7%.
The category has grown mid-single digits. In the U.S., Tide sales have grown 10% since the start of the campaign. Now, waste. 98% of consumers claim single-use plastics are a serious problem. In a broader context, less than 10% of plastic waste is recycled today. While this is striking, it offers an opportunity for P&G to lead the change, bringing circularity to life and growing our business through our integrated strategy. Designing our packaging for reducing, reusing, and recycling is essential. One example is from Hair Care Europe, where they have moved to 100% recycled plastic for Head & Shoulders and Pantene. This saves 10,000 tons of virgin plastic annually, and Hair Care Europe is also the first region to reach 50% virgin plastic reduction, well ahead of our 2030 goal. Ariel ECOCLIC is launching now in Europe.
It is made from 70% recycled fibers and is designed to be recycled while preventing young children from accessing the pods. Always is testing in a European market a new package that opens like a milk carton, is made of sustainably sourced fibers, and is recyclable. P&G is transforming the industry by leading innovation on packaging and waste and making these technologies available to the entire industry. P&G invented a patent-protected recycling technology to produce virgin-like resin from polypropylene waste. We licensed it to PureCycle Technologies and made it available to the rest of the industry. As PureCycle announced, they expect to start production by the end of this calendar year. Another example is HolyGrail 2.0. This is a digital watermark technology that can increase both the quantity and quality of recycled materials via intelligent sorting.
P&G is also partnering with external organizations that are addressing gaps in waste management systems. The Alliance to End Plastic Waste, the Recycling Partnership, Circulate Capital Ocean Fund, and those are just a few examples. Together, we'll continue to make more progress on reducing waste. Now on water. Matthew Price and his home care team have done a great work on our auto dish care brand, Cascade, delivering irresistible superiority that reduces water and energy. Most consumers know that Cascade's superior performance delivers sparkling clean dishes, and we've been educating them that Cascade's superior formula cleans stuck-on food so they can skip the pre-wash, saving water and energy. Still, consumers told us that they resisted using the dishwasher because they thought it was a water and energy waste, and it's quite the opposite. Using a dishwasher can use less water than washing in the sink.
A lot less, up to 20 gal per load. In fact, as of the fourth dish, you will save water and energy by using the dishwasher. We are educating consumers on ways to reduce their water consumption through campaigns aimed at demystifying the use of the dishwasher, encouraging consumers to be courageous and do it, running the dishwasher, every night. Cascade grew organic sales mid-teens behind a superior innovation and sustainability campaign, increasing auto dish loads per week by 25%. P&G Home Care has committed with every innovation to reduce water and energy across the dish franchise around the world. Finally, let's review work happening in the nature pillar. Responsible sourcing of materials of natural origin is a critical component of our Responsible Beauty commitments.
This was especially important to Herbal Essences, given the target consumer has a high interest in naturals, what's in the product, and where it came from. We started with declaring that Herbal's bio:renew line would include active botanicals that have a real impact on hair and scalp. I'll share with you our journey on aloe, one of 33 botanicals in Herbal Essences bio:renew line. There are more than 300 species of aloe in the world. We started with ensuring that what we were sourcing was actually aloe, and that it was of high quality.
We did this through our partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the world's leader in botanical science. We selected our supplier based on this and then contracted with the Union for Ethical BioTrade to audit the supply chain through the lens of our Responsible Beauty sourcing guidelines, which we developed and implemented about a year ago and have posted publicly on our Responsible Beauty page as part of pg.com. We found some outages in a couple of areas of social and environmental sustainability, which the supplier has agreed to mitigate.
All of this enables Herbal Essences to back up its sustainably sourced claims, provide verification of supply chain to regulators, and give consumers assurance that Herbal Essences delivers on its promise of real plant ingredients certified by real plant experts. Herbal Essences grew organic sales mid double digits last year, mid single digits last year, sorry, and contributed to category growth.
Across the company, we've been working on programs with positive impacts on environmental sustainability for decades, and now we are fully integrating that work into our irresistible superiority framework. We will continue to make progress in this critical focus area. Expectations are rising, and we are excited to deliver superior solutions to exceed those expectations. You will hear more examples from the sector CEOs later today of superior innovations that are sustainable. We have put delivery of sustainability into the hands of our category leaders so that it is fully integrated into the irresistible superiority innovation ecosystem. I will now hand over to Vittorio Cretella, our Chief Information Officer. Thank you.
Thank you, Alex. 2.5 years ago, our IT organization launched a new initiative that we called Digital for Growth and Value Creation. The objective was to deliver accelerated growth and productivity by leveraging digital for superiority in every aspect of our business, from product innovation to business operation, from consumer engagement to go to market. As we started focusing on digital more intentionally, we began seeing the size of the opportunity, which is now embedded in our business strategy as one of the four focus areas for the company. The critical ingredients to succeed with this approach includes, number one, intentionality and ownership of each sector, category, region and market. Thanks to all business leaders, similar to sustainability, digital acumen is not a bolted on strategy, but increasingly integrated into the business strategy and objectives.
Second, talent and skills, especially in the sectors and in the markets. As digital solutions are increasingly delivered by multifunctional teams, we invest in the digital fluency of the overall organization. We increased the IT resources embedded and dedicated to sector and regions, rebalancing those versus central teams. We created a dedicated capability to attract, recruit, and onboard engineering talent in key markets and key digital hubs such as the U.S. and Poland. Finally, modern technology is a key enabler, and we have been investing in the power of the cloud, AI and automation, and in modular integration with application programming interfaces or APIs. Our corporate data lake adds up to 7 PB of data in both Azure and Google Cloud.
We are building a dedicated AI factory to automate data science work, which is already leveraged by 30 use cases across 80% of our business with 10x faster speed to value. To enable modularity, over the past two years, we implemented more than 450 APIs, with a large majority being constantly reused and which are 3.5 x faster than traditional interfaces. We also adopted the technology and the methodology for agile application development, delivering faster and more frequent software releases. For example, in baby care, we have 2.5 x more frequent releases of our Pampers loyalty app, the consumer app, with 75% better resiliency. We create value with digital solutions that are embedded into our integrated strategies, enabled by our empowered, agile and accountable organization.
To blend agility and speed with scale and repeatability, in addition to leveraging common technology foundations, we adopted a composite approach which combines the power of enterprise platforms with the agility of specific digital solutions. Those enterprise platforms reflect common needs in consumer data management, product connectivity, manufacturing data integration, warehousing transactions, data and machine learning modeling, to name just a few, while at the same time providing data and functions for business-specific solutions that are built on top of them. That gives us the best of what works, allowing differentiation while avoiding starting from scratch every time.
As you hear more about how we are strengthening our integrated strategies, you'll see use cases in the area of supply chain, innovation, retail execution, and consumer communication. Now, earlier, I talked about our objective to deliver accelerated growth and productivity by leveraging digital for superiority in every aspect of our business, product innovation, business operations, consumer engagement, and go-to-market. Let's double-click on each of these areas. In digital consumer experience innovation, we leverage digital twin models to develop superior products and packaging. We are able to rework formulas in a fraction of the time it used to take. We equip household panels with connected devices and sensors to acquire a large amount of granular data to derive the insights on consumer behavior. In business operations, thanks to digital connectivity and AI in our manufacturing plants and warehouses, we maximize quality, resiliency, and energy and water consumption.
We use data and AI to prevent supply chain issues and to provide transparency towards the progress of our ESG objectives. In consumer engagement, we use digital solutions to maximize media reach, and therefore drive superior brand communication. We engage directly with consumers enriching our transparent first-party data collection to then serve advertising to the right audiences with the right frequency and the right content, while at the same time driving productivity through optimized costs. Finally, we leverage data and AI to maximize the impact and efficiency of our trade spend to assist the retailers in category management, both in store and online, and to maximize the effectiveness of our in-store activities. Now let me turn it over to Shailesh Jejurikar, Chief Operating Officer, and Julio Nemeth, Chief Product Supply Officer, who will bring this concept to life in our supply chain.
Thank you, Vittorio. Supply chain has historically been a competitive advantage for P&G. At Investor Day in 2018, we shared how we were investing to dramatically transform our supply chain to extend our advantage. We created a synchronized network based on real-time demand signals to serve the evolving needs of our consumers and customers. We also shared how we were constructing more cost-effective, multi-category manufacturing sites in geographically strategic locations to minimize costs, maximize flexibility, and improve service to retailers. These investments have served us very well over the past few years as we faced unprecedented supply chain challenges with volatility on all sides of supply, consumer demand, workforce, and geopolitical dynamics. In the face of these pressures, our teams and our operations displayed enormous resilience to maximize supply and serve consumers and customers. For example, to overcome labor shortages, we maximized our integrated work system.
Data and analytics were brought front and center to respond more quickly to changes in demand. We developed solutions for formula flexibility and redundancies of supply. We utilized our planning service center platform to optimize supply, and we leveraged strategic supply relationships to secure preferential service covering over 80% of our material spend. The most meaningful signs that these interventions were effective came from our customers. Our top customers rank our supply chain number one and have done so for the past seven years in the Advantage Monitor Survey. We have also been recognized by Gartner as one of only five supply chains in the world in the category of masters. This is meaningful because it's a vote of peer companies across all industries. The improvements we've made in our systems over the past few years have provided rich learnings we continue to build on.
We've been investing significantly to strengthen our supply chain advantage and be better positioned to handle larger capacity and higher ranges of demand volatility. At the same time, we saw more clearly than ever before the real and significant challenges in our supply chains. Challenges we are turning into opportunities. With Supply Chain 3.0, we are creating the next level of supply, a supply chain that provides greater agility, flexibility, scalability, transparency, and resilience. Through a set of forward-looking strategic choices, we are reinventing our supply chain into a superior proposition for consumers, customers, and employees while delivering up to $1.5 billion of productivity per year.
As we continue to face volatility in the market, this lens of superiority throughout our supply chain will serve us well in the future, helping us not only overcome, but create value in times of disruption. Julio will walk you through how we are utilizing our well-developed framework of superiority to develop an end-to-end synchronized, sustainable, and resilient supply chain, amplified by data analytics and enabled by an organization that is at the leading edge of transformation, mastery, and leadership. Julio, over to you.
Drive growth and value creation and represents the next transformation of our physical, digital, and human interface in the supply chain. The four vectors to drive value are resilience to supply in full, seamless data interconnection, sustainability, and superior workforce. The first vector is resilience to supply in full. The most fundamental job of a supply chain is to supply to the level of the demand. With the volatility we continue to face, our supply chain needs more resilience to supply in full under any condition. This is critical element to accelerate category growth, maximize P&G sales growth, and build the next level of partnership with our retailers. One key element of resilience is to develop an exceptional capability for formula flexibility and alternative suppliers at all regional level in all businesses.
This slide provides an example, and we have many more, whereby a formula flexibility and the development of alternative regional suppliers, we have been able, in this case in particular, to overcome the global semiconductor shortage. Braun and Oral-B developed several alternative designs for our products which provide the same consumer experience. This has enabled us to outperform competition and generate nearly 550 basis points of Oral-B value share growth versus pre-pandemic. Sundar will share an example of the fabric care business leveraging formula flexibility to drive stronger resilience, agility, and cost savings in a few minutes. Resilience also means supplying the upside of the demand in full, and that requires installing the necessary capacity in manufacturing, logistics, and material supply.
We plan to spend incremental capital over the next four years to build this necessary upside supply infrastructure in those businesses that can accelerate category growth and where margins are healthy. Another element of our resilience plan is automation. The pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities of highly labor-intensive operations, which coupled with the imbalance in the demand and supply of labor, made us to undertake the most ambitious automation program we have ever engaged on. This program is expected to deliver over $500 million in productivity savings annually. The following video illustrates a few of the technologies that we are developing and rolling out. We are also making major steps in the full automation of our quality control systems using sensors, image recognition, and AI across our end-to-end supply chain.
On top of aiming at perfect quality, our touchless quality program delivers over $100 million in savings by reducing manual inspection and reducing material losses. The second vector of Supply 3.0 is seamless data interconnection. This involves the application of artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to a supply network that is seamlessly interconnected from suppliers to retailers. We see the opportunity for meaningful productivity in cost of goods sold over the next four to five years coming out of this. As an example, in transportation, we have a $3 million opportunity in North America just by addressing the most obvious inefficiencies in space, truck utilization, and driver utilization. Using data and machine learning algorithms, we can optimize scheduling to deliver $20 million in savings by eliminating idle time for drivers.
Data and algorithms can save us $100 million in real-time optimization of truckloads and another $180 million for dynamic routing and sourcing optimization. Our third vector of Supply 3.0 is sustainability. You have already heard how we are approaching this at the company level, and our approach within P&G supply is consistent with it. For the benefit of time, I will not talk about this today. To finish, let me talk about the fourth and most important vector, which is our superior workforce and our Integrated Work System, or IWS. To sustain our supply chain competitive advantage, we need a superior workforce, and for that, we need a superior employee value equation in all roles of our supply chain. One key aspect of this is the further implementation of our integrated work system in each of our manufacturing sites and critical fulfillment centers.
Our integrated work system combines external concepts like total productive maintenance, Lean Six Sigma, and Industry 4.0 in an extraordinarily comprehensive program that keeps our supply chain ahead of competition in the areas of value creation, process reliability, productivity, and quality. On average, IWS sites perform better in the industry on a number of metrics, from higher employee morale to lower attrition. Results continue to improve as sites progress through the phases of IWS. On those sites that achieved Phase 5, employee survey results are over 85% favorable. Attrition is at 6% compared to a 40% typically in manufacturing in North America. Safety and technical standards and skills are exceptionally high. We closed the fiscal year 2022 with 16 sites in Phase 5.0 of integrated work system.
We have another 34 to go on the next 18 months and the remaining 60 on the following two years. The discipline of IWS consistently will drive over $400 million in savings each of the next four years. To close, Supply 3.0 is an ambitious program that transforms our supply chain to address the major challenges and opportunities of the coming years and aims to deliver $1.5 billion in savings every year while maximizing sales. The vectors are interdependent, working together to sustain and extend our competitive advantage in supply chain for many years to come. Now, Sundar Raman, CEO of our Fabric & Home Care, will share how we are creating and extending product superiority by leveraging new digital capabilities.
Thanks, Julio. Data and digitization are now giving us access to tools we have never had before. These are allowing us to delight consumers and create disproportionate shareholder value. In Fabric & Home Care, we have made digitalization a priority across the entire value stream, all the way from purchasing raw materials, manufacturing, all the way through to the end consumer. This is creating new opportunities for us, not just on the productivity side, but also with sales growth that's helping accelerate value creation. I want to share two examples with you today to bring this to life. The first is connected homes. We're constructively disrupting how we unlock consumer insights, recognizing the gaps between claimed and actual consumer habits. Connected home panels are one of our several proprietary ways by which we're addressing this challenge. There are often consumer panels.
They give us real-time behavior data into how we can improve these consumer experiences. For example, consumers tend to underestimate the amount of time their kitchen taps run while they do dishes by hand. We're able to learn this real-time through our connected consumer home panels. At the same time, they tend to use the dishwasher a whole lot less frequently because they believe it tends to waste a whole lot of water. Actually, on average, consumers end up using 4 gal of water every two minutes while washing dishes by hand because the taps tend to keep running. Whereas a dishwasher typically uses 4 gal of water in an entire cycle. That means if we were doing dishes by hand, we would have to do all the dishes that need to be done in under two minutes to typically be more efficient than an energy-certified dishwasher.
I'm not that fast. With this insight, Cascade launched a myth-busting campaign with a tongue-in-cheek advertising that has been growing the category and the business. I'll have an opportunity to share this advertising with you as part of the sector review. The second example I share with you is about how we improve the speed of formula development and design, and executional agility through data modeling and simulations. We now have a one-click, no-touch approach to sending formulations all the way down to our manufacturing lines, automating what would have been a previously manual process. We applied this approach in February 2021 when winter storms in Texas and Louisiana disrupted over 60 of our supply chains.
We had to reformulate nearly 60% of our U.S. liquid detergent business using these digital tools, and the teams did it in under 28 days, something that would have normally taken 120 days. Digital, not just for the sake of digital, but to create value for our business. By now, you're familiar with our company's integrated growth strategies. Translating these into our sector's virtuous cycle of value creation, we're constructively disrupting every node here through data and digitalization. On superiority, we're digitizing consumer insights, product formulations, translating them via analytics into actions that improve all vectors of superiority. On category growth, we're algorithmizing our initiative success drivers, whether it's media, go-to-market, shelf and merchandising to deliver category growth. On operational excellence, we're using simulations to create flexibility, develop business continuity plans, enabling supply resilience and stronger customer service in the process.
Last, certainly not least, we're using models that optimize product costs and improve productivity while simultaneously improving product superiority. Now, Mindy Sherwood, our Chief Sales Officer and President of Global Walmart, will share some examples of how we are driving superior retail execution enabled by digital tools. Mindy?
Thanks, Sundar. Ensuring P&G sales teams have the tools and capabilities to work with our customers and create superior retail execution that drive category growth, value, and share growth for P&G's leading brands, it's a top priority for all of us. The way we do this is through our number one key business driver, and that is winning the shelf, which we do by making recommendations to our retail partners to create a superior retail experience. This goes for both the physical shelf in brick-and-mortar stores and the digital shelf online. On the physical shelf, it matters where you place the product. Things to consider. Is it at eye level? Is the product on the top shelf? Can people actually reach it? What is the product next to? Even the choice of color schemes can help create a superior consumer experience. It's the same for the digital shelf.
When consumers are searching for product on their mobile devices, we need to consider things like what images should we use? What information should we include? Should we include video or no video? Any recommendations on which products appear with what search terms. When this is done right, our consumers win, our customers win, and we win. In the past, our sales and marketing research teams, they go through a very long process to create a better physical shelf. This included determining which shelf layouts might work, then partnering with our customers to run research. Finally, retailers could adjust the shelf based on those results. This process could take months or sometimes even years. It was never truly complete as the shelf is constantly changing in line with our consumers' needs. Today, digital is enabling P&G to automate, elevate, and revolutionize retail execution.
We're creating new digital tools and capabilities that help us recommend winning shelf sets to our retailers faster, more accurate at predictions, and with many fewer resources. Using our wealth of experience and true shelf sales data across our categories, our digital tools and algorithms are taking the guessing and the long timeline right out of the process. This digital technology helps us understand consumers' wants, needs, and responses without having to physically experiment in the store, and it's a competitive advantage for us versus anything else in the marketplace. As an example, our personal care business leveraged this technology. They grew their shelf share by nearly 10%, driving significant category growth, share growth of nearly three points, and high single-digit sales growth over the past fiscal year, demonstrating that superior retail execution leads to business results for us and our retail partners.
P&G also understands what tactics work for our digital retailers on the online shelf. In the past, paid search campaign managers, they go onto the website, they type in a list of keywords, they review the brand content, and then they would adjust to improve the performance. They'd be able to check on the search performance at item level maybe one time per day to enhance the experience. Now we have digital tools that our teams use. They know exactly where to show up in search, which words to bid on, how much to invest in a campaign, and when to run it. Our previous mostly manual process allowed us to update our brand strategies once per workday, five times per week. With our digitized and automated process, we update our brand strategies every 15 minutes, 24/7, 672 times per week.
Better quality results while saving time and money. These digital tools have helped us win across top retailers such as Target, Walmart, and Amazon, doubling our share of search. These are just two examples of digital capabilities that really help us to raise the bar on superior retail execution, providing both growth and value. These digital capabilities also enable us to drive more productive spending, allowing us to reinvest or flow the savings to the bottom line. We're excited about these tools as well as others that are still in development. Next up, Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, will share how we're driving superior brand communication utilizing digital tools.
Thank you, Mindy. Hi, everyone. Brand building superiority matters, but how to achieve that superiority changes because brand building is in a constant state of disruption, particularly as data and digital technology reshape consumer engagement with our brands. Broadcast TV reach keeps declining, while connected TV streaming services and digital media keep growing. E-commerce and digitally originated commerce keep growing, with omni-retailers using shopper data and developing services and media, online ordering, store pickup, and home delivery. The agency industry faces heavy pressure as brands bring more work in-house, bypassing agencies altogether. We deal with disruption in two ways. Raising the bar to strengthen brand building fundamentals and leading constructive disruption to reinvent brand building. We strengthen fundamentals through the proven who, what, how brand building framework to improve performance across the elements of superiority, particularly superior brand communication.
We fuel investments through marketing spending productivity of $500 billion-$700 billion a year, largely reinvested to increase media reach with stronger advertising campaigns that demonstrate performance and value like this one.
Oi, oi. Phwoar, you called out a challenge. That grease don't scare me. With Fairy Platinum Plus here, your tough messes aren't that tough at all. Let's make this really interesting and switch to a short cycle.
Fairy Platinum Plus capsules have a unique formula that starts to work the instant it hits the water, removing tough mess fast.
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Switching to short helps you save up to 33% energy per wash.
Happy days.
Fairy Platinum Plus, our best clean, even on a short cycle.
Now, at the same time, we're constantly reinventing brand building from mass marketing with significant waste to brand building with greater precision on a mass scale, fueled by data and digital technology. We transparently gather consumer data on our own platforms, which are made possible because people choose to engage with P&G brands on our websites, apps, direct to consumer, packaging, and media. We also use the vast repository of P&G's proprietary consumer research data on habits and practices, on advertising testing, and on technical product and packaging studies. We get data and insights that are collected from panel participants through measurement sensors in connected homes.
We bring these data assets together into P&G's proprietary consumer database, which we call Consumer 360, and we develop predictive analytics and algorithms to build digital solutions for brands so they can reinvent media to achieve mass reach with greater precision. To reinvent advertising, to deliver effective ad experiences that are more superior, more useful and more interesting, and to reinvent the work of brand builders to operate with more direct control of creating brand growth and value. I'll illustrate with two examples. Pampers has an in-house media team that's creating growth and value through one-to-one brand building, which is necessary because parents with babies and diapers represent only about 10% of households. Now, in the past, Pampers reached 70% of parents, largely through TV, but only about 5% of diapering households. That's a lot of media waste.
They've transformed their model by transparently collecting and leveraging first-party data that's provided by parents, creating a one-to-one trusted relationship with parents from pregnancy through every stage of baby development. For example, when parents learn they're pregnant and go online, they search to determine when the baby's due, and Pampers' due date calculator is served up to help. Over time, Pampers serves additional content such as the baby name generator or surveys about baby development and augmented reality bedtime storytelling. Pampers then asks parents to join the Pampers Club so they can receive other relevant information and rewards for purchasing diapers. Now these interactions create value, which in turn creates trust and willingness for parents to share data and buy Pampers. With Pampers Club, we now have the ability to engage directly with 50% of all parents with babies in diapers.
Now, with first-party data and other sources, the Pampers media team creates precise, smart audiences using a proprietary algorithm that defines consumer groups across the various stages of baby and child development. Pampers reaches these smart audiences through programmatic media, which is buying and serving digital media in an automated way only to those who they want to reach and in a way that avoids excess ad frequency, so the same person won't see the same ad over and over and over again. To improve ad effectiveness, Pampers uses testing called AI Studios or Artificial Intelligence Studios. These have proprietary algorithms that test ads in one day for $1,000 versus traditional tests that can take 30 days and cost up to $30,000. The way it works is consumers will see an ad, then they're asked open-ended questions about their thoughts, feelings, and reactions.
We then take that feedback, and it's uploaded to a data network that's comprised of decades of consumer reactions data to advertising. Artificial intelligence analyzes and interprets the consumer feedback and scores the ad against known ads, so we can predict performance in market. Brands can make changes to images, music, copy, or text to iterate and improve the ad for the best performance. What this fast cycle testing allows Pampers to do is optimize more than 140 different ads a year for different platforms and audiences, including on digital media, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, e-commerce, streaming TV, and broadcast TV. Here's two examples.
A diaper this leak free? That's them free. Only Pampers Cruisers 360 have a 360 stretchy waistband for up to 100% leak free fit on every wild child. Pampers Cruisers 360, live wild and free. From the very first touch, Pampers, the number one pediatrician-recommended brand, helps keep baby's skin drier and healthier, so every touch will protect like the first. Pampers.
This is working. Pampers U.S. grew sales, excuse me, 10% last year, with reach up 20 points to 95%, awareness up 26 points, brand trust up 13 points, return on media investment up 17%, and 15% media savings, demonstrating that we can increase reach while achieving efficiencies that can be reinvested or taken to the bottom line to drive growth and value creation. Tide is transforming TV media to try to reach up to 100% of households. Tide was one of the first brands to bring media in-house. In broadcast TV, they received program and network viewing data that was previously available only to agencies. They converted the data into a planning algorithm that analyzes and chooses where to place ads across 120 networks and thousands of program combinations so they can maximize reach at a lower cost.
They developed a scheduling algorithm to optimize the allocation of ads within programs across weeks, days, and hours, increasing reach with the same number of ad units and saving $65 million. They're now using an algorithm to test a new way to buy ad units spread evenly across all TV programs and channels, which should increase reach another three points and save another $40 million. Now, with the shift to streaming TV, turns out 70% of households are reachable with ads, but there's excessive ad frequency within the same shows. Audiences of the big platforms like Paramount+, Peacock, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video largely overlap. Smaller streaming platforms like Sling, Crackle, and Tubi can help Tide deliver more reach because of unique individual audiences.
To find those individual audiences, Tide switched to programmatic media buying, finding unique connected TV IDs across all platforms, so they could stop duplicating ad frequency, increase reach, and save money. Tide now reaches 86% of households with a line of sight to 92%, demonstrating again that we can increase reach while achieving efficiencies that can be reinvested or taken to the bottom line. Finally, we see retailer media as an opportunity to accelerate market growth. Retailers in several markets either have or are developing their own media offerings. We're working with them to help develop capabilities focused on making media an accelerator of market growth. There are three elements, search, programmatic media, and shoppable media. Retailer search represents 11% of total media spending and is now growing in double digits.
We've worked with retailers to get direct access to their search programs so we can adjust ad buying and content every 15 minutes, as Mindy outlined earlier, increasing sales returns by 4 x and increasing basket sizes. On programmatic media buying, we're combining P&G smart audience data with retailer shopper and purchase data in a transparent and privacy-compliant way, so we can create new insights and attract new users, buy more items, and buy more often, driving market growth. Let's walk through an example from a U.S. retailer where we combine shopper data with P&G consumer data in a third-party clean room. What that led to is new audiences, such as non-shoppers, new homeowners, and new parents within 40 mi of the store. We then created advertising with multiple products that we serve to these audiences through programmatic media buys.
The retailer increased shoppers, and they grew category sales, and P&G grew sales and users. We're now testing this with other retailers. We're creating shoppable media that enables consumers to instantly see, search, and buy a product through the media they're engaging in, which just reduces the time and steps from awareness to purchase. Here's examples from China, Douyin or TikTok for Pampers and Always, and from U.S. Walmart for Vicks and Gillette. The world of brand building is constantly disrupting, and these examples illustrate how we're using data analytics and digital technology to lead constructive disruption by reinventing brand building in media, advertising, and in how we work. We're reinventing what it means to be one of the world's largest advertisers. It's not who spends the most, it's who reaches the most with the greatest precision and the greatest effectiveness to deliver growth and value creation.
Now, Tracey Grabowski, our Chief Human Resources Officer, will talk about the employee value equation.
Thank you, Marc. Hello. There's a quote that's been attributed to Richard Deupree, who was P&G's CEO from 1930 to 1947. It goes like this. "If you leave us our money, our buildings, and our brands, but take away our people, the company will fail. But if you take away our money, our buildings, and our brands, but leave us our people, we can rebuild the whole thing in a decade." There's a similar shorthand quote I've heard many times in my 33 years with P&G. People are our most important asset. Since P&G's founding, we've recognized that to attract, develop, and retain the best workforce possible, we need to offer a superior employee value equation. It was this recognition that led to P&G pioneering America's first profit-sharing program, which included factory workers in 1887.
A few things have changed since then, but the importance of P&G people to the success of the company is evergreen. We're proud of where we are today and all that we offer that makes P&G a great place to work. Historically, this has been a point of strength for us. We also recognize that the way we work and our relationship with work has changed because of the pandemic. Employees want to know, how are you putting your values and principles into action? They're looking for a renewed sense of belonging, for trusting and authentic relationships with their managers and their colleagues, and a reassurance that the company is investing in their career and their development. We're seeing increasing employee expectations for workplace benefits, for flexibility, for transparency, and for equity. Where do we stand?
Every year, we ask employees about this to participate in a survey that covers a variety of areas about the health of our organization. Participation is strong. This year, we had a 72% response rate. Overall results on the survey were equal to a year ago, a strong 77% favorable, and importantly, above competitive benchmarks in the vast majority of areas, including P&G as an employer of choice, meaningful work, and equality and inclusion. Our gender, race, and ethnicity numbers are strong. We recognize that diverse representation in the company enables us to understand and serve billions of consumers around the world. 41% of our global employees and very nearly 50% of our global management are women. 28% of our U.S. employees are multicultural. Our board, 45% women and 45% multicultural. We continue to attract highly qualified talent at entry levels and experienced hires.
Each year, more than 600,000 people apply for management positions. We hire about 6,000, 1%. We're recognized as a top employer across a range of external rankings. Our employer of choice rankings, as determined by Universum, are up in many markets. While we're starting from a position of strength in many respects, we also have opportunities to improve. We are seeing lower connection with new employees, diverse employees, and those changing roles, leading to higher attrition versus what we've historically seen, although we remain in the top quartile for retention in the industry according to Gartner data. There's always more work to do to attract, develop, and retain the best talent. Employees have a lot of choices. We want a superior employee value equation to ensure that working at P&G delivers a superior experience and value for all employees.
Think about how we create a superior consumer experience. Starts with insights. We need to truly understand our consumers, their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their lives. Then we apply those insights to deliver superior products and packaging, communication, retail execution, and value. We're applying those same concepts with our employees to deliver a superior employee value equation. This requires us to have a sincere dialogue with our employees that speaks to relationships and humanity, an overt discussion about what we offer, both give and get, what we call P&G plus me equals mutual success. Based on employee feedback, we identified four areas necessary for a superior employee experience. We call them vectors, similar to the vectors of superiority on the consumer side, and importantly, these are also integrated. Just as superiority and a single vector for a product will not lead to overall superiority, same is true here.
These vectors have been validated, and they resonate with employees around the world, regardless of role or level. They reflect what is unique and compelling about our P&G culture and our P&G experience. Our employee value equation is unique. A typical employee value equation might include a bullet point list of what companies offer to employees, maybe in benefits or training or vacation. We're going beyond the what we offer to the why. The first vector is making an impact in our daily work by being empowered and accountable with increasing responsibility over time. The insight we have here is that people don't mind working hard if they are doing something that matters.
It starts with finding inspiration from the core of our business, serving consumers in small but meaningful ways through the products we make, pack, and ship every day and from the people they serve alongside in doing so. We've made specific changes to our organization design and culture to make our organization more agile, more accountable, and more empowered. This directly enables the impact of our employees. The second vector is continually growing our skills and capabilities, which in turn gives P&G and our brands competitive advantage. Many companies offer courses to help employees upskill. At P&G, we also offer training classes, but our uniqueness is our commitment to develop all 100,000+ of the people we work with to reach their full potential. This is a very different model.
It requires a robust activity system, including planned, meaningful experiences, world-class training opportunities, and a real focus on coaching and feedback for growth. The third vector is being valued and rewarded for the work that we do, knowing that the company cares for our health and financial well-being, and that we can bring our authentic selves to work every day. We've made significant investments in employee benefits, compensation, workplace upgrades, access to wellness resources, and our hybrid work model. We have competitive base compensation, and we've increased how frequently we benchmark our salaries. We've also expanded our bonus program so more employees' compensation is tied to the company performance. The last vector is being inspired to serve consumers better than competition, to build the business, and to be a part of a company that is a force for growth and a force for good.
Our extensive recruiting and selection process does yield really smart people, but also people who are open to sharing a set of values, to collaborating, and to taking a long-term view of things. In addition to being valued and rewarded, we know our employees want to be part of something bigger than themselves. Our employees feel proud of the consumers we serve, and proud of the results that we deliver, proud to be part of a winning team. As Mr. Deupree said, our people have been at the heart of who we are since this company began. We will continue to invest in a superior employee value equation just as we invest in superior products. Back to you, Jon.
Thanks, Tracey. I hope this drill down into our strategy and the ways we're strengthening it has been informative and has provided you a better sense of the work that we're undertaking. The work, as you've seen, is significant, but necessary to keep winning with consumers, with customers, and for shareowners. We're building on our successes and addressing our challenges by doubling down on our integrated strategy to profitably grow markets, sales, profit, household penetration, and through this, our share. We're strengthening the execution of our strategy, raising the bar again on superiority, driving productivity to fund investments, offset headwinds, and build margin, and putting focus on four additional areas, supply, sustainability, digital acumen, and our employee value equation.
Our best path forward is to stay focused on executing and strengthening the integrated strategies that have enabled strong results over the past four years and are the foundation for balanced growth and value creation. We're now about halfway through our presentation. After a break, we'll hear from each one of our sector CEOs and our chief operating officer on how they're bringing our strategy to life in their respective businesses. Following that, we'll take questions. We're gonna take a 15-minute break, so if you can be back in the room, a little ahead of 4:00 P.M., we'll stay right on schedule. Thank you.
Welcome back. As Jon said, my colleagues and I are now going to share how our integrated strategies are coming to life in each of the sectors, starting with Fabric and Home Care. Fabric and Home Care is a $135 billion industry that has grown at an average of 5% over the last four years. In the same time period, P&G has grown 7% in the sector, gaining nearly four points of value share. Fabric and Home Care is P&G's largest sector, generating 34% of the company's sales last fiscal year. Within the sector, fabric care is 2/3 and home care is the remaining 1/3. P&G is the global market leader in both the fabric and home care categories with a portfolio of leading brands.
Our brands are our lifeblood, and they are also our promise to consumers to tackle the tough cleaning jobs. These promises are positioned against the multiple jobs across those categories, laundry detergent, fabric enhancers, dish care, air care, and surface care. More on these jobs a bit later. Our $10 billion brands here represent nearly 80% of our sales and hold leading positions in the markets where we play. On to these jobs. Getting rid of stains is one of the many problems of consumer jobs to be done that we help consumers solve with our products. What does that number mean? Today, 26%, only 26% of consumers are completely satisfied with getting rid of stains, and we are obsessed with improving this. With clothes, stains, habits, machines constantly changing, we have a long runway for growth in solving stain removal.
Getting rid of stains is just one of the things we do in Fabric and Home Care. We have identified multiple jobs to be done, including getting rid of odor, protecting the shape and feel of clothes, getting through tough messes in the kitchen, giving clothes a fresh scent, improving wellness, killing germs, to name a few. Each of these jobs is an opportunity to create a superior consumer solution that delights them, grows the categories in the process, and create value for P&G and our shareholders. With that set up, I'm gonna do something which you typically wouldn't find in this kind of a forum, wash our dirty linen in public. You might be wondering what those two mannequins were doing at the front as you entered.
We stained their clothes, washed one of them with Tide in cold water, and the other one with a leading bargain brand in hot water to show you the superior cleaning performance of Tide in cold. I invite you to visit the Fabric Care booth later today to see the results with your own eyes. Consistent with our company strategies, this slide captures the essence of our value creation model and the virtuous cycle within the fabric and home care sector. This is how we create value when all of them work in sync. It all starts with solving consumers' unmet needs with products that are superior, with packaging that is irresistibly superior, with communication, go-to-market consumer and customer value that is superior. Our innovation is therefore focused on creating more users, driving more usage, earning a greater premium per use, thus enabling category growth.
When we deliver this category growth with excellence, operational excellence across the entire value stream, we are there when consumers and customers need us, and we build competitive advantage. When we deliver this with operational excellence, we're able to identify inefficiencies in everything we do. By identifying and eliminating those, we find productivity, which we then reinvest back into superiority, completing this virtuous value creation cycle that gets accelerated through continuous constructive disruption. I'd like to bring this to life by going through each of these pillars. Let's start with superiority. There are two examples I wanna share with you, one from the U.S. and one from Europe, on how our brands communicate our product superiority, and you will see how irresistible superiority is integrated with sustainability in these examples. Please play the advertisement.
We really had our hands full with our two-year-old.
Yeah. Naturally, we doubled down with a new puppy.
Sure. They're twice as cute together, but now we've got double the stains.
Double the odors.
Thankfully, we also have Tide Ultra Oxi with odor eliminator. It can handle double trouble because it's the number one stain fighter.
The number one odor remover.
I thought you guys were house trained.
With the number one stain fighter and odor remover, it's got to be Tide.
How can Ariel pods help with climate change? Wash colder and see. Now when we take on tough stains like mud and sweat, we can save energy. Ariel pods in our new cardboard box work brilliantly on cold to give you an outstanding clean. If we all turn to wash colder, we could save as much CO2 as taking 500,000 c ars off the freeways. Wash colder and save up to 60% energy per wash. Rated best on stains by Which? Always keep away from children.
Superior products and packaging brought to life through superior communication and go-to-market execution drives strong business results. Ariel's organic sales are up 7% since the start of this campaign, leading category growth while combining single-digit pricing with innovation. Tide Power PODS have contributed to organic sales of +5% and driving category growth, with their average price being 3x the category average in the United States. Superiority drives category growth by delighting consumers and solving unmet needs. We have a track record of driving category growth, and this holds true even during recessionary periods. Over the last 40 years, U.S. P&G Fabric Care business has grown 5x , 500%, in a market that has grown by 4 x. Market growth, therefore, has been the main driver of P&G's growth, 80%, which we have driven with superior innovation.
In turn, P&G has been the main driver of this market growth, and we have a long opportunity, endless opportunity for value creation ahead of us by increasing household penetration, frequency of use, new solutions to solve consumer problems, and expanding our premium solutions. We have confidence in the underlying strength and strategy of our business because category growth is a long-term winning strategy. Leading category growth requires us to partner with our retailers. This superior retail execution and partnership drives category growth, which is what our customers care about. This shows we're in a very strong position when it comes to partnership with our retailers. According to our external benchmarking done by Kantar, P&G Fabric & Home Care has ranked consecutively number one in retail execution among our peer group in the past three years.
Let's now watch a few examples of innovation that drives category growth, the kind of growth we and our retail partners care about.
If you haven't tried Dawn Powerwash Dish Spray, what are you waiting for? It's Dawn's fastest and easiest way to clean everyday dishes. On simple messes, just spray, wipe, and rinse. On tough messes, its spray-activating suds have five times faster grease cleaning power to break down grease without water. Plus, its targeted spray cleans even hard-to-reach places better. Replace your dish soap with Dawn Powerwash and spray your dishes clean.
We do it every night.
Every night.
I live alone, but I still do it every night. Right after dinner.
Definitely after Mila. Like clockwork. Do it
Run your dishwasher with Cascade Platinum and save water. Did you know an ENERGY STAR certified dishwasher uses less than four gallons per cycle while a running sink uses that every two minutes? That means even small loads can save water. Why not do it? Run your dishwasher every night with Cascade Platinum, the surprising way to save water.
The superior innovation that solves unmet consumer needs drives category growth. Dawn has grown over 50% since the launch of Powerwash. That drives nearly 90% of the category growth. If Powerwash were to be a standalone brand, it would be the third-largest in the category. Cascade Platinum sales are up 15% after years of single-digit growth, driving 95% of our category growth. We continue to solve consumers' unmet needs with category growth. I have the pleasure of showing you a brand-new launch from Downy.
Oof. Gotta get rid of this.
Tell me why.
'Cause it stinks.
Tell me why.
I don't know. I've washed it so many times.
Tell me why.
No, you tell me why I can't get rid of this odor.
Have you tried new Downy Rinse & Refresh?
It doesn't just cover up odors, it helps remove them three times better than detergents alone.
It can.
Guess the odor wins. Bye-bye.
Nope. That's not us.
Sorry.
Rinse odor away with new Downy Rinse & Refresh.
A fun piece of advertising. Downy Rinse is designed to help remove odor-causing residues three times better than detergent alone. While we're in the early days of this launch, initial results are really encouraging. Let's turn to operational excellence. We continue to operate in a really challenging environment when it comes to supply challenges, unprecedented weather events, force majeures. Despite all these, we maintained a very high level of customer service with our case fill rate about 95% in most cases over the past years. Since fiscal year 2020 through the end of this year, we'd have invested over $1 billion to increase capacity to continue serving our customers and consumers. Last week, we announced the purchase of land within Inland Port, Arizona, to build a new manufacturing plant.
While still early in the planning process, we are planning up to $ 500 million investment and project 500 new jobs. Productivity has always been, will continue to be a critical component of our model. To mitigate the unprecedented increase in costs, we're committed to driving savings and cash productivity with no area of cost left untouched. Productivity and pricing are necessary to maintain the superiority across all our vectors, including delivering superior value to our consumers and customers. We do this by identifying efficiencies across every element of our value stream, product manufacturing, communication, and go-to-market. Earlier today, I shared just one example of how we use digitalization to do product modeling that allowed us to mitigate the impact of supply challenges and inflation. In times like these, we need to double down and not step back on investing in growth.
In the current year, we're investing over $1 billion in product, media, capacity, and innovation. Finally, constructive disruption is an accelerator of this entire virtuous value creation cycle. Earlier today, you heard me talk about connected homes and formula optimization as a couple of examples. We have also created internal media planning tools, sophisticated TV ratings forecast models that optimize how to best reach consumers. We're also integrating sustainability into superiority to accelerate value creation, and the best example of this is our cold water washing campaign, which Jon and Alex talked about earlier, and you saw the commercial for. Our focus on these strategies has delivered sustained, balanced growth with sales up 7% and net earnings up 13% on average since fiscal year 2018.
Our relentless focus on this virtuous value creation cycle of irresistible superiority, category growth, operational excellence, and productivity gives us the confidence of future growth. Thank you for your time. I look forward to seeing you at our booth later today. Next up is Fama Francisco, CEO of our Baby, Feminine and Family Care business. Fama?
Baby, Feminine, and Family Care are part of almost a $105 billion industry that has grown by 4% on average since 2018. P&G has grown our organic sales by 4% over the past four years on a sector level, with Feminine Care leading the growth at +7%, P&G Family Care growing by 5%, and Baby Care grew 1%. Baby Care stabilized from fiscal years 2019 to 2021 and has been leading category growth. Baby Care grew high single digits in fiscal 2022, delivering the best year in a decade. The sector is nearly $20 billion in sales and accounts for 25% of the company, with 40% in Baby Care, 35% in Family Care, and 25% in Feminine Care.
We have a portfolio of household name brands including Pampers, which is P&G's largest brand, Luvs, Always, Tampax, Always Discreet, Bounty, Charmin, and Puffs. P&G is the global market leader in our Baby Care and our Feminine Care categories, and P&G is also the market leader in our Family Care business in North America, where we predominantly compete. Now, while these are three distinct categories, the superiority model is a very consistent roadmap to winning. Starting with Baby Care. Here is one of P&G's largest categories with over $8 billion in sales. Since we sold our first disposable diaper back in 1961, we have been continuously innovating to deliver superior products that support the happy and healthy development of babies and win with parents, caregivers, and health professionals. North America Swaddlers is a great example of how superiority enables us to win with consumers and drive category growth.
Back in 2018, we realized that we had lost superiority in the premium segment of our business in North America, and we invested to drive superiority across all the five vectors. To restore superiority, we launched three back-to-back innovations on Swaddlers, improving softness, comfort, and leakage protection. Our superior packaging highlights the benefits of Swaddlers, such as being the Number one pediatrician-recommended brand and with up to 100% leak-proof skin protection. We also step-changed our retail execution, expanding our in-store distribution by up to 15%, and we step-changed our superior brand communication in our advertising. We shifted our media mix to be a lot more digitally led, allowing us to decrease our media spend while increasing our reach, our frequency of reach, and growing sales double digits. A great example of driving productivity to fuel growth. Let's watch the copy.
Pampers Swaddlers feature lockaway channels. They stay 2x drier, so babies can sleep soundly all night. Pampers.
These investments in superiority allowed us to gain 1 million new users in Pampers Swaddlers alone and exceed $1 billion in retail sales. Swaddlers was a key contributor to our North America baby care, driving growth and delivering a double-digit increase in sales last year. Now, as Jon said, superiority is a relative measure, and it's not a static target, so we didn't stop there. We will be launching another major innovation that provides further delight in comfort and leakage protection very soon. We also constructively disrupted how we reach our consumers, which Marc talked about earlier today. At any given point in time, only 10% of households have diaper-aged children. As you can imagine, our consumers turn over completely every three years, and their needs change from infant to baby to toddler.
Using traditional mass marketing tools to target this consumer and this category is completely not efficient. In fact, it's a big waste of money. What did we do? We built the largest opt-in database of parents in our industry by offering a worthwhile value exchange. We provide useful tools like the due date calculator, the baby name generator, and Pampers rewards, and that allows us to create a trusted one-on-one relationship between Pampers and parents. Now we reach over 95% of parents, strengthening our brand equity and driving productivity through our media targeting, and our accuracy is unmatched in the industry. Now, moving on to feminine care. Over the past three years, P&G feminine care drove more than 50% of the global category growth, over 1.5 x our market share level.
We've done this through a relentless focus on superiority across all the vectors, enabling category premiumization and regimen usage. Always Discreet has disrupted the traditional ideas of the incontinence category, focusing on superior protection in a thinner, much more discreet product and beautiful feminine packaging. Our superior products, our superior packaging and communication are making a meaningful difference in consumers' lives and driving strong business results. Our latest campaign on Always Discreet encourages category users to choose products without having to compromise, and they deserve better. Let's watch.
I get bladder leaks. I didn't want to feel like I was wearing the pads I wore when I was 12. I tried the Always Discreet pads. They fit perfectly in the place they're supposed to. Look how much it holds, and it still stays thin. It's a protection we deserve.
Since entering the incontinence business eight years ago, Always Discreet has been a driving force in terms of driving category growth. In fact, we've increased household penetration up by 50%. Over the last three years, we have grown sales 3 x the rate of the global incontinence category, and we hold the number two share position in both North America and Europe and the number three position in Japan, where we entered in 2019. Now, superior communication is also delivering superior results on Tampax. Two years ago, we set out to reinvigorate a category that was stagnant in terms of market growth. In July 2020, Tampax launched an educational campaign grounded in humor to normalize tampon and period talk. Let's watch Amy Schumer, our tampon guru.
I don't do Kegels. Be real with me. Will the Tampax just fall out?
No, but Kegels are good.
I want you to tell me when you think I'm doing it and then when I'm not doing it. Okay, ready?
You're doing it.
I was doing it. Okay, tampons are filled with, like, toxic ingredients that are just all getting absorbed straight into my vagina and, like, going right up to my brain, right?
No.
Oh, there's a lot of misinformation out there. I can't speak for other brands, but Tampax tampons go through a rigorous safety assessment for any harmful ingredients. What about dioxins?
Nope.
Pesticides?
Nope.
Bleach?
Nope.
Gluten?
No.
Guacamole.
No.
Should we order in?
Yes.
Our campaign has reached millions of consumers across platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and even gaming, and the response has been resoundingly positive. Since then, we actually led the entire tampon category in North America to grow by nearly 10%, and Tampax share grew by nearly nine points. Now, in fact, we've been so successful driving category growth that demand has outstripped our capacity for Tampax, and we are actively working to build more. Now, last but not least, Family Care. Family Care has been a critical driver to our shareholder value for the company. P&G organic sales grew mid-single digits over the last three years as the pandemic led to record tissue and towel consumption, driven by increased time at home and also stronger cleaning, health, and hygiene habits. P&G has consistently driven category growth in the tissue towel segment, enabled by our superiority strategy.
Our products are noticeably superior in cleaning, absorbency, and softness due to our unique proprietary technology. In the current environment, communicating the superior value of our brands is so important. Charmin's current campaign, called Test Lab, educates consumers that they can use less due to Charmin's superior absorbency. Let's watch the copy.
At Charmin, we're all about the science of softness. We've doubly tested our new Charmin Ultra Soft to prove its value really stacks up. First up, the cushy soft test. Wow. Softer than ever. Next, the absorbency test. See? It's 2 x more absorbent, so you can use less. New Charmin Ultra Soft is always worth it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have one more test to conduct.
We all go. Why not enjoy the go with Charmin?
Charmin grew sales mid-single digits on average over the last three years and actually had a very strong start to the fiscal year. Organic sales were up 7% in the first quarter. Superior communication enables category growth. Bounty communicates our value by demonstrating how one sheet of Bounty can pick up a mess that the leading competitor brands fail to absorb, even with two sheets. Let's watch.
One Bounty versus two of the leading ordinary brands. One sheet of Bounty absorbs more than two sheets of theirs. The winner is Bounty. One and done. Bounty, the quicker picker upper.
Over the past 15 years, our Bounty sales grew by $1.5 billion, doubling in size and driving over 40% of the category growth while maintaining our share leadership. We are committed to continue to drive growth in this category through superior products, superior communication to delight consumers as habits change. In closing, our baby, feminine, and family care team is agile, passionate, and driven to lead category growth by serving consumers around the world and across life stages. We are proud of our market share leadership, and we are committed to accelerate our growth even further in the future with productivity and constructive disruption as our fuel to our irresistible superiority. Thank you. Next up is Alex Keith to cover the beauty sector.
Thanks, Fama. Beauty is a large, high-growth industry with a market size today of $175 billion for the categories in which we play, reflecting a healthy 5% growth over the past four years. P&G Beauty is an important part of P&G overall. This business made up 18% of P&G's overall sales in fiscal 2022. As Jon outlined, in 2016, we made the decision to focus our beauty portfolio on daily use categories where performance drives brand choice, haircare, skincare, and personal care. Today, we are well-rounded in terms of category balance. About half of beauty sales come from our haircare business and the other half from our skin and personal care business, which operates as a single business category.
Our portfolio includes leading and iconic brands like Olay, Pantene, and Head & Shoulders, which typically hold the number one or number two positions in the markets where they are present. It includes brands that focus on daily hygiene needs at an average price of $1, expanding all the way to the demanding needs of the luxury skincare consumer with an SK-II average price of $200. In the five-year period since we began operating our focused portfolio, fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2022. We added $3.3 billion in annual sales, $1.2 billion in annual profit, and generated $13 billion in cash flow. This five-year performance was strong and balanced with all six of our top global brands growing sales.
We delivered this growth by deliberately and consistently delivering irresistible superiority across more and more of our category region combinations over time. Like other sectors in P&G, when we are superior in four or more vectors, we deliver disproportionate sales growth for P&G Beauty and the category, leading to share growth. Our objective is to get even more of the business to at least four vectors of superiority. Meaningful ingredient-led innovation in skincare, like Olay's Vitamin C, struck the right balance of performance, potency, and in-use delight. This innovation earned the number one product launch spot in U.S. Skincare in calendar 2021. In personal care, China's Safeguard Premium Body Wash leveraged superior brand communications and superior value-creating retail partnerships, helping to deliver more than double-digit annual sales growth for the brand over the past three years.
Also in China, Pantene accelerated its focus on premium and super-premium innovations like 3 Minute Miracle, Intense Hydration Shampoo, and Treatment Shots. These innovations, together with strong commercial innovation on the base brand, are delivering irresistible superiority for Pantene in market and double-digit sales growth across the past three years. This superiority, complemented by a strong productivity program across all cost elements, results in P&G Beauty having industry-leading before-tax margins that are ahead of competitive weighted averages. However, our two largest businesses were impacted by several factors in fiscal 2022, resulting in below-category performance. First, China Hair Care, which is P&G's biggest business in China, is the market leader with a very large offline footprint. Still, ongoing pandemic lockdowns, which limited offline shopping, notably affected this business over the past year, compounded by our small footprint in China's rapidly emerging online channels.
Simply stated, we were not present at a sufficiently high enough level in the places and moments where the Chinese consumer was shopping to overcome these offline headwinds. Pandemic impacts are also affecting our SK-II business, with reduced department store traffic as well as travel retail disruptions now even extending to Hainan Island in China, where travel has virtually disappeared over the past three months. Finally, similar to other businesses, P&G Beauty was affected by the global supply chain crisis and the related availability and pricing of commodities, both of which negatively impacted our profit margin. These macroeconomic disruptions are by no means over, and doubtless, there are more to come. Each of last year's issues are opportunities for improvement this year and beyond. We're making the changes needed to win in this ever tougher environment and are confident we'll reignite our growth trajectory thanks to our four focused accelerations.
First, accelerating digital capability and improving our presence in digital commerce. Specifically, we're using data and algorithms to increase media productivity across digital channels. This includes creating unique audiences and competitive placement tools for key digital channels, plus leveraging cross-selling opportunities and consumer insights from the first-party data that we transparently collect with tools like Olay Skin Advisor and HairCode. This precision targeting helps us to get the right content to the right consumer, so they can find the right product in the right channel. We're also making significant improvements to our digital commerce capabilities in content and operations. Olay in China is leading the way here by leveraging first-party data, media optimization, and search metrics to optimize our online media while also realizing notable cost efficiencies. This has helped Olay reach new consumers with relevant, highly engaging content that converts into sales.
As a result, search volumes are up 30%, sales offtake is up 60%, and our return on investment has increased by more than 70%. Olay's equity with online shoppers has also improved by a healthy percentage. Second, we're re-energizing SK-II by reestablishing PITERA as the brand's hero ingredient and the centerpiece of what is still a very strong brand equity. For over 40 years, every single SK-II product has been formulated with PITERA, enabling millions of skin transformations around the world. Accordingly, PITERA will become the focus of SK-II's always leading digital communication, including through the first ever World PITERA Day, executed at the local level in key markets like Japan, where this campaign has generated a double-digit increase in new users across our last quarter spanning July to September.
Through the refocus on PITERA and new innovations like GenOptics Aura Essence, a daily usage cream that delivers new levels of skin firming, we are confident in SK-II's long-term growth potential. Third, we're rebalancing growth globally by accelerating business momentum in our Europe and North America beauty businesses. Our Europe beauty portfolio accelerated sales and profit ahead of category growth averages in fiscal 2022, thanks to strong brand communication and in-store executions, coupled with powerful premium innovation like Head & Shoulders Derma X and Pantene Pro-V Miracle. In North America, our personal care business delivered high single-digit sales and double-digit profit last fiscal, driven by strong execution across superiority vectors, as well as premium innovations like aluminum-free formulas across our antiperspirant and deodorant lineup. Finally, we're entering fast-growing segments and price tiers within the categories where we play today.
We've been selective about portfolio expansion with both created and acquired brands, both of which are designed to reach new consumers in these spaces. This includes creation of our specialty beauty division, where acquired brands First Aid Beauty, Ouai, Tula, and Farmacy are market leaders in the premium skin, hair, and personal care segments. The U.S. specialty beauty market is valued at more than $10 billion across these three categories, with double-digit growth in the past 12 months alone. Today already, Tula is the number one skincare brand at Ulta. First Aid Beauty's body exfoliator, KP Bump Eraser, ranks as the number one selling product in the specialty body segment. We're excited about the growth potential for this portfolio and are partnering closely with each brand to raise the bar in superiority vectors to help them grow. Plus, we're learning a lot from them, too.
We also continue to operationalize our industry-leading sustainability platform, Responsible Beauty. Sustainably-minded consumers in beauty have grown double digits in the last four years and now make up one out of every four consumers. As I said earlier, we've integrated Responsible Beauty directly into our irresistible superiority models and innovation programs with bold goals to ensure that we're a positive force for growth, good, and beauty in the world. From a manufacturing lens, we've already met and sometimes exceeded some of our Ambition 2030 targets, including reaching our goal of 100% zero waste to landfill status for all of our beauty plants. Our commitment to Responsible Beauty powers us to develop meaningful innovation that eliminates trade-offs between sustainability and product performance. This includes our Herbal Essences bio:renew collection, which I highlighted earlier.
We're at the beginning of our superiority that's sustainable journey, and our entire organization is committed and poised to do more. Enabling new strategies to come to life profitably are very strong capabilities in productivity, delivering premium price mix with innovation, and strong beauty execution in market. We remain committed to smart simplification across our operations, especially to enable a virtuous cycle of reinvestment, realizing important savings today while protecting investments needed for future growth. In closing, we're confident in our strategies and in our ability to execute them well in this increasingly dynamic world, especially to deliver continued growth and value creation. I'll now hand over to Jen Davis, Chief Executive Officer of Health Care. Thank you.
Thank you, Alex. P&G plays in a $300 billion global healthcare market that's grown about 4% per year since 2018. We expect market growth will accelerate behind social and demographic trends such as aging, chronic disease, and the desire for well-being through self-care. P&G Health Care has grown 8% over that same period, driving the market and over two points of value share growth. In fact, over the past one, three, and five years, we've been the fastest-growing major consumer health manufacturer in the world, and we are now the number two player in the industry. Our business is comprised of oral care with 60% and personal health care with 40% of the sector's top-line sales.
Both personal health and oral care have delivered outstanding value creation for P&G over the last four years, with balanced sales growth, productivity to enable faster profit growth, and strong cash generation. No other healthcare company has a more balanced portfolio with leading presence across four major consumer healthcare jobs to be done. Control is a big motivation in healthcare. When consumers have acute issues to treat or fix, like the flu or heartburn, they want fast symptom relief to get back on track. Many people need help managing blood sugar or ongoing digestive issues, and they don't want their condition to control them. They want daily solutions to manage their conditions so they can live a normal life. Now prevent is about security, adopting healthy habits today to proactively prevent future health problems.
This is a key growth driver of super premium health-focused toothpaste and power toothbrushes to prevent cavities and gum disease. Enhance and improve is about consumers' desire to be and perform at their best. For example, teeth whitening can boost confidence, while vitamins and food supplements can help consumers look and feel great today as they improve wellness over time. Our objective is to provide irresistibly superior solutions for these jobs, products with trusted performance and the highest efficacy and quality to build brand loyalty. When using these products is a delightful experience, we make it easier for consumers to adopt and maintain healthy daily habits that grow categories. The global oral care category is $55 billion in size and consistently growing mid-single digits. With a 20% market share, P&G's iconic oral care brands span a wide range of product forms.
We have our broadest portfolio in the U.S. with toothpaste, manual and power brushes, rinse, floss, whitening, and denture, with leadership positions in five out of six. Oral health means more than good teeth. Over 700 studies substantiate that good oral health improves whole body health. Clinical studies have shown that people who use an electric toothbrush have healthier gums, less tooth decay, and they keep their teeth for longer than people who use a manual toothbrush. It's no surprise dentists recommend switching to a power brush to improve patients' oral health. Oral-B is the global market leader in power brushing and the number one dentist-recommended brand. In 2020, we launched Oral-B iO, creating a new gold standard in the super premium power brush segment. As Victor mentioned, it delivers a first-time wow and provides superior clinical results.
iO removes 100% more plaque than a manual brush, 6 x more plaque along the gum line where it matters most within eight weeks. This is critical to the prevention of gingivitis and more serious issues. In fact, plaque bacteria can cause an inflammatory response in the periodontal tissue that sets off a chain reaction that spreads throughout the body. In a study involving consumers whose plaque buildup had advanced to gingivitis, patients using iO showed 3 x greater reduction in gum bleeding versus manual brush use. Oral-B has delivered all five vectors of superiority to make iO a success. In the two years since launch, iO has grown to $400 million in retail sales and contributed 70% of category growth. About 30% of iO users traded in from a manual toothbrush, indicating the significant value consumers experience from making this change.
We're currently extending the portfolio at the top in Europe with our newest innovation, the Series 10 with iO Sense. It's our most advanced brush to date. Let's take a look. This summer, we also launched Series 3, 4, and 5 globally, which is extending the price ladder down and expanding distribution across channels, giving consumers more options to experience iO whatever their budget and wherever they shop. We've also innovated across our replacement brush heads with three new variants, including targeted clean for people with braces, a frequent request from our dental professional partners. In 2018, we accelerated the growth of the gum segment in toothpaste with the blockbuster launch of Crest Gum Detoxify. Prior to this, the penetration of gum toothpaste was only 2%. Within one year, we doubled it to 4%. Let's take a look at this ad.
My gums are irritated. I don't have to worry about that, do I? Actually, you do. Harmful bacteria lurk just below the gum line, and if you're not taking care of your gums, you're not taking care of your mouth. Now I use this, Crest Gum Detoxify. Crest Gum Detoxify. Voted Product of the Year. It works below the gum line and is clinically proven to neutralize harmful plaque bacteria and help reverse early gum damage. Gum Detoxify from Crest. Gums are good. Is my checkup. Crest, healthy, beautiful smiles for life.
To- date, Crest is the number one penetrated brand in the gum segment due to superiority across multiple vectors, including exceptional clinical results, superior consumer experience, winning communications, and best-in-class in-store execution. We've continued to elevate our gum collection from deeper gum cleaning and prevention to gum treatment and healing to our most recent launch in 2021 with Crest Gum Restore. Crest Gum penetration is now 6%, and the gum segment has grown 16% in dollar sales the past two years. These launches have propelled P&G to be the fastest-growing global super-premium paste manufacturer over the last three years. We remain optimistic and excited about the opportunity to impact consumer health outcomes and accelerate oral care category growth. The global personal health care category is about $250 billion in size and consistently growing low to mid-single digits.
With a broad presence in key segments and a strong portfolio of physician-supported multi-region brands, P&G Personal Health Care has been a consistent growth driver for the company. We've driven productivity across the P&L to enable accelerated profit growth while simultaneously strengthening investments in consumer messaging. Our portfolio includes legacy brands like Vicks, the number-one OTC brand, and cough, cold, flu brand in the world. It also includes trusted brands acquired from Merck that positioned us in new segments like nerve care. In the U.S., we are a top two player across respiratory, sleep, and digestive wellness pillars. From fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2022, the respiratory category has grown about 14%.
Now, beyond the incidence of cold and flu and COVID, we see increased consumer propensity to treat symptoms due to the social stigma of coughing around others, and Vicks has been there for consumers as they've treated these symptoms more often. During this timeframe, our respiratory portfolio has grown 38%, nearly three times faster than the category, driving more than two points of value share growth. Vicks is an example of enduring irresistible superiority that we've continued to build upon with innovation. These include new benefits and forms like VapoPatch and VapoShower, providing new occasions and ways to enjoy the experience of VapoRub. We've also invested in VapoRub communication, reminding consumers of their childhood while modernizing the brands and generating trial of new forms. We also leveraged our ZzzQuil equity to expand into the sleep category 10 years ago.
Healthy sleep is critical to reset your brain and body. Recent studies are strengthening known relationships between inadequate sleep and hypertension, obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and dementia. The CDC has declared sleeplessness a public health epidemic. 50 million-70 million Americans suffer from one or more sleep disorders, and one in three adults do not get sufficient rest on a consistent basis. We've led investment in the sleep category to educate consumers on the benefits of better sleep, and we've expanded the ZzzQuil line beyond treatments to complete sleep care with products that help people prevent occasional sleeplessness and wake more refreshed. Let's take a look at the copy.
Restless nights fogging up your day? Tonight, try new ZzzQuil PURE Zzzs Sleep+ Next Day Energy, with melatonin to help you fall asleep naturally, plus extended-release B vitamins. Wake up feeling refreshed. Pure Zzzs. Sleep better. Wake up your best.
We've now launched ZzzQuil in nine countries with irresistible superiority across multiple vectors. This includes products with great-tasting gummies and new actives like ashwagandha, packaging that uses less plastic and delivers better branding, and media with the number one share of voice in the category. We've more than doubled ZzzQuil sales over the last four years, and this represents a 33% compound average growth rate, significantly more than the category's 14% growth. We aren't stopping. We'll continue to expand to new countries and with new innovation, leveraging the proven expansion model we've executed over time. We're confident in our strategic choices and our ability to continue delivering sustainable, balanced growth and value creation by helping consumers treat, manage, and prevent healthcare issues and to enhance their life with healthy habits. Our healthcare team is agile, passionate, and committed to accelerating this category even further in the future.
I'll now hand it over to Gary Coombe, Chief Executive Officer of P&G Grooming. Thank you.
Thank you, Jen. Good afternoon, everybody. P&G Grooming is over $6.5 billion in sales and represents 8% of the total company. Our business is split 75% in male and 25% in female grooming. Grooming itself is a $23 billion industry, and we are the global leader. Now, in 2018, I updated you on our efforts to stabilize the grooming business following a decade of underperformance. We were urgently restoring superiority on all five vectors to return the category to growth and P&G to balanced and sustainable top and bottom-line performance. We have unique capabilities in consumer understanding, innovation, supply chain, and go-to-market scale that our competitors simply couldn't match. We needed to transform our strategies and our organization and our operations to realize this advantage and get back to winning in markets.
Since then, we've been able to drive category growth and improved P&G Grooming's top and bottom line growth in the process. We have reestablished Gillette as the brand that can drive category growth. We have returned our grooming business to consistent sales growth, delivering 6% organic sales growth over the last two fiscal years. We've also returned to share growth over the last 12, six and three-month periods on the total business and in all regions. As a result, we've delivered strong operating total shareholder returns in both fiscal 2021 and 2022, despite the global pandemic and all the macroeconomic disruptions that followed that. Now, the job is to accelerate this momentum. The central pillar of this transformation was established in 2019 as we declared our intention to move from being a wet shaving business to a grooming company.
This strategic shift recognized the many ways consumers choose to groom, the range of different tools that they are looking for, and how often they are changing styles. It also focused our organization on the competitive advantage that we have as a P&G Grooming company. We are uniquely placed to combine the science and technology of blades and razors, of appliances, and of chemistry to offer superior products to all consumers, whatever their grooming choices. Key to this are five strategic interventions that we're making on the business, flowing directly from P&G's integrated growth strategy. The vital first step was restoring and extending superiority of our core and highly profitable wet shave business. In 2018, the brand architecture was confusing, the range was difficult to shop, and we were frustrating consumers with plastic packaging that was near impossible to open.
We have now fully reengineered the Gillette premium blades and razors lineup, reinforcing product superiority with upgraded blade cutting performance and durable handle design, together with a transformation of our packaging. We've replaced the plastic with fully recyclable paper and cardboard boxes. The range is much clearer for consumers to understand and much easier to shop. This return to superiority has helped the male shave category back to growth in fiscal 2022, with Gillette growing mid-single digits and adding 40 basis points of value share. We have similarly reengineered our Venus business, helping grow that category and P&G sales double digits last year. Beyond the clear superiority that this transformation provides on products, packaging, and retail execution, it also delivers significant sustainability benefits.
Together with the Gillette changes, this packaging saves over 1,000 metric tons of plastic, the equivalent of 150 million water bottles every year. We are further strengthening superiority with our biggest Gillette platform launch since Fusion. The new Gillette Labs range with exfoliating bar addresses a key barrier to men shaving more frequently by turning shaving from an occasional chore to an everyday delight by making shaving effortless. With a striking new design and color and a beautiful product in beautiful packaging, we've painted stores, media, and even national monuments black and neon green to launch this new razor. Retailer support and the consumer reaction have been outstanding.
It's already the number one driver of category value growth in the U.S., and the number one selling razor in all European launch markets, with a 20% share of razors in the U.K., 18% in Germany, and 30% in the Netherlands. This is the new core Gillette business, delivering noticeable superiority and value that is truly delighting consumers. Now, we're still in the early stages of this launch with lots more to come, and this is a platform that we will continue to innovate on for many years ahead. The next pillar of our strategy is leveraging the combination of blades and razors, appliances and chemistry expertise uniquely at our disposal to create new sources of consumption. Historically, as I've said, we were a business focused on wet shaving, the face for men and legs for women, and we innovated to make blades better.
Beards were a curse. Since 2019, we've complemented superiority efforts on our core business with a measured but very intentional shift to expand our where to play strategy to broader grooming, opening new growth opportunities in regimen chemistry, in beard care, styling, and grooming beyond the face. Our King C. Gillette range combines blades and razors, appliances and chemistry products to serve all the needs of men with facial hair under one brand. Our female intimate grooming range uses the same combination to provide a noticeably superior proposition for the 80% of women who groom their pubic hair, but were deeply dissatisfied with incumbent product offerings. Our premium intense pulsed light appliances from Braun, which provides long-lasting visible hair removal equivalent to a salon treatment, have been re-engineered and relaunched across the world.
Now together, these superior propositions have generated an additional $250 million of sales in fiscal 2022, and will deliver half of our sales growth this year. We are building on this now with the launch of a new intimate grooming range from Gillette in North America for the majority of men who groom their body and pubic hair, but are generally dissatisfied with current products. We will follow this in the second half of the fiscal with new beard styling and body shaving appliances that restore Braun to superiority in this fast-growing segment. We are combining all this product and packaging innovation with a transformation of our brand communications to better connect and win with younger and multicultural consumers. We've reversed our historical equity gap with Millennials and Gen Z consumers on both Gillette and Venus.
We've increased penetration among multicultural consumers, particularly African Americans and Hispanic men here in the U.S. We've step changed our media reach and efficiency with 70% of our spending now on digital. Superior retail execution is vital for the grooming business. Unlike other P&G categories, grooming is an impulse purchase business. Blades and razors don't run out like a bottle of shampoo or detergent. Men can and do keep scraping away with the same old blade. As a consequence, we are rarely on a shopping list. In addition, despite a rapidly growing e-commerce business that was further accelerated by the pandemic, still 80% of our sales are in traditional stores.
We are making strategic investments to win here, including superior shelving executions, showcasing our house of grooming lineup, ensuring noticeable superior innovation like Gillette Labs is truly unmissable in stores, and prompting purchase and increasing basket sizes with more displays and presence at checkouts. All of this is supported by significant investment in additional store merchandisers, especially here in the U.S., to help address challenges of on-shelf availability and the amount of blades that remain locked up in anti-theft casing. As a result of this and the category growth that we are delivering, retailer confidence has returned, unlocking much higher levels of support for upcoming programs. This virtuous cycle has been truly hard-earned, and now that we have it, we will not lose it. All the investments we are making in superiority are fueled by ongoing productivity efforts.
This work is even more important now to offset the foreign exchange and cost inflation headwinds that we're all facing. We are accelerating efforts across every spend bucket, with a particular focus on our supply chain and media spend to strip out waste and fuel continued growth. Four years ago, only 60% of our business was judged to be competitively superior. This is now closer to 80%. We are now broadly superior on shaving systems and on appliances, on product, and on packaging, and across both male and female businesses. Our brands are now relevant and desirable to younger consumers. Globally, Gillette, Venus, and Braun are the drivers of category growth, which is unlocking more retail support. Our investment in superiority is enabled by an ever-strengthening productivity muscle.
We draw energy from the progress made, delivering our best results in more than a decade, but we are not complacent. Our transformation is a multi-year mission, a marathon barely begun. Continuing to lead category growth and constructively disrupting ourselves will be critical to sustaining progress through the challenging external context that we face this year and beyond. I will now hand over back to Shailesh, P&G's Chief Operating Officer. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Gary. Today, we have seen how our integrated strategy has delivered great results in a very challenging macro environment. At our last Investor Day in 2018, we announced our move to a new organizational structure with the goal of enabling a more empowered, agile, and accountable organization to accelerate growth and value creation. This followed, as Jon said earlier, a successful pilot in our two largest markets, U.S. and China. By removing the enterprise market responsibility from the sector business units, our sector leaders can focus their attention on markets that account for 80% of company sales and 90% of after-tax profit. Together, we are sustaining excellence in focus markets while also growing in enterprise markets. Enterprise markets are attractive because of their longer-term growth and value creation potential. We're capturing this opportunity by giving enterprise market leaders more freedom to operate.
Enterprise markets play an important role in positioning us for the future. P&G's ability to overcome a wide variety of challenges, particularly inflation and currency devaluation in enterprise markets, and deliver our integrated growth strategy, is a proof point in our ability to do the same in the rest of the world. We've executed the corporate strategies of pricing with innovation and driving productivity to significantly improve margins in enterprise markets. In this dynamic environment, we've been responsive when additional change is required. Earlier this year, we moved Russia to an enterprise market designation to allow more freedom to make decisions at the speed necessary to manage through the rapidly changing market conditions. This allows us to operate with more flexibility than we could as a focus market where decisions are made by category and by sector.
Flexibility, speed, and freedom to operate have enabled growth on both the top and bottom line in nearly all enterprise markets. Even before the pandemic, volatility and inflation were the standard in many of these markets. Our integrated strategies have been tested in this environment, and they've enabled strong business results. This gives us great confidence that these strategies will also win in focus markets as we manage through similar headwinds. For example, we had to take very significant pricing in markets like Turkey, Argentina, and Egypt to offset commodities and foreign exchange. We continued investing in superiority, and over time, margins have held or grown, and we've largely maintained our market share positions. Our organizational design enables speed of decision-making when most accurately needed, as in the case of devaluation in Turkey.
Despite ongoing headwinds, the team closest to the issue managed with speed and agility, improving our operating margins between fiscal year 2017 and fiscal year 2022. Decisions that would previously have taken months and required reviews with 10 category precedents now take two days enabled by clear accountability. We flex to the needs of enterprise markets while freeing up sector business units to focus on our largest and most profitable markets. In fiscal 2022, enterprise markets were nearing $16 billion in sales, with average organic sales growth of about 6% per year over the past four years. After-tax profits have been growing at double digits on average, driving margins to be approximately 1.4 x larger than they were in fiscal 2018. Excluding FX, after-tax profits have grown at an average of nearly 30% a year.
Structurally, we are breakeven or better in nearly every single country. Emerging markets bring some unique challenges, such as the level of volatility, especially related to foreign exchange, long supply chains, and markets with evolving demographics. These markets are adopting new ways of working to consistently deliver results. We've responded to demographic changes, introducing new offerings to some of these markets, while continuing to raise the bar on superiority, enabling a longer-term play on consumption growth. The drivers of our results in emerging markets, as for the rest of the company, center on the integrated strategic choices we've talked. Let me share some examples. First is superiority. In Brazil, Downy is converting users by strengthening core superiority of the brand's long-lasting perfume, leveraging media as an engine of growth, and expanding into new channels of distribution, including online and high-frequency stores. It's growing penetration and sales.
Sales have grown at an average of about 30% a year. We're expanding this model across the region into Chile, Argentina, and other markets. Let's look at a copy which highlights the superiority of Downy's long-lasting perfume. In Brazil, Downy is driving 50% of the market growth through superiority across product, communication, and retail execution, despite a price premium of four times the market average, and has driven, as I said, sales at about 30% a year. In European emerging markets, value communication drives superiority in inflationary environments. We made it easy for consumers to understand how our products help them save electricity costs by using Fairy and Ariel, get more mileage out of each purchase of Gillette and Always, and earn cashback through Oral-B and Pampers.
These communications are complemented by strong in-store executions and efficient media buys to sustain reach. Let's look at a copy from Turkey showing how very strong formula helps consumers save energy by washing in cold water. In Turkey and surrounding countries, superior value-based communication has enabled 37% organic sales growth, with operating margins improving last fiscal year despite the high inflation. Our Asia Pacific, Middle East, and Africa region doubled productivity in fiscal 2022 while growing before-tax margins through an operationalized approach to cost breakthroughs, empowering employees with technology like visualization tools and automation apps to identify savings more quickly across all areas of the business, democratizing information sharing across categories, and scaling up the most promising ideas at low cost. As the pandemic exacerbated labor shortages and supply chain constraints, we embraced constructive disruption to rethink how we sell to retailers.
In the AMA region, we created a tech-assisted selling program that leverages technology to help us more efficiently serve retailers, driving more distribution at lower cost. Let's take a look.
With 18 million retail stores, the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa region offers enormous opportunity for P&G. How can sales teams effectively serve these stores without regular in-person visits? With our new proprietary tech-assisted selling program, we are better serving more retailers and improving on-shelf availability for consumers. Through call centers, customer service representatives sell to retailers via phone, enabled by our in-house intelligence technology system. This cloud-based platform couples sales data with our own data science algorithms, with inputs from distributor sellouts and seller visit data.
The output is a simple interface that aids the representatives in real time, generating a list of retailers to contact and guiding them through each interaction, with suggested sales orders based on store sales history, available promotions, and information on the superior benefits of our products. Through direct, fast, and effective communication, tech-assisted selling drove 12% incremental sales at stores where it was implemented. It also lowered the cost to serve by 20 basis points versus a physical seller while strengthening our retail partnerships. Across the region, this program delivered $25 million in incremental sales in fiscal year 2021, 2022, and is on track to deliver $50 million this fiscal year.
As you've seen, and in summary, the integrated strategy is driving growth in enterprise markets. Our growth in these dynamic markets complements and enables the results in focus markets. Thank you, and back to you, Jon.
Thanks, Shailesh. We've come to the end of our prepared remarks. Before we move to your questions, I wanna take a few minutes to reiterate a few key messages about the path ahead for Procter & Gamble. First, as you've seen, we're fully committed to our objective of delivering balanced growth and value creation. We create balanced growth and value creation when we deliver these five strategic choices with excellence. Again, portfolio superiority, productivity, constructive disruption, and an empowered, agile, and accountable organization and culture. I hope the examples you've seen today demonstrate how we're continuing to bring the strategy to life around the world in focus markets and in enterprise markets. We strongly believe there is significant runway ahead to keep driving every aspect of this strategy.
We're strengthening the execution of our strategy through these four areas of additional focus, supply, sustainability, digital acumen, and a superior employee value equation. We offered you a deep dive on each of these today with the intent of driving further understanding of the work we're undertaking and the progress we've made so far. Again, these are not new or separate strategies. They're necessary elements in continuing to build superiority and reducing costs to enable investment and value creation and strengthening our organization. They're part of the constructive disruption that we must continue to lead. Our goal is balanced top and bottom line growth. In the ever more complex world we live in, it's not just top and bottom line that must be balanced.
We must endeavor to balance the needs of an increasing number of constituents, or we're unlikely to deliver against the needs of any of them. Consumer, customer, employee, society, and share owner needs must each be met. There's no choice to make here. There's no opt-out. Servicing and balancing the needs of each of these constituents will not be easy, but it's necessary. Those that do it best, as I expect we will, should thrive. Better be balanced, top line, bottom line, and effective in serving a growing number of constituents. We're realistic about the road ahead. It will be bumpy, but we continue to operate in a very challenging environment. We should expect more volatility in costs, currencies, and consumer dynamics.
Our best path forward in this environment is to stay focused on executing the integrated strategies that have enabled strong results over the past four years and are the foundation for balanced growth and value creation. We're actually very well positioned. Think about what you would want to succeed and thrive in today's environment. A portfolio of consumer preferred products and categories where performance drives brand choice. P&G has that. Superiority across product, package, communication, retail execution, and value. P&G has that, and we're raising the bar again. You would want the ability to be very efficient in all of your operations through productivity efforts. We have that. You would want the capability to lead disruption across the value chain. We're doing that. You would want the best organization in the world. We're fortunate to have that.
My confidence is based on our results, a clear path forward, the leadership team you've heard from today, and all P&G people. We're embracing our challenges as opportunities to further differentiate ourselves versus our competition, stepping forward, not back, to serve consumers, customers, each other, society, and shareowners. With that, we're happy to take your questions. Our IR team are in the aisles with Mike. Feel free to ask a question to anybody who's in the room today, but I've asked Andre to join me on stage. I expect most of the questions will be for the two of us.
Could you introduce yourself please for the folks?
Sure. Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI. You've now gotten to the point that you said where you've got about 80% of the businesses with superiority in, I guess, four of the vectors, four of the five vectors.
four or more, yeah.
Which is a terrific achievement. When you think about those businesses, right, that, where you're at that 80%, and let's just keep it to the U.S., right? You know, you still probably in a lot of those businesses have, I mean, 30% or so, right, market share, right? If you then examine those businesses where you've got all that superiority, but the market share is just 30%, what are the gaps? Is it price, availability? Is it the inertia and loyalty of other brands?
Just trying to kind of scope out and kind of see what are the kind of the big picture gaps that you can address to get those market shares from 30% to 35% to 40%, and is it in fact kind of addressing those four things that, you know, the four focus areas that you talked about? Are there other generalities there? Thank you.
Let me turn that question around a little bit and talk about opportunities as opposed to gaps, though they're addressing the same question. We have many opportunities to increase the market share over time in those categories. We're not fully distributed in all channels, distribution opportunities exist. The level of superiority, we're not resting, as we said today, just because we have superiority in a given product category. We're working to extend that advantage. We're working to ensure, as Victor talked about, a first use wow. We're working to improve superiority and satisfaction through proper dosing.
We spent a fair amount of time today on communication and the opportunities that exist for us there to target consumers for whom that product is needed and continue to more effectively demonstrate both the performance superiority and the value. I think you saw a lot of that kind of advertising today. Those are some of the things that we're working on. You know, we've also talked about the importance of how you build share. In that context, we've talked about the creation of business, not the taking of business. It's a much more constructive endeavor, and that's what we aim to do through innovation that really drives a difference in categories where performance drives brand choice.
Bryan Spillane from Bank of America Securities. My question is around digital acumen and applying that to the supply chain. I guess my perception from the presentation is that the jobs in the supply chain, whether it's in warehousing or in manufacturing plants, have become more sophisticated as the skill level goes up. Can you talk a little bit about where you are now in terms of having skilled labor for those, you know, jobs that require more skills? Are the labor pools around those manufacturing plants, as I know of warehouses, sufficient enough to sort of support
Thanks, Bryan. I'm gonna ask Julio Nemeth to answer your question. Julio is, as you know, our supply chain officer.
Thanks for the question. As we expand our operations, we need to continue recruiting, the element of the superior value equation that was presented is fundamental. The way we build the skills is through our internal integrated work system that takes the operators that come to join the force and progress to a very high level of technical skills. They are available to move around across the operations in the U.S. We are on a challenging environment in terms of competition, but we have a very strong engine of creating the skills internally in our house.
Thanks, Julio.
Thanks. Olivia Tong with Raymond James. I wanted to ask you about your innovation pipeline, how you think about it relative to recent past, because it's obviously been a cornerstone of the growth in recent years. You know, now that the environment is changing a bit, the macros are sort of turning from perhaps a tailwind into a headwind. How do you think about the pricing, the portfolio, and reaching various consumers?
I'm still looking for those tailwinds, Olivia, but why don't I ask Victor to answer the first part of that question on the innovation pipeline.
As I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we constantly look for opportunities in terms of how do we delight consumers even more, focusing on the primary job to be done and extending the job to be done on that category. I talked about number one is of course extending our superiority versus key competition, but equally important is to deliver the ones to wow and have innovation. The combination of those three allow us to create a very strong pipeline for every single brand, every single platform in our categories. We use a lot of market information as you saw today, connected homes, market trends, consumer dynamics that help us inform how we can shape categories for P&G to win.
I think it would also probably be helpful, I know he's not expecting this question, but our fastest growing category right now is personal healthcare, and that's being driven by innovation. Paul, do you wanna comment on your view on our innovation pipeline in that business?
Sure. Paul Gama . The pipeline is good, robust, and we've got a super agile fast model that really collects insights at a swift pace. We can turn around innovation, connect to consumers, in a way that we've been leading the market and we have a lot of share growth. The pipeline looking forward has been structured to continue as it has been the last three years, which has been leading the charge in our growth rate of share growth, you know, triple the market rate, but continues to be robust and we're very positive on what we're looking at for the next three years.
Thanks, Paul. Maybe Andre, you wanna handle the second part of Olivia's question?
Maybe on the innovation. The other thing I would say is we've made a point to not let up on the innovation investment, right? Even during COVID and during supply chain, we continue to invest more than $3 billion in our innovation capability in R&D. You heard Gary, for example, talk about his investment in continued innovation. The model requires us to continue to double down. We've done that, and therefore, as a result, the pipeline going forward is as strong as the pipeline that you've seen in the past. Our ability to continue to take pricing depends on that pipeline. You have seen price elasticities be more favorable than we would have expected, and the only plausible and logical reason for that is we are truly delivering superior offerings via innovation as we take this pricing.
It's not gonna get easier as the consumer increasingly is under pressure, and we see that in Europe, where price elasticities now are returning to more normal levels, because the consumer simply isn't as flushed in terms of cash. But we still see our shares holding. Despite the fact that we are taking pricing, we're doing it with innovation, we're returning to elasticities that we would have expected, but we're holding share. I feel good about where we are. I feel also good about our continued ability grounded in that superiority model.
There's also another aspect of pricing that typically comes up in these discussions, understandably, which is, how do we have full cooperation from our retail partners in passing these prices forward? The simple answer there is yes. They need the pricing both for our brands and for their private label brands. Generally, it's been a constructive discussion.
Thanks. Steve Powers from Deutsche Bank. Thanks. Two questions, if I could, from Andre's slides. The first one is just on the market realities that you highlighted. I couldn't quite gather from your tone if any of those realities had gotten more bumpy, to use Jon's word earlier, or if it was more steady state from where you had been at the end of the September quarter, specifically around inventory destocking at retailers. The second question was, you had said that working media was up about $1.2 billion since fiscal 2018.
I think some quick math I was trying to do here, that means that working media as a percentage of total advertising, as you reported, has gone from about 65% of total advertising to about 75%, and that non-working media was actually down.
About $500 million over that time frame. If those numbers are right, I guess the question is, what's the right optimal balance between working and non-working media, and how do you get there?
Yeah, maybe let's start with the media questions first. I think I can't confirm the math, but the direction is right. It's very simply driven by the fact that we have been optimizing the non-working media structure very intentionally, and Marc can talk about this maybe a little bit, by restructuring our agency relationships and reducing the number of agencies we're working on and working with. I don't know, Marc, if you wanna comment on that.
While we're getting the microphone to Mark. The balance, Steve, the optimal balance, as you can appreciate, is different by category, by country. There's really not an intelligent comment at an aggregate level as it relates to that question.
Yeah, that's correct. I would say with the way we look at media is what we're trying to do is reach as many of the category buyers as we possibly can within any market, which is there's plenty of upside on that because the reach that we achieve on many of these businesses still is well short of the 90 that we see in some of these others. That's the way, really way we look at it. When it comes to the non-working media, probably a simple way to think about it is we're just trying to reduce as much of the non-working media as we possibly can. We've already reduced the number of agencies over the course of the last several years by about 60%. We've continued to drive fees down.
We're now bringing more of our media planning in-house because we found that we have the capabilities to be able to deliver that. That is enabling us to be able to do more and do it with less. Then there's other opportunities within non-working media as well in terms of production, for example. We're finding additional ways that we can do production using again digital acumen to be able to create dynamic advertising, for example, and be able to get even more efficiencies.
A little further shift, right? If you think about the Pampers model, the type of content we need is different. The short length content for digital creation is done in-house to a large degree versus done by creative agencies because we simply don't have the time to turn it around with agency structure. That'll shift the model and shift the spend structure. First part of the question, the bumps are all there. At any given point in time, you can pick the side of the road you drive on, but you're still gonna hit a bump. I don't think they are different than anything we would have articulated in context of when we reiterated our guidance. We still feel good about the guidance range we've given, but we just wanna register the fact that none of these bumps have disappeared.
Hi. Lauren Lieberman from Barclays. You were talking a bit earlier about you've mentioned retailers pricing conversations are constructive. Something I was curious about, a little bit longer term maybe, is the degree to which your supply has already been more reliable than many others in the industry, not just your direct competitors, but across food, you name the category. You've definitely said that you don't expect the pace of market share gain that you've seen in the last two or three years to be sustainable as others come back into stock. How has that impacted your relationship with retailers beyond the Advantage Monitor survey? Jon, you said the number one, two, and three points of conversations with retailers and suppliers, that's the conversations you're having with leadership. Retailers still don't sound very happy.
I would just be curious, you know, on all their conference calls and our solutions. Just, you know, how does the resiliency of your supply chain in version 2.0, what's proving sticky, what's benefiting you versus competition and just non-competitor companies as well?
You know, finding a happy retailer, Lauren, is like, finding a satisfied investor. They're few and far between. Having said that, my view of this, and I'll ask Mindy, who leads our sales function, to comment on this as well, is that it's never been better. It increasingly, the discussion revolves around, market growth. You know, it's interesting. When I talked about meeting Doug at that warehouse, there was a group of suppliers there, and, the Walmart team was talking a lot about, market share, which they're prone to do. At one point, I just couldn't handle it anymore. I stood up and said, "You know, the truth is, you don't care about my market share, and I don't care about yours.
There's one thing we both care about, which is market growth. Let's focus our discussion on our efforts on doing that together." Increasingly, that and supplying are the key parts of the conversation. Mindy, do you
Yeah. I would agree that there's not a retailer out there at this point that would say they're completely happy with where they are with supply. There's two questions that almost every retailer is asking to the suppliers that are out there, and this is where they're determining who they're gonna lean into to win with on their business. The first is, "Can you actually supply me sustainably and more so than your competition?" In that space, we have been able to prove that we have been able to do that all the way through the pandemic and then through today. The second question is always, "Have you had a proven track record of growing my category so that I can grow market share?" Again, this is where we've been able to outperform the available competition.
Those two questions with us being favorable in the answer puts us in.
We've given them a fair amount of visibility into what we're working against on Supply Chain 3.0, and they're also very enthused and excited about that.
Hi, Dara Mohsenian from Morgan Stanley. Two questions. One, a lot of great detail on supply chain and Supply Chain 3.0 and the digitization efforts. When you think about the yield of the organization over the next few years versus the last few years, do you expect greater productivity, effectiveness of the organization going forward relative to recent trend? Is it similar? Where do you sort of stand in your efforts there? And can you also benchmark yourself versus peers? Obviously, peers aren't standing still, and they're making efforts on those fronts. Any sense for where you stand and where that might have been a few years ago? And then an unrelated question, Jon. M&A hasn't been a big focus the last few years. Should we expect that to be a bigger focus going forward based on the circumstances today?
How do you look at sort of a strategic lens in terms of which product categories might make the most sense as you think about M&A?
I think that's a five-parter. Let me start with M&A, and then we'll talk to Julio again about where he thinks we stand vis-a-vis competition on supply, and Andre can comment on the productivity opportunities that are ahead. The reality is that there are only two of our categories where we could even consider any kind of substantive M&A because of our market share positions and increasing regulatory concern, which you're all very familiar with, on those dynamics as relates to the consumer protection.
The two categories that are more fragmented inherently, and as a result, where we have lower share, and this will be less of an issue, are the two categories that you've seen us being acquisitive in, namely, the beauty categories, particularly skin care and, the personal healthcare category. I would expect our efforts to be focused there. The strategic screen we apply is the same one that we talked about today as we brought the portfolio down. We wanna be in daily use categories where performance drives brand choice and the categories that play to our strengths as a company. I expect the vast majority of our growth to be organic, and that's how we plan and think. There's not an acquisition built into any of our thinking, from a algorithm standpoint. That's that.
Julio, you wanna talk about a little bit about our relative supply capability?
Beyond what you saw from Gartner and from the Advantage Monitor, our approach to this is an approach of, what is the part of the glass that we still have empty? We intensively benchmark, and we try to look for the opportunities at the specific level where we are not doing as well as competition, and we put the effort there. This is a concept that is part of our integrated work system progression. We are never satisfied here, and the way to progress is to go in through the very details and close those gaps and push the areas that we are strong to.
Productivity?
To Julio Nemeth's point, I think the interventions we're making on the product supply side, Supply Chain 3.0, will yield higher productivity. That's the whole idea, higher productivity per employee with more meaningful jobs for every employee in our supply chain. When you look at our overhead structure, when we benchmark ourselves versus peer group, we are in a very good position, but that doesn't help us at all. We need to continue to drive productivity. Again, our efforts with digitization and automation help us to create bigger end-to-end jobs, faster decision cycles, more meaningful jobs that improve our employee value equation. If we do that right, we get to both better talent, better decision-making, faster decision-making, and a better overhead structure. I think it's part of the model, Dara , what I would tell you.
Andrea Teixeira from JPMorgan. Wanted to go back to the slide of 1,100 impact, 1,100 basis points impact on gross margin and how on EBITDA, right? Or you know, your $2.86 on EPS. How we should be thinking, I know a lot of that is that you cannot control. Obviously, there's FX, there's you know commodities. But it looks like if we kind of peaked from that. Long term, do you expect to fully recover and/or many of those are structural, and we might see it trickling down from your suppliers or labor pressures and all of that. How we should be thinking of that balance?
Three-part answer, Andrea. One, we wanna recover dollars. We're not looking to recover margin in the short term. We're on track to recover dollars, but we won't give you a timeline because, as you say, many of those components are not within our control. The model will require margin expansion. Again, mid-single-digit growth, high mid- to high single-digit core EPS growth will require us to expand margins somewhere between 30-70 basis points. That growth algorithm will remain and is required for us to be successful. Have we peaked? I don't know. We look at it on a spot basis, and the spot basis, unfortunately, as Jon said, we're still waiting for those helps to occur. So between foreign exchange, commodity and pass-through, because we don't buy input commodities. We buy plastic bags and cardboard.
Between those elements, we're holding steady right now. Different elements shift, but there's no significant improvement that we're seeing. It'll take us some time to recover the dollars fully, but margin growth will be part of our growth algorithm.
You know, I talked about this at the end of the last earnings call, but when you think about what our team is accomplishing. 50% of earnings in two years, gone. We delivered earnings ahead of a year ago last year. We're committing to deliver it equal to slightly ahead again this year, while continuing to step forward on investments in superiority, investments in marketing, investments in capability, investments in our people. I don't expect you know you to give us credit for that. That's not the point. But the point is, the inherent earnings potential of this strategy and this company is significant. Thank goodness it is, or we wouldn't be standing here talking today about earnings that were equal to or ahead of year ago.
We'll take one more question.
Great. Thanks. Kevin Grundy from Jefferies. Jon, just to follow up on the M&A piece. Is it fair to say there's a greater openness today than there has been perhaps in several years on that front? I guess I ask in the context that the portfolio is in a good place after a period of rationalization, kind of work through COVID and still working through supply chain issues. Growth has started to normalize. As it normalized, we're at a lower pace now than we were in the U.S., still working through issues in China. You have a stronger U.S. dollar. It just and in the markets that you named, not only are they more fragmented, but they're also faster growing.
It'd be an opportunity to accelerate growth and go with the addition of healthcare assets, and there are some that are out there in addition to beauty. That's all kind of a big point, but it just feels like the company is in a better place to execute on M&A and potentially do larger scale M&A than it's been in the past. Just want to give you the opportunity to respond. Thank you.
From a position standpoint, I agree with your observations. There's asset availability. There are seller price expectations, which I don't think have adjusted to where they need to adjust. There's financing costs, which are much higher than they would have been two or three or four years ago. I think if you know the question behind the question is, you know, are we leaning more aggressively into M&A as a result of some of the dynamics that you pointed out, I would say no.
All right. Thank you very much. That's all the time we have for questions now. Thanks for all of you listening on the webcast as well.