Good morning, everyone. To kick off the HPC portion of the day, we're so glad to welcome back P&G. We have the company's CFO, Andre Schulten, with us, and of course from investor relations, we have Keri Cowan, who's going to be taking over as head of investor relations early next year.
I'm not doing it.
John Chevalier, who's going to be retiring. I promised him and everyone else there's no tears on this stage this year, so I'm going to keep it tight and just say we've known each other a really long time, and this isn't goodbye, and thank you for everything over so many years, and on behalf of everyone, because everyone feels the same way.
Thank you.
Okay. See? Very tight. Okay. Andre, over the past nine months, since Shailesh has been CEO, he has been really clear that P&G does not need a full reset of the integrated growth strategy, but it is more a matter of improving execution, and that we would start to see sales and market shares accelerating again in a 12 - 18-month timeframe, again, with the context that he has been CEO for about nine months. First question, just to play devil's advocate, why doesn't P&G need to change its strategy? You could argue market shares are stabilizing, but maybe you need to do something bigger or shake things up to get shares growing in a more sustainable and material way.
Look, the strategy we are executing is the same strategy this company has been on for 189 years now, which is grounded in understanding the consumer better than everybody else in categories where we can truly add value. The categories we are in are the right categories. We know how to play in them. We have the R&D capabilities, the supply chain capabilities, and the consumer understanding to win. They are expendable categories, daily use, and performance makes a difference, so our capabilities are relevant to the consumer. We know how to deliver superiority. We know how to define it. We know how to measure it. Better understanding the consumer and then delivering against those needs is the way that we grow categories, we grow share, and we grow our business on a sustainable way. We need outstanding productivity to fuel that momentum consistently, and that productivity muscle is well developed.
Lastly, we need an organization that is capable and enhancing themselves to continue to develop against those core elements of the strategy. None of that needs to change because everything is very basic. The art in the strategy is not the articulation, the art in the strategy is the consistent execution. While we are not changing the strategy, we are changing every piece of wiring under the hood. That is really what it is all about. How do we act faster when we recognize that our propositions are not superior? How do we cut through functional barriers in that conversation so it doesn't become an R&D versus supply versus go-to-market versus marketing conversation, but an integrated conversation on what does the consumer need and how do we get there quicker?
That was one of the fundamental decisions we made is to declare the moment you do not grow users, you are not superior. We do not care whether it is one, two, three, four, or five of the vectors, but you, dear general manager, are uniquely responsible for fixing that superiority. That has been the success model in where we see turnaround in the business. Literally every category-country combinations where we have declared you are not growing users and the organization has accepted the diagnosis and then gone into deep dive of what is the consumer part of the value equation that we are missing, addressed it, the business turns, and it does not turn in 12 months, it turns within 60 days, 90 days. We are building capabilities to do that even better by having more data easier available to the organization on every KPI that determines what we call superiority.
We've talked about our data lake. We talked about the capability that we have in extracting data from that. Now the potential of making that data available using technology, using AI to help us analyze data quantities that otherwise we weren't able to at that speed with that precision is a whole new world for us to better understand and even faster diagnose where the consumer need is that we haven't met. Reducing internal work processes, everything that has to do with reporting, forecasting, stewardship, internal analysis, all of that we're automating, digitizing, which frees up the organization to focus externally on those opportunities.
Supply Chain 3.0, we've been talking about that for a year and a half, is in full execution, meaning maximum automation of the supply chain, integrated digital capabilities from quality measurement and execution to inventory management to warehouse execution, unattended shifts that will give us productivity runway for the next five to 10 years. Integrated in that superiority conversation is R&D capability, where we're using technology to discover new elements in the innovation toolbox. Molecular Discovery Suite is one of those elements, where we're using AI to just get access to new technologies faster and scale them faster.
To get back to the question, Lauren, the core strategy is not changing, but how we deliver against that strategy is fundamentally shifting, and I think every element of the company is gearing up to leverage technology to go faster, be more agile in diagnosing and addressing potential outages and delivering the productivity we need as a fuel to actually be able to afford all of that while delivering.
Okay, great. My second question on this topic, is the 12 - 18 month timeframe still the right one to anchor to in the context of since Shailesh became CEO? Or does that change in an environment where we've had continued slower category growth in the U.S.?
I think it's still the right timeframe. We all wake up every morning and something else happened. Certainly those headwinds that I think everybody's seeing don't help, category growth being one of them, cost and commodity pressures being another, transportation cost increases due to driver shortage. You name them, you've heard them all. I don't think it changes the ambition. The ambition is to return this business to strong growth, in that 12 - 18 month timeframe. If I quickly walk around the regions, enterprise markets are consistently in the 4%-6% range. China is growing share and now growing five quarters in a row, low singles accelerating to mid-singles. Europe is slow in terms of growth. Market growth is only 1%, but we're growing share. I think we're on path to re-accelerating. In the U.S., we now stabilized share category growth around 2%.
We're growing at around 2.5%, on a consumption basis. I would say this quarter, next quarter, we're solidifying the base. I think that gives us confidence that, in half two, we can start growing in the U.S. more consistently, and Europe should be re-accelerating. I think we're on that trajectory. As you know, Lauren, there are many things that can happen, so there's never a guarantee. But if I look at the trajectory the business has been on, if I look at the patchwork of category country combinations that we are fixing one by one, the total patchwork gets greener, and the greener it gets, the more comfortable I get that that sustained momentum will only accelerate.
Okay, great. Before we get into some of the near-term interventions that are underway, I wanted to go a little deeper on some of the longer-term capability reinvention work that's going on. You mentioned Supply Chain 3.0 already yielding stronger productivity. We've spoken about scaling these integrated data platforms, but when would you say we'll start to see how these capabilities translate into a core competitive advantage for the company?
I think it will gradually happen over the next two years. Different stages of visibility, I think that we will be able to demonstrate on the media transformation. I believe that will become more visible over the next 12- 18 months as we fully scale, the media capabilities, across social, integrated content creation. We now have brought content creation fully in-house. We're leveraging AI capabilities to create more content with higher quality. We're able to deploy that content fully automated, across all platforms. We still are working on the measurement side, but I think you'll see those elements becoming a bigger part of the marketing framework. Everywhere where I think we're scaling those capabilities, we see great market response. That is one that I think will become more visible. You'll see it at Investor Day.
You see all of them at Investor Day, but I think that one will be clearly having a more immediate impact on the business. Supply Chain 3.0, I think we've already talked about many of the elements. We'll share again at Investor Day, the rollout schedule, but that's well underway. We're well on our way in terms of unattended shifts. RTTQ, return touchless quality, is being rolled out globally. Fully automated dark warehouse technology is rolled out, including loading and unloading of trucks. So that's just a matter of scaling it over the next 24 months around the world. R&D capability, I don't think we will disclose in much more detail for all the right reasons. But let me just give you one data point. We're using Molecular Discovery Suite, and that sounds great, but it's not that tangible.
But to make it tangible, over the last decade, we discovered two new molecules in our fabric care business. One decade, two molecules. Every time we discover them, it moves us to a new S-curve of performance. In the last six months, I think Victor, our Chief R&D Officer, told me we've discovered six or seven. So six months, six or seven; a decade, two. That makes it relevant. So the ability to, I think, increase our flexibility and formulation, increase product performance, is tangible as an outcome of these technologies. The same across perfumes, and many others. Just the integration of data, across categories is a huge enabler for our R&D organization. But it also enables faster and earlier integration with the commercial side. Because we look at the same consumer insights, the same consumer data, the same consumer testing data.
We use the same proprietary consumer digital twins to test propositions, including the commercial idea behind the proposition. If you put that together, you can see how the innovation cycle is just speeding up. The error rate is decreasing, and the alignment across functions is just much stronger. Again, some of that we'll be able to bring to life. Many of those things are more internal than external.
Okay. Let's talk about the evolving retail landscape. Shailesh has described retailers as media platforms and media platforms as retailers. You've also talked about joint work with retailers around traffic, profitability, supply chain, and pack size. What does a best-in-class retail partnership look like today, or will it look like in this ideal state versus a few years ago?
It starts with an agreed mission to grow the categories we operate in. I think once we have agreement with the retailer that that's the objective that we have between them and us, the rest of the conversation flows more easily. I think with even the most difficult retailers, I think we're at that point. I will tell you from when you have that conversation with a German hard discounter, and they agree that that's the mission, that's a breakthrough, versus where we've been. Once you have that, then it becomes, okay, what's the breadth of the value creation chain that we have available to us? When you open up that aperture and you say, well, it's not about a margin conversation on the products that you list. It is on that, but it is on innovation, it is on media spending and media activation.
It is how we bring the product to life in store and online. It's about the supply chain cost and supply chain reliability and quality. Then suddenly you have a different conversation because you can create more value across a broader set of measures. Then if you can turn that into not a one-year plan, but into a three-year plan, which allows you to make fundamental changes to the way you collaborate and operate, that's what we call best in class. I think the other element I give you here is the strategic alignment at the leadership level is generally easy.
Operationalizing that alignment down to the buyer level, down to each department in their organization, our organization is not that easy. The other core element that we found is critical is an escalation mechanism that very quickly allows us, when we see misalignment at the operating level, we can elevate the conversation to leadership and resolve those issues not within weeks, but within days. I think that's one thing that, for example, the North American team has done a fabulous job of, to say we need an escalation mechanism so we don't stall teams for weeks and weeks because of operational issues that never come to the surface. If you have alignment on the mission, you can turn that into a broader set of value creation. You have a three-year plan, and you can get out of operational issues quickly by elevating. You got a best-in-class relationship.
Okay, great. One thing also on this topic is, you've always talked about country category combinations growing share, but this quarter was new to us as a mention of the percentage of customer brand combinations in North America, and that number moved from less than 10% in the first half to 50% in the second half. Can you tell us about this new metric and kind of why we're looking at it in this way, and what changed specifically to see that big of an improvement in such a short period of time in North America?
We quoted the metric because it is the metric we use internally. If you look at some of our U.S. customers, they are bigger than markets. It is completely fair to look at them and look at category customer combination while we look around the world at category country combination simply because of the size of them. More importantly, it is how we are organizing the effort in the U.S. to say by category or by brand and by customer, do we really understand, A, are we growing? If we are not growing users and share, do we understand why, and do we have an aligned plan how to fix it? I think to your question on how did we accelerate from 7% at the beginning of the year to now 50%, I think we will accelerate to 80% + by the end of the calendar year.
It is that intentionality to say every category at every customer needs to have a plan that either is already in execution or will be in execution within the next 60-90 days to grow users and grow share. Once you have that clarity of mission, then it is only a matter of doing the work, sitting down at the customer team level, identify the issue, align priority funding and resource allocation, and go. I think that intentionality that Shailesh was driving with the North America team helped focus, and I think also gave a clear measure. Trust me, the one conversation you do not want to have is be part of that red customer category combination for a series of months. I think it is just good, very disciplined management of what we want to accomplish.
Okay, great. In North America, it does feel like there has been much more volatility in your performance over the last year. Both, why do you think that has been the case? Then specifically with the fourth quarter, there was a three-point gap between sell-in and sell-out. Has that gap continued into 1 Q? Are you seeing narrowing of that between shipment and consumption dynamic?
Yeah, I think Q4 was an unfortunate confluence of multiple factors that provided that disconnect between consistent sell-out at 2% and the sell-in that was significantly lower. I do not see that in the current quarter. I hope that is not something we will see in the future. The real answer to your question is why we are not growing fast enough. We are not growing fast enough in the U.S. I think once the category returns to 3% growth and we will be growing at 4%, that volatility will go away because you have enough velocity in the retail that they will have to maintain stock levels, inventory levels to serve that flow-through. Once that pipe is stable, it is just that, it is stable.
If you are growing at 2% and the pipe is built for 4%, you can turn off the pipe for a period of time and wait, and then you refuel, so it creates more volatility. I think the real underlying mission here is we got to get back in the U.S. to 3%-4% growth.
Okay. Let's shift gears to China, a market that has been a pretty encouraging proof point in the portfolio, as you mentioned earlier. What have been the one or two most important changes implemented in China that are responsible for the improvement, and how much of that playbook do you think is transferable to other markets, or particularly North America, that have been a little bit more challenged?
Yeah, you recall the China surgery was probably one of the more interventions we have made. About two years ago, we started by changing the go-to-market model. We reduced the number of distributors, hired higher capability distributors, increased our intentionality on which channels offline and online we want to win in, and staffed accordingly. We changed and transformed our brand-building model, much in line with what I was talking before, way more focused on social and digital, because the market was ahead and still is ahead of the rest of the world in social penetration. We changed our innovation strategy, our research strategy to be more local and locally relevant. All of those elements I view as the right interventions at the time, and they majorly contributed to the turnaround in China.
We saw with the investment in innovation, with the investment in go-to-market, we are now growing share offline and we are growing share online. That is, in all honesty, without all categories firing. We still have a significant opportunity in oral care. We still have a significant opportunity in mass skin on our OLAY brand. We still have not reached potential on fabric care, for example, but you can see how the team is freed up to focus on the consumer and how it is working in every channel consistently. There is a bit of a tailwind on the diaper business right now, but even before that tailwind, the China business was growing consistently now for five quarters, 3%-5%. The diaper opportunity is a great opportunity for us now to build trial, and that is what the team is focused on.
I do believe it's very sustainable because it's grounded in the right interventions to get the team focused. In that sense, I think it's reapplicable to the rest of the world, and that's exactly what I was describing to different degrees, but it's the same underlying playbook.
Okay, great. Let's talk a little about some of the near-term interventions that are in the works more broadly. On the call, the fourth quarter call, you'd mentioned some pricing interventions. Have these been put in the market in the cases where they're already in? Are you seeing any improvement in sales or market share performance?
We've said we'll be competitive on the diaper business. I think we have been now competitive on the diaper business, and we regained our share. I think that's done. We said we would be competitive on the oral care business. We've done that. We have told you, I think, before that we were out of range in some price points in the club channel, simply because of the nature of the pack size, not necessarily the value per sheet on some of our family care business. We have fixed that, and we see the business responding, Lauren. It's one of the fundamental things that if you have a superiority issue and it is a value issue that is grounded in price or promotion, we will be competitive.
We don't view this as a growth muscle, so this is not the way we will grow, but we have to remain competitive in some of those categories. I think we've done that, and actually, I see more stability going forward.
Okay. I mean, at the risk of being redundant, we definitely have heard other companies discussing P&G being more promotional over the summer. I think there's always going to be a situation where everyone's pointing fingers at each other on where it all started. Just, I guess, any thoughts, how would you respond to that in terms of P&G sort of being the instigator on promotional activity, particularly U.S. and Europe?
It's hard to say, and there might be instances where others feel that we are leading. There are instances where we feel others are leading. I think it comes back to the same principle. We will be competitive, and if we're not, we'll make the right interventions.
Okay. What other activities beyond pricing would fall into the "near-term interventions" bucket? Where, again, do you think there's still improvement? It's too early to call, but things beyond pricing that kind of fall into this near-term bucket.
I would describe it as the continuation of the diligent work category by category, customer by customer or country by country. Literally, it's that simple. You continue to chuck through the category/country combinations and fix them one by one.
You can't do them all at the same time. Resource, both financial and human, it takes some time to diagnose, but it's literally that go step by step. As I said, we expect, I expect the U.S. to be closer to 80% of share growth plans by customer. I think once we see that, we will see the acceleration in the second half. That's why I was starting, Lauren, I think this quarter, next quarter will still be solidifying the progress, so we have a really solid growth trajectory. Then innovation will kick in, so I see honestly more positive momentum in the back half then.
Okay, great. Just-
One more thing I'd add is that-
Yeah
As the businesses are going through the diagnosis of the media spend over the last couple of years, they're identifying the places where the spend didn't really deliver the results we thought it might.
As they redeploy spend to different vehicles, maybe moving from more awareness building, long-term kind of advertising into more activation-oriented social spend, that's helping turn the trajectory of the brands, too.
Okay. Great. I just wanted to stay quickly with fiscal 2027 guidance. Just sort of housekeeping question to get out of the way around costs. Any notable changes in input costs, freight, logistics, in your outlook since July?
We had outlooked $1 billion after-tax of headwinds. That was for Brent at 90. I think this morning we were at 102.50, upward trajectory. So that obviously has an impact. Transportation cost in the U.S., we have a driver shortage now. That has an impact. Then you see Canadian retaliatory tariffs coming just this week, so that has an impact. None of this is not manageable. So I would argue we have enough time and enough flexibility to deal with that. It makes it harder. But I'm still confident that we are in the right range. I think the pressure on pricing will increase with some of the cost pressures sustaining. Again, the longer oil stays at above 100, the harder it will get, I think, for everyone to manage. I think the higher the combined pressure on pricing will be.
But at this point in time, we acknowledge the headwinds, but I think they're manageable.
Okay, great. We know to expect the greatest hit to margins from raw materials in the first quarter, but anything else that you want to share on gross margin progression?
I shouldn't say that I don't care. But I really don't.
I can ask a different question.
I know. No, but listen. What we're focused on is to return to the top line growth that we want from an algorithm standpoint and return to the EPS line that we want. How that works in between growth margin and operating margin is an outcome, and it is different by business. As I said last night at dinner, if we can have a fantastic innovation that compresses gross margin by three points and accelerates growth by three points, that's a trade-off we would make any given day. So what is important to us is we need to deliver productivity for us to be able to continue to fuel innovation. We have delivered significant productivity last year. We will deliver even more this year, and I don't see the pipeline drying up.
That's important because that will sustain gross margin at a level that is manageable, even as we invest in innovation. What is important to John's point is that we get more efficient in our media spending because we've been not as efficient as we should have been. We've talked about media experiments and pushing reach to see how far that can become a viable tool to acquire new users. I would declare that experiment as not successful. Therefore, we're now shifting, and that's part of the media transformation I was talking about. We need to get the media spend to be more efficient. We need our organization freed up to become more efficient, driven by technology. Those are the underlying efficiency measures that I'm looking at. Again, gross margin is just an outcome of that.
Okay, great. Let's talk a little bit about M&A. You acquired Thorne. This was announced after 4Q earnings. Would love to take the opportunity to have you talk a little bit about the rationale for acquiring this business. Is this the start of something, kind of acquiring fast-growing brands to reshape the portfolio?
I think it's the execution of the strategy we've been articulating all along. We said we will look for value accretive acquisitions in the beauty space and in the healthcare space. We prefer bolt-ons. I think we've proven now that we can very successfully scale bolt-ons, either within category or across categories, AKA Native. We will continue to look for those opportunities. Thorne, in our mind, is a great opportunity for us. In a very fragmented VMS space where few brands are able to stand out, Thorne has built an incredible equity over the last decade. Doctor endorsement, a high quality of ingredients, high efficacy, high levels of trust, a very powerful campaign. That's attractive to us. We see a huge opportunity in the asset platform that allows us to drive synergies with our supply chain. We see the opportunity to scale this across multiple categories.
We see an opportunity for international expansion. You put all of that together, it's just a fantastic bolt-on opportunity for us that we can apply our capabilities to, and at the same time, fully leverage and harvest what the team at Thorne has built over the last decade, which is fantastic. To preempt maybe the next question, we have not lowered our payout threshold. The objective here is to build a business plan that delivers the same rate of return that we require from every M&A activity that we've pursued. There's no change in strategy on where we would acquire, there's no change in strategy of bolt-on versus transformational, and there's no change in strategy in terms of acceptable payout. All the same, Thorne was just a great opportunity.
Okay. We've definitely got. I mean, you sort of answered it, but we've definitely gotten questions on the multiple. I don't know, anything else that you can share with regard to sort of financial discipline as you look at these kinds of acquisitions?
No, just what I've said. I think it's the same hurdle rate that we apply to every acquisition, and the construct of the business plan, and Paul will talk more. Paul is our CEO for the healthcare business. He will talk more about it and certainly more eloquent than I can on what really the business opportunity is. But we see an enormous potential in a brand that is growing 30%, has more than 30% EBITDA margin, and enormous potential to build a franchise that goes way beyond just the core healthcare VMS space. And that justifies the premium, with, in my mind, relatively conservative assumptions.
Okay. So you've touched on it a couple times, the upcoming Investor Day, but just anything we should be looking forward to as key topics heading into the Investor Day, other than John Chevalier's final goodbye?
Right. Absolutely.
That's really why we're-
That would be the highlight of the event, obviously. But what we want to be able to demonstrate is a couple of things. Number one, the alignment, agility, discipline, and intentionality, which you will hear every president talk about their focus on the consumer. Every time they refocus on the consumer, they identify the outage in terms of superiority, the intentionality and clarity with which they fix it, and then the immediate turn of results, which is fascinating to see. We just had our global president leadership council last week in Cincinnati, and it was amazing to see the consistency of diagnosis, fix, result. I hope you'll see that come through. You will see the transformation under the hood, in more detail across each of those elements, the media transformation, brand building transformation, what we're doing with the organization and with internal work processes, supply chain, R&D.
We'll spend a good amount of time on those capabilities. I think demonstrating what that means for a consumer. To your question, how does this come to life? We'll showcase innovation capability and what the consumer ultimately will see in terms of what innovation we can deliver, what breakthroughs we can deliver, how we can communicate them. That's really the three-part agenda that we have.
Okay, great. Well, I can't wait. Please join me in thanking P&G for being here today and this week at the conference.