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.
Now, it's my pleasure to welcome Procter & Gamble back to the CAGNY stage. As you all likely know, P&G has long been a supporter of this conference. Today with us, we have Chairman, President, and CEO, Jon Moeller, CFO, Andre Schulten, and VP of Investor Relations, John Chevalier. The last several years have been eventful, to say the least, for Procter & Gamble. Following a few years of tepid industry growth, Procter management turned the ship, simplifying its org structure, developing game-changing innovation, investing in both digital and supply chain capabilities, and perhaps most importantly, focusing on irresistible superiority across its brands to drive peer-leading growth. They also effectively navigated a global pandemic, rampant input cost inflation, and supply chain challenges, all while delivering top and bottom-line growth well ahead of peers and expectations. No small feat. With that, I'll turn it over to CFO Andre Schulten.
Thanks, Andrew. Good morning, everyone. I'll start today with a review of results, then Jon will discuss our strategies, and we look forward to answering your questions after our prepared remarks. Starting with results, we had a strong start to the fiscal year. Through the H1 , organic sales are up 6% despite market pressure in Greater China, a reduced portfolio in Russia, and trade inventory reductions. We are very pleased with the 6% top-line performance for half one. Core earnings per share are down 3%, offsetting the vast majority of the 26 points of headwinds from material costs, foreign exchange, and transportation. We have strong pricing execution across all markets and continued productivity across the full P&L and balance sheet.
The organization overcame those headwinds while growing sales, holding share on a global aggregate basis, and continuing to invest in innovation and superiority of our brands, setting us up for sustained growth and value creation. We have momentum across the portfolio. Top-line growth is broad-based with all 10 categories growing organic sales in the H1 . Through December, global aggregate market share is in line with prior year, with 29 of our top 50 category country combinations holding or growing share. Through January, past three months, U.S. all outlet value share is up 40 basis points, with 8 categories of 10 categories growing share. U.S. volume share is up 80 basis points, improving sequentially versus the Q1 as we continue to invest and as consumers demonstrate their preference for P&G products.
The portfolio performs across regions. Through December, focus markets organic sales are up 3%, and enterprise markets are up 15%. Five out of six regions are growing organic sales. North America exceeded $10 billion in sales for the first time ever in the Q1 and beat their sales record again in quarter two. North America is tracking towards $40 billion of sales this fiscal year, up from $30 billion just four years ago. Enabled by these results, on our last quarterly earnings call, we increased our guidance for fiscal year organic sales growth from a range of 3%-5% to a range of 4%-5%. We are continuing our strong track record of cash return to shareowners. We've paid a dividend for the past 132 years. Only seven U.S. publicly traded companies have paid a dividend more consecutive years than P&G.
We've raised our dividend for the past 66 years. Only three U.S. companies have raised their dividend more consecutive years. Through the December quarter, we've returned nearly $10.5 billion of cash to shareowners, $4.5 billion in dividends, and $6 billion in share repurchases. Over two years, we have incurred $7 billion of after-tax headwinds from commodities, foreign exchange, and transportation. To put this into margin terms, this equates to $8.7 billion of operating profit, more than 1,100 basis points of operating margin hit on a fiscal year 2021 sales basis. In EPS terms, $2.79 per share of cost and FX headwinds, nearly half of fiscal year 2021 core EPS of $5.66.
Despite these challenges, on our last call to the earnings call, we maintained our outlook of core earnings per share growth in a range of in line to +4% versus prior year. We are confident in our ability to overcome these impacts via top line growth, productivity, and well-balanced pricing authority. With this context, we're very pleased that we are on track to deliver at least $5.81 per share this fiscal year, the low end of our guidance range. As you are aware, the time horizon of our guidance extends to the end of June. We want to reiterate two key points. We are committed to returning to our balanced growth algorithm across the top and bottom line, which includes consistent margin expansion over the coming quarters.
We will do so via a combination of productivity and adequate pricing while investing in innovation and the overall superiority of our brands. For the balance of this fiscal year, we have challenges to manage through. None of the macro challenges in the context are unique to P&G. We attempt to be realistic about these impacts in our guidance and transparent in our commentary. While we're encouraged to see input costs moderating, they are still up significantly year-over-year, and it takes time for the benefits to flow through our P&L for some material costs, 6 months-9 months. Foreign exchange continues to be a significant year-over-year headwind, and consumers are facing the highest inflation in over 40 years. These near-term market realities are putting pressure on global market volumes.
Over time, our expectation is that we return to more balanced top-line growth, a combination of volume, price, and mix. As a leader in the categories we compete in, we play an important role in driving category growth in both volume and value. The timing of when we get there depends somewhat on the strength of the consumer. Consumer dynamics vary by region. The U.S. and our enterprise market consumers remain very resilient. European markets have softened as high inflation affects consumer spending. While COVID restrictions have been lifted in Greater China, we expect a modest recovery curve. Longer term, we expect China to return to mid-single digit underlying growth rates. Across all regions, we continue to focus on expanding the irresistible superiority of our brands as we offset the cost challenges via innovation, productivity, and pricing.
A question we frequently receive is how pricing discussions are going with retailers. As you might expect, as the inflationary cycle wears on, each new pricing decision becomes more difficult. We do everything we can to offset cost increases with our productivity work to minimize the need for pricing. However, if it comes down to a choice of taking pricing or cutting investment in innovation and support for our brands, we continue to believe that we can deliver superior value for consumers and retailers via sustained investment. That's why whenever possible, we close couple pricing with innovation to deliver a better value for consumers, even at a modestly higher price.
Our strategy is built on superiority that drives category growth, which benefits both retailers and P&G, and that strategy requires investment. When we decide to take pricing, we discuss input cost details, innovation plans, superiority, and consumer value with our retail partners. We all want the consumers to be delighted with the performance and value they receive. Overall, we believe this is a rough patch to grow through. We will not reduce investment in the long-term health of our business so that we can drive both volume and value growth in the categories we compete in.
We view reigniting underlying category volume growth in the categories we compete as a critical enabler for balanced mid and long-term growth. Catalysts for this growth are available to us even in the most developed markets. We have opportunities to drive incremental household penetration, identify new jobs to be done with our consumers, and encourage incremental usage for a better consumer experience. Let's look at a couple of examples. U.S. fabric enhancers organic sales have grown double digits on average over the last seven years.
Despite strong sustained growth, there remains significant upside in household penetration across all forms: liquid fabric enhancers, scent beads, and dryer sheets. Once we're present in a consumer's household, significant opportunity exists in load penetration, which is illustrated by the table on the right. While we use fabric enhancers as a common example, growth opportunities exist in all categories. For example, in baby care, since launching Ninjamas, the bedwetting segment has grown double digits, with P&G driving 40% of the growth on average, nearly four times our fair share. Dawn Powerwash and Downy Rinse, incremental products to the dishwashing and laundry regimen that solve previously unmet consumer needs.
In summary, balanced growth remains our objective and reinforces the importance of continuing to invest in the superiority of our brands, especially when consumers are even more focused on the performance and value of the brands they choose. Now let me turn it over to Jon.
I'll begin by reinforcing in Andre's last points the importance of balanced top and bottom line growth. Our integrated set of strategies have enabled balanced growth, and we believe position us well going forward. A focused portfolio of daily use products, many providing cleaning, health, and hygiene benefits in categories where performance plays a significant role in brand choice. Superiority to win with consumers. Superiority is critical in an inflationary environment as consumers face increased pressure on nearly every aspect of their household budgets. As Andre said, we're investing to deliver truly superior value, combination of price, product performance, and user's experience to earn their loyalty every day. Bear with me. Harder than I thought. Superiority drives market growth. As the industry leader in most of our categories, it is up to us to lead this growth.
Today, we assess our level of superiority across product, package, communication, retail execution, and value at about 80% of sales. The Dawn brand provides a great example of superiority. With consumers spending more time at home, eating more meals, and doing more dishes at home, appreciation for superiority in the dish category is higher than ever. Dawn has delivered outstanding results behind innovation that drives product and packaging superiority, such as Dawn Powerwash, which we launched in the US three years ago. If Powerwash were a standalone brand, it would be the third largest in the category. We're innovating to extend this margin of advantage.
Last year, we launched Dawn EZ-Squeeze in the U.S., and Fairy Max Power in Europe. Superior product with an upgraded formula across the entire lineup. Superior packaging. The no flip, no mess cap makes it easy and fast to use from the first squeeze to the last. Superior communication across the lineup. Let's watch two ads, one for Dawn EZ-Squeeze, and then Dawn Powerwash.
Are you tired of washing dishes? Flip the way you clean them with Dawn Platinum EZ-Squeeze. It's an upside down bottle with no cap. You just grab and squeeze. Dawn Platinum's more powerful formula breaks down and removes grease four times faster. Huh? Nice. No flip, no mess. Platinum is also a go-to grease cleaner for your sink, your countertops, and to pre-treat stains on laundry. Fast, easy. Dawn Platinum EZ-Squeeze, flip the way you clean dishes.
That's me before Dawn Power Wash. Soaking, scrubbing, that's life. Was life. Power Wash gives me the power of an overnight soak in minutes. I'm sorry, minutes? With three cleaning boosters not found in traditional dish soap to help break down, loosen, and lift away food and grease. Much faster. Just spray suds on. No water needed till rinsing. Tougher mess? Let the suds sit a few minutes before wiping. Even cleans t he grill.
Thank you. It's more than soap. It's Power Wash.
Superiority across all five vectors: product, package, brand communication, retail execution, and value, drive strong results. Dawn has delivered over 90% of the US hand dish category growth over the last 3.5 years. Nearly 30% higher than our fair share. During the same period, Dawn's value share is up 10 points. Driving category growth with superior innovation builds market share and builds business for our retail partners. Safeguard Detox Body Wash in China is another example of driving category growth with a superior proposition across the five vectors. As the number one personal cleansing brand, Safeguard has provided family protection to Chinese consumers for over 30 years. We continue to extend our superiority advantage beyond just cleansing to a superior usage experience. Packaging that dispenses a luxurious foam 10 times creamier than normal lathering. Superior communication where the consumer chooses.
Traditional media still plays a role in China, but increasingly, consumers are engaging via Douyin and live streaming, so how we engage with the consumer has to shift as well. Let's look at two examples. Superiority again driving superior results. Safeguard Detox Body Wash grew 80% in the H1 . Value share has grown continuously the past three years, and at a retail price two times the category average, Safeguard Detox Body Wash is a sweetener for our retail partners as well. Our India Fabric Care team has innovated across the five vectors of superiority in both Tide and Ariel. Product superiority shifted from less than 25% of sales to over 65%. This was fueled by productivity with the dual purpose of investing in superiority and expanding profitability. Tide's superior communication helps ensure kids start the school year with shirts that look like new. Let's watch.
New paint.
Bahut purani shirt hai yaar. Mom tight se dhoti hai na.
Idea.
Ab toh nayi shirt leni padegi na Mom?
Chauk gaya beta.
Par tel ka daag toh nahi gaya na?
Ab chauk gaya beta.
Haan.
Ab naye Tide mein hai double power, jo nikale tezz aise ziddi daag aur rakhe kapde new pinch.
Superior execution, you guessed it, superior results. P&G Laundry is driving 25% of the category growth in India, over 1.5 x our fair share. Organic sales are up over 40% fiscal year to date. Over the past three months, value share is up nearly two points. We are defining superiority across every part of our portfolio with specific consumer groups and benchmarks for each brand and price tier. We're innovating across tiers, ensuring we provide value to the consumer in all price tiers where we compete. The strategic need for investment to continue to strengthen the long-term health and competitiveness of our brands, the short-term need to manage through significant cost increases, and the ongoing need to drive balanced top and bottom-line growth, including margin expansion, underscore the importance of ongoing productivity.
Productivity in marketing, as an example, more efficiency and greater effectiveness enable us to reach consumers when and where they're most receptive to our advertising. This leads to higher quality engagement, and when orchestrated across media platforms, avoids excessive advertising frequency, which is at best wasteful spending and at worst an annoyance to consumers. We've made good progress in building and scaling capabilities to drive effectiveness and efficiency of marketing spend, but still have plenty of runway ahead of us. At our Investor Day in November, we shared many examples of how we're constructively disrupting brand building. Pampers provides just one example. By applying a proprietary algorithm, we can create consumer groups across the various stages of baby and child development to more effectively target content. Superior communication to new parents looks different than superior communication for parents with active on-the-go toddlers.
Programmatic media allows us to target these smart audiences, buying and serving digital media in an automated way only to consumers we want to reach in a way that avoids excess ad frequency. Constructive disruption to drive productivity and a sustainable, expanding competitive advantage. In cost of goods sold, productivity is usually a lower cost per case of product delivered to a customer, but lower cost is only one form of productivity. Productivity that improves quality, increases supply assurance, and yields higher on-shelf availability of our products, all of which improve superiority with consumers and retail partners, are huge creators of value for our business. As discussed at Investor Day with Supply Chain 3.0, we're creating the next benchmark, a supply chain that provides greater agility, flexibility, scalability, transparency, and resilience.
We expect Supply Chain 3.0 to enable productivity savings of up to one and a half billion dollars per year. A portion of this will be reinvested to enable capacity expansions. We'll also invest in technology to continue to improve our supply chain to enable future growth. In North America, we're launching a platform of supply chain services for our retail partners in July 2023 that will enable us to better serve our joint consumers while streamlining the end-to-end supply chain, aiming to create a sustainable and expanding competitive advantage. We're also driving productivity by constructively disrupting the way we identify and develop new raw materials. We're creating proprietary algorithms, leveraging artificial intelligence to digitally design molecules. In fabric care, we're using this capability together with virtual reality tools to reformulate perfuming molecules and formulations based on real-time raw material availability and cost data.
This has enabled us to reduce product development time from years to months while increasing irresistible consumer experiences. Success in our highly competitive industry also requires agility that comes from a mindset of constructive disruption, a willingness to change, adapt, and create new trends and technologies that will shape our industry for the future. These capabilities often extend our competitive advantage. Our organization structure yields a more empowered, agile, and accountable organization with little overlap or redundancy, flowing to new demands, seamlessly supporting each other to deliver against our priorities around the world. Going forward, there are 4 areas we're driving to improve the execution of these integrated strategies: Supply Chain 3.0, digital acumen, environmental sustainability, and a superior employee value equation.
These are not new or separate strategies. They're necessary elements in continuing to build superiority, reduce costs, enable investment and value creation, and to further strengthen our organization. We've already discussed Supply Chain 3.0. Environmental sustainability. Our efforts in sustainability are important to create more value while improving our environmental impact, enabling consumers to reduce their footprint and helping society solve some of its most pressing challenges. Irresistible superiority without making trade-offs between performance and sustainability. A few examples. Gillette and Venus replaced their plastic packaging with fully recyclable paper and cardboard boxes. This saves over 1,000 metric tons of plastic, the equivalent of 150 million water bottles each year. Always launched a new package in parts of Europe that is made of sustainably sourced fibers and is recyclable.
Hair Care Europe has moved to 100% recycled plastic for Head & Shoulders and Pantene, which saves 10,000 tons of virgin plastic annually. We also have superior innovation that helps consumers reduce their footprint, which can often lead to a superior value equation by enabling consumers to save energy and water. Tide and Ariel provide superior cold water performance that enables energy cost savings for our consumers and improves sustainability by reducing the energy required to heat the water in the laundry process. Washing in cold improves garment lifespans. Cascade, using the dishwasher can use less water than washing in the sink, up to 20 gallons per load. The Fairy Max improved formula helps save water by being able to start washing dishes from the very first drop of water. No need to wait for the water to warm up.
We're also in helping industry reduce its footprint through leading innovation and making innovative technologies available to the entire industry for application. P&G invented a patented recycling technology to produce virgin-like resin from polypropylene plastic waste. We've licensed the polypropylene application to PureCycle Technologies and are making it broadly available across industries. We recently developed a similar technology to recycle polyethylene waste, and we're working with partners to commercialize this as well. Another example is our leadership in enrolling industry to use digital watermark technology that's embedded in packaging. It's invisible to the human eyes, but detectable at recyclers to enable accurate and automated plastic sorting. This results in higher quality recycled material and an increase in recycling rates. We will continue to invest in innovation to help society solve some of the most pressing environmental challenges we face.
Digital acumen. Data and digitization are giving us access to tools we never had before to delight consumers and create shareholder value across our operations. An example, we're creating new digital tools and capabilities that help us recommend winning shelf sets to our retailers. Faster, more accurate at prediction, and with fewer resources. On the virtual shelf, we have digital tools that tell our teams exactly where to show up in search, which words to bid on, how much to invest in a campaign, and when to run it. These digital technologies drive superior retail execution and provide us with a competitive advantage versus anything else in the marketplace today.
Finally, the employee value proposition. We want a superior employee value equation to ensure that working at P&G delivers a superior experience and value for all employees. By definition, this must include equality. To deliver a superior value proposition, there must be something in it for everyone. As mentioned earlier, our focus remains on 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 is no choice to make here. There is 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 an increasing number of constituents. These strategic choices, portfolio, superiority, productivity, constructive disruption, and organization structure and culture are not independent strategies. They reinforce and build on each other. When executed well, they grow markets and in turn deliver strong sales, share, earnings, and cash results, leading to balanced growth and value creation.
These strategies were delivering strong results before the crisis. They served us well during these more recent volatile times. They remain the right strategic choices to drive balanced growth and value creation as we move through and hopefully past the crisis. We're stepping forward, not back, focused on growing through the near-term challenges we're facing. We're doubling down to serve consumers and our communities. We're doing this in our interest, in society's interest, and in the interest of our long-term shareowners. Thanks, and we'll be happy to take questions. Lauren, can we get a microphone to the front?
I'll go ahead and sit down.
Thank you. I wanted to ask a little about China. You know, the last couple quarters definitely been transparent about performance in China, and relative to the market. One of the questions I had is I can't help but think back to, I think it was 2016, when at this conference, David kind of stood up and said, you know, "We've done something wrong in China," right? We're sort of we're going left, the consumer's going right, and we need to address the broader strategy. I was curious if you could talk, I guess, a little bit about your sense of the underperformance in China, how much of it is channel specific, is it strategy specific relative to brands or positioning? Is there a discussion on some sort of strategic reset that needs to happen in China? Is it just a matter of the market getting better and P&G will get better with the market?
I'll provide some perspective and Andre can add. If you look at the last five years, our results in China have been very encouraging. We've grown about 7% on average over those years, including some of the more recent declines due to COVID and the impact that it's had on the market. If you look at our market shares, I was just on the phone with the China team earlier this week. We're holding our building shares in aggregate, so that's encouraging as well. China's China, though, which means it changes every day. We always have work to do to meet emerging consumer desires, both in terms of the products they buy and where they choose to purchase them.
Social media is a very rapidly evolving platform or platforms, plural. And in some of those channels, we see market share deficits, so we need to work to catch up in those channels. Overall, it remains a very attractive business. I'm glad we made the strategic pivot that we made, that you referred to several years ago, by focusing on our two largest markets, the U.S. and China, and I think we're reasonably well-positioned to continue to do well there. Andre Schulten, do you?
I agree.
Good. Go ahead.
Thanks. Just a quick follow-up on that. You mentioned China changes every day. Could you characterize any, c ertainly we're familiar with the structural changes that took place in a lot of categories in the COVID period since our last CAGNY in the U.S ., could you characterize the changes to the channel, to the consumer that you see in your business, and, yeah, maybe identify where that leaves you, better or worse, same?
I think Jon mentioned some of it. It's, the major changes for us I think are in the retail footprint, where the consumer shops, and I think we've seen a transition towards online, certainly a more elevated and accelerated transition towards online shopping during the COVID period, which put disproportionate burden on every brick-and-mortar retailer, including department stores. For us, the job at hand is to ensure that we are adequately set up in online retail, which we are doing. Jon said it, we're gaining share, I think we're doing something right in that sense. Making sure that we have the media muscle and the marketing muscle to operate in an online environment. You saw two examples in the presentation, the team is strengthening that every day. That's working.
Then the other element we now need to watch carefully as China reopens is on our SK-II business, the balance between travel retail, online business, and department stores. All three channels will be important, but they are certainly a different balance. A higher level of engagement in department stores is required in order to drive new user acquisition in that channel, and that's really the primary purpose of it. I think the channel dynamic is one, the media dynamic is another. I think the other component that we'll have to see is from a supply chain standpoint, I think the strategy we've chosen is the right strategy to ensure that really the majority of our China business, virtually all of it, is locally sourced. We can locally innovate, which is relevant for the consumer because that, in my mind is one of the big examples we have, is we can develop innovation that is locally relevant at a pace that probably we couldn't 10 years ago.
Thank you. You mentioned the rough path ahead. I wanted to just if you can elaborate a little bit on RGM and investments, ad investments and share of voice above and below the line. I understand that obviously through guide, the H2 implies a 50 basis points or 40 basis points of G&A reduction, but we don't see what is above the line. Are you seeing the need, especially in the commentary about Europe, the deceleration there, and again, giving a lot of credit to all the improvements in assortment, in preference superiority, anything you can elaborate on how to go through the rough patch as we go into RGMs and product pricing?
The worst thing we can do, in my opinion, in this environment, and I mentioned it briefly, is step back or to blink or to back off our strategies. That doesn't mean we're committed to continue, and Andre said the same thing in his remarks. That doesn't mean we're not looking for opportunities to reduce cost of those investments. For example, in media, we're increasingly looking at reach, which I mentioned, as a measure of sufficiency. We wanna increase reach in part by reducing investment and frequency, and the tools we have, increasingly available allow us to do that much better than they ever have in the past. We've talked about this many times, but we have to be very... It's difficult to look at total dollar spend in terms of whether we're investing sufficiently or not.
We're focusing on those endpoint deliverables, is what we're committed to deliver against. I've been very clear about this, that if we're faced with a choice, which we may be, to back off that investment, or to have a degree of gross or operating margin compression and even, you know, small earnings per share decline, we will make those investments. It's very important for the future of the business. You know, I'm sure you've heard a lot this week about the relationships between retailers and manufacturers. I think our relationships with our partners in those in the retail space are better than they've ever been. That won't be true when we stop supporting growth of the market, which is the only way that they can grow.
Kevin?
Thanks for the question. Kevin Grundy, Jefferies. John, question on your market share and how you potentially adjust the playbook here over the next 12 months, given what remains still largely premium portfolio. I think in your presentation you alluded to broader pricing ladders and investments that you made, you know, including laundry, family care, grooming, just to name a few. But that being said, your market share has slipped a little bit in the US in some of these categories, and we have seen trade-down in some of them. How do you sort of balance the longer term goals around superiority versus what we're seeing in terms of consumer behavior here, given your premium portfolio? Thank you.
We wanna have delightful, superior experiences across relevant price tiers, not just at the highest end. That's part of how we deal with that, is ensure that consumers who wanna trade down, still have a delightful option within our brand family that they can choose. As a result, you know, our market shares, in aggregate, as Andre talked about, have held up very well. They're growing in the U.S., both value and volume. That doesn't mean that we should stop asking the exact question that you asked. We ask it of ourselves every day.
So far, I haven't seen anything that would indicate a need for, you know, significant need for a change in strategy. Andre showed you the breadth of the growth across the categories and across the markets. There's always an opportunity here or there, and we will always work to address those opportunities. I think our approach thus far has served us very, very well.
Yeah. If anything, Kevin, I would just add that when you look at all outlet data, which is really what we're basing John's statements on and my statements in the prepared remarks, if anything, we see strengthening of the business. Family care, which was under pressure, is back to shared growth in all outlet. Fabric care, growing volume share. I think the portfolio play that we're describing is actually serving us very well.
Thanks. Just a question about balance. You talked a bit about that in the presentation. As we think about a scenario where maybe some of the headwinds over the last few years, whether it's commodities and currencies, become tailwinds over the next year or two, can you talk about how you're thinking about the balance of how much of that you'd reinvest in the P&L? How much of that might be marketing investment or product innovation? And also maybe touch on how you would think about that in terms of cash investments as well, like capital spending. Just how much drops to the bottom line, how much you'd wanna use to sort of maybe play a little bit more offense to the extent that that's a scenario?
Let me start with capital. The core for us at the moment is to catch up to demand, which we're still doing in some of the categories. That's why you see a little bit of accelerated capital spending. I don't expect a fundamental change in our capital percentage of sales versus previous years, just a acceleration to catch up. The level of investment, I really don't have a good answer because it'll depend on the opportunity that is out there. First and foremost, we'll continue to invest fully in innovation, in fully driving superiority across all five vectors. We are committed, as we said in the prepared remarks, to return to our growth algorithm, which includes margin expansion. A component of whatever comes as a help will certainly be reinvested. Our objective is balanced top line, and bottom line growth. Return to some level of margin expansion. First and foremost, the primary job at hand is to continue to build irresistible superiority across the lineup.
Just two additional points. I think I've shared this with you before, but if you look at the correlation between top line growth and our share price, it's very low. It's 11% over a reasonable period of time. If you therefore conclude that what really matters is bottom line, you'd be mistaken, because the correlation between our bottom line and our share price is also very low. It's 17% over the period of time I'm referring to. When you look at operating total shareholder return, which requires top line growth and bottom line growth, the correlation is in the 1960s. Just from a pure math standpoint, I call it one of the physical laws of the economic universe, we will be committed to grow top line and bottom line, as Andre said, inclusive of margin expansion. [inaudible]
Thanks. Another element of balance, and Andre, you referred to this, is balance of the makeup of the top line between pricing and volume, and the importance of restoring your portfolio and your categories to volume growth. Can you just talk a little bit about the path to that objective towards a more balanced makeup of price versus volume? How much of that's within your control versus environmental factors, and a bit about what you think it will, you know, cost to get there?
Look, I think part of this will happen naturally, right? Because as pricing annualizes, the consumer stabilizes. Some of the compensating behaviors we see in the short term, like using up pantry inventory, thinking about dosing maybe more intentionally than they used to, I think some of that will just naturally disappear, and the current price levels will become the new norm. Some of that will normalize. I think, as I said, we have huge opportunity to drive jobs to be done, household penetration, and dosing within the categories that we operate in. That is really part of the growth model, Steve. I don't see it as an incremental investment. It is just executing the playbook, right?
While the playbook was focused over the past, rightfully so, over the past 18 months, 24 months to get innovation out, get the pricing out there, drive productivity, I think reminding our organizations, which we do really on a daily basis, that driving household penetration, new jobs to be done, and usage with the innovation and with the communication that we have out there is a critical component. It's not, it's not incremental. It's just re-emphasizing a core part of the playbook.
Dara?
Hi. Can you guys compare and contrast what you're seeing in Europe right now relative to the U.S., in terms of consumer trade down? Obviously, there's some structural differences in the market in terms of higher private label penetration in Europe and more consolidated retailers, but it does seem like there's distinct performance. How much of that sort of relates to P&G execution just versus those structural dynamics?
Well, clearly, you know, as Andre mentioned, the consumer is most robust in the United States currently, and in parts of the developing world. China's still working to recover. Europe, for some obvious reasons, the consumers are under more pressure than they are in other parts of the world. It's hard to sort through exactly the various drivers of that, Dara, because of timing. We generally, because we're market leaders in those categories, we're often the first to take pricing. And the market works through that. We're kind of in the middle of that process right now. Generally, Europe is more challenging. Our strategy is the same in each of those markets. Though obviously having pack sizes and price points that are lower in a European context is necessary to serve those consumers. I don't see dramatic differences.
I think the core difference that we see is private label pricing is simply lagging in Europe. Temporarily, the price delta versus branded competition is bigger. We'll see how that goes. I think how it goes to the playbook and what we're doing, every conversation we're having with businesses is are we sufficient in terms of media? Can we invest more? Can we drive the superiority of our brands via short-term media investments and stronger value messaging?
Robert?
Thank you. Robert Ottenstein, Evercore ISI. Just to focus a little bit more on the U.S., can you give us your latest read on where retailer inventories are, consumer pantries, and whether you're still seeing a move, you know, a modest move is what you mentioned at your Investor Day, towards dollar stores and club stores? You know, is that accelerated, diminished, about the same as it was, you know, three months ago? Thank you.
From an inventory standpoint, I think, you know, it was very understandable that for a period of time, retailers across channels, built inventory simply because of the uncertainty of supply and the volatility of demand. As both of those things have somewhat, normalized, we've seen them understandably adjust inventory back down, and that's broadly true across channels, and it's something that is largely, behind us. There hasn't been a great shift between channels, in the recent, quarter or two. You know, I see a lot of conversation about, online versus offline. That's all blending now. I mean, what is Walmart? Is that an offline channel or is it an online channel? I think it's both. The same for Target. Between the dollar stores, the drug channel, et cetera, there hasn't been a real significant shift.
Let's wrap now and move over to the breakout.
Okay. Thank you very much. Happy to see you in the breakout.