P&G would like to remind you that today's presentation includes 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. Also, as required by Regulation G, Procter & Gamble needs to make you aware that during this presentation, the company will make references to several non-GAAP and other financial measures. For completeness, P&G has posted on its website, www.pginvestor.com, a full reconciliation of non-GAAP and other financial measures. Here is Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of The Procter & Gamble Company, David Taylor.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Cincinnati, and welcome to all of you joining on the webcast. We're happy you can join us for this presentation, and we're looking forward to talking with many of you at the reception this evening. If you've joined us for any of our investor presentations over the last three years, you've heard one consistent thing, a focus on balanced growth and value creation. The same theme has been the focus of each of our internal strategy sessions, leadership team meetings, and employee webcasts. We are seeking to improve the lives of the world's consumers in the world in which we live with consumer preferred brands and products that create and grow categories, generate sustained top line and bottom line growth and cash, delivering operating total shareholder return in the top third of our peer group.
To deliver this objective, we're focused on creating and extending noticeably superior brands, driving productivity improvements and cost savings to fuel investments in margin, and transforming P&G's organization and culture. These will continue to be the focus areas going forward. There's a good reason for that. They're mutually reinforcing. They enable and build upon each other. Together, they contribute to stronger balanced top line growth, bottom line growth, and cash generation. We've made good progress in each of these areas, which is showing up in our results. Consumption of P&G products is increasing. Market share is up globally and translating into faster top line growth. We need to do better in an even more dynamic environment.
Geopolitical volatility, including tax, trade, and privacy, retail transformation, disruption of the media ecosystem, rising input costs, and strong foreign exchange headwinds, as well as highly capable and agile competition, whether it be multinational, regional, or local. We must and are accelerating the pace of change and stepping up our execution to meet these challenges. Winning in today's dynamic world requires us to lead this disruption to create, maintain, and build advantage. We've changed considerably over the last couple years, which has allowed us to maintain value. This rate and magnitude of change must accelerate for us to build value on a relative basis. We are leading disruptive change along the entire value chain, improving the lives of the world's consumers, the world in which they live, and our relevance in it.
These strategic focus areas and the disruptive work we are leading form the agenda for our time together this afternoon. Jon and several of our business unit leaders that are here today will first lead a discussion on our world and our company, highlighting the progress we've made to strengthen the portfolio, drive productivity and superiority, and improve organization design and culture. I'll then lead a discussion on the next wave of change in innovation, brand building, supply, digitization, organization, and citizenship, all designed to further strengthen and sustain our results. We'll take a short break about halfway through the discussion, and then we'll finish with your questions. Later this evening, you'll have an opportunity to talk with nearly every one of our top leadership team at our reception and booth displays. Thank you again for joining us. Here's Jon.
Thanks, David. Good afternoon, everyone. I wanna start our discussion this afternoon with a description of our world the way that we see it, how quickly things are changing, and the challenges and opportunities this presents. Our world has evolved significantly over just the last 10 years, starting with the financial crisis and followed by a decade of increasing and dynamic change that will likely continue to accelerate for the next 10 years. The market for consumer products has grown over the last 10 years, along with populations and incomes. This growth is forecasted to continue. What was a $300 billion global market in 2007 is a $470 billion global market today that is forecast to exceed $540 billion by 2022.
Population has grown from 6.1 billion to 7 billion over the past decade, an increase of 15%, and is expected to exceed 7.6 billion, another 9% increase, by 2028. Per capita income in 2005 constant U.S. dollars has increased from $5,100 in 2007 to $6,000 in 2018, an increase of about 18%. It's forecast to reach $7,400, another 23% increase, by 2028. Global GDP is following suit, increasing from $49 trillion in 2007 to $65 trillion in 2018 to $85 trillion in 2028. The number of middle and upper income households has increased by 65% and is forecast to increase by another 50% by 2028.
Our markets, while volatile year to year, are growing between 2% and 4% globally. This is down from 5% during the prior decade, but it's still very healthy growth. Importantly, P&G and the consumer products industry will benefit from more population income and middle income household growth in the next decade than at any time in our company's 181-year history. The world's population continues to urbanize. Urbanites constitute 50% of the world's population, with 180,000 people moving to cities every day. 63% of households will be urban by 2025 and 70% by 2050, with the largest increase, as you'd expect, in Asia.
The number of people living in cities with average per capita incomes above $10,000 per year has grown from about 800 million in 2007 to $1.1 billion currently. It's expected to increase to nearly 1.6 billion by 2028. This is 13% of the population in 2007, 21% in 2018, and 29% in 2028. McKinsey projects that 600 cities will generate more than 60% of global economic growth in 2025, and 100 cities within this will contribute 35% of all global growth. This is both an opportunity and a threat. Urbanization fundamentally changes shopping economics and habits and shapes a new economic reality, making service of all kinds abundant and cheap. The world's population is aging.
There were 1.2 billion consumers over the age of 50 in 2007. Today, that number is 1.6 billion, with a forecast of 2.1 billion, an increase of 26% by 2028. This dynamic is most pronounced in Japan. 42% of the population was over 50 in 2007, 46% today, 51% in 2028. Europe, 32% to 41% to 45%. China, 22% to 31% to 39%. In North America, 26% to 31% to 34%. By contrast, the population cohort aged 18- 34, usually the point of market entry target audience in many of our product categories, declines as a percentage of total population. Japan from 20% in 2007 to 14% in 2028. Europe from 22% to 17%.
China from 24% to 17%. Aging changes physiology, needs, and therefore jobs to be done, product usage, all of which shape habits and consumption levels. Aging hands carry less and have more difficulty opening and holding our packages. Aging eyes strain to read our packaging. On the positive side, aging effectively creates a new point of market entry for some needs, for example, adult incontinence. In other cases, aging creates a point of market change for consumers, redefining what superiority means now for them. We're identifying and capitalizing on these new points of market entry and market change, attempting to delight aging consumers in an irresistibly superior way. Consumer preferences are changing, giving rise to new fast-growing segments and forms and disrupting others. Millennials are often credited or blamed for these trends, but these needs and desires aren't necessarily contained to that age group.
Consumers of all ages increasingly want "and", performance and natural, performance and sustainable, and they're often willing to pay a premium to provide these benefits to their families. Ingredients. Ingredient sourcing and perceived safety are taking on increasing importance. Objective safety is no longer the only priority. Consumers to varying degrees around the world are unwilling to accept impurities or perceived contamination of any kind. Perceived shortfalls in the eyes of consumers, a government, or an NGO risk shutting down a business and severely threatening brand equity. These are challenges, but they're also opportunities to make this new definition of product quality a competitive advantage for P&G. The retail environment is being disrupted and is under significant pressure. E-commerce is growing globally at 18%, while hyper, super, and mass channels are growing at 1% and declining in many markets.
Small format channels, discounters, specialty beauty, drug, and pharmacies are growing generally at the expense of larger formats. Each market has its exception, and we have a few here in the U.S., these are the prevailing global trends. The emergence of e-commerce offering low prices, free shipping, and enabling price transparency has challenged the economic model of traditional retail. E-commerce has enabled the proliferation of small brands and niche players, some of whom are choosing to circumvent retailers altogether by selling direct to consumers. Economic pressure on traditional retail and price transparency has heightened the need for unique, differentiated offerings and elevated expectations on supply chain execution. Again, these disruptions create opportunities for P&G to set itself apart from competition, we won't win with our old ways of operating. We must disrupt ourselves to capitalize on these opportunities. Another challenge slash opportunity, the world's rapidly digitizing.
1.2 billion people had access to the Internet in 2007. It's up to 3.6 billion currently, with 10% annual growth. Only 100 million people had access to mobile technology in 2007. 3 billion people have mobile access today, and this is also growing at a 10% annual rate. The market's collective percent advertising spent on digital media has gone from only 8% in 2007 to 42% today and will soon exceed 50%. 70% of today's digital media is consumed on a mobile device. Wearable devices are projected to grow from 1 million in 2015 to 200 million in 2021. Price discovery and comparison, as well as sourcing, was largely local in 2007.
It's moved national, is expanding to mega regions, and is moving global. Power is moving to consumers. Personal voice assistants and the Internet of Things disintermediate shopping lists and path to purchase. Connected devices. The current estimate of connected devices is 23 billion, 3.3 devices for every person on Earth, redefine the shopping experience and blur the lines between what we call moments of truth, when and how consumers learn about our products, decide to make a purchase, and actually transact. Algorithms behind digital merchants are continuously making assortment and pricing decisions. Autonomous vehicles and drones are positioned to become the modern backbone to logistics. The size and cost of connected sensors, now estimated at 30x the global population, is approaching the point where anything and everything can collect and report data, redefining jobs to be done and measuring how well we do them.
More disruption, more opportunity. Geopolitical and economic volatility continue to increase. P&G was operating in zero, what we call crisis markets, in 2007. Today, we operate in 15. Sales in these difficult markets account for 13% of our revenue. Trade barriers as well as exchange capital and pricing controls have increased significantly, a large shift from 2007. Foreign exchange is extremely volatile after being largely a non-event from 2000-2006. There are negative interest rates in nine countries, not good when combined with aging demographics. With continued pressure on commodities and U.S. monetary policy likely running against the balance of the world for the foreseeable future, we see no abatement in this geopolitical and economic pressure. Nationalism and attendant protectionism are resident just below the surface in many markets.
All of this increases the risk of higher transaction costs, regulation, and consumer-driven market disruptions. Through all of this, competition has gotten stronger and is more varied. Our multinational competitors have upped their game. Our large Japanese competitors are expanding across Asia and are making forays into Europe and Africa. While we face the local competitors in most markets forever, the number of them and their capability has been increasing. 450 haircare brands launched in the China Tmall flagship store last year alone. 450. 990 haircare brands in China e-commerce as of December last year. The success of local brands in China is notable, whether it's Blue Moon in laundry or Yunnan Baiyao in toothpaste. These smaller or regional competitors are the fastest-growing players in many markets, and it's likely their aspirations will eventually extend beyond their home country borders.
As I mentioned, a digital access has led to a number of direct-to-consumer entries across our categories. Some of these are well-funded startups marketing an anti-establishment agenda. Some have generated attractive exit values, incenting even additional entries. While top brands in most categories are maintaining share, small emerging brands have established a stronger foothold. Recent research report compared share positions in the U.S. from 2013 to 2017 in our categories. Leading U.S. brands held a 34.5% share in 2017, unchanged from 2013. Emerging brands were at 5.4%, adding 2.5 share points over this time period. Private label retailer brands were at 17.6%, up about half a point. All other brands were at a 42.5% share, down 3 points.
The situation, of course, varies by category, but the broad trends are similar, as are the remedies. When our top brands deliver across the five key superiority vectors, they deliver strong results even when emerging and private label brands grow. When they don't deliver superiority on at least four of the five, we lose ground. Finally, our world is being impacted by both the reality and the perception of resource depletion. These challenges are most acute where population and consumption growth are largest. By 2050, the United Nations estimates that more than 5 billion people, or half the global population, could suffer water shortages. Water prices in the U.S. have increased more than 50% on average in the past seven years. Air pollution is linked to one of nine deaths worldwide.
These dynamics are increasing consumer interest in environmentally sustainable products, packaging, and business models, and strengthened interest in natural products. Each of these forces that I've talked about are creating waves of change, and with this, new opportunities and new challenges. We're positioning ourselves as the constructive disruptors in our industry to prevent becoming the victims of these changes, seizing and capitalizing instead on the opportunities. We need to work at the same time to filter the signals, avoiding the temptation to chase every bright, shiny object or fall into the trap of change for change sake. We will continue to define winning by endpoint results, not in process metrics or some inventory of capabilities or brands.
We'll deliver balanced growth and value creation. We'll do it the right way, consistent with our purpose, values, and principles that have guided P&G throughout its successful 180+ year history. We've been working for some time to shape our portfolio, hone our cost structure, strengthen our organization and culture, creating a more simpler, focused and stronger P&G to win in this exciting, dynamic new world. I've just described our world as we see it. I wanna now move to our company. P&G, as David said, is a very different company than it was prior to the financial crisis and subsequent portfolio cost and balance sheet restructuring. We're much simpler, more focused, more profitable, better positioned to win.
Since fiscal 2007, we focused our efforts on our strongest businesses, reducing the number of categories in which we compete by 60% and brands by 70%. We've significantly lowered costs by reducing the number of manufacturing sites by 20% and the number of manufacturing platforms by 50%. Core profit per employee is up 50%. We've reduced P&G roles by 23% on our apples to apples basis, including divestitures down nearly 30%, including contractor roles down 35%. We've increased investments in advertising reach and trial building product sampling by cutting the number of advertising, public relations and other agencies supporting the business by 60%, reducing non-working media costs by over $900 million. We reduced the number of office buildings and research and development centers by 65% and 30%, respectively.
We've restructured to reduce the number of legal entities by 60%. Within the 10 remaining categories, we've simplified and strengthened significantly. In Fabric Care, for example, 35% fewer and much stronger brands, 30% fewer SKUs, 35% fewer more cost-efficient manufacturing platforms, 40% fewer packaging formats. In Hair Care, fewer and stronger brands, 40% fewer SKUs, 25% fewer formula platforms. Across the 10 categories, SKUs are down 24% and are much more productive. While dramatically focusing and strengthening both our portfolio and our operations, we've maintained most of our sales, grown profit and profit margin, and increased the market value of the enterprise. P&G is a highly profitable and cash generative company. Before tax operating margins are among the highest in our industry, behind only Reckitt and Colgate, whose margins reflect their concentrations in healthcare.
We have significant below-the-line advantages, operating with one of the lowest interest expense % and one of the lowest tax rates, putting us at the top of our industry in after-tax margin. We've averaged 100% adjusted free cash flow productivity over the last 10 years, enabling us to return $120 billion, more than 100% of adjusted net earnings to shareowners through dividends, which have increased for 62 consecutive years, and share repurchase. We've returned additional value through share exchange from the coffee, beauty, and battery transactions. Over the last 10 years, there are only 13 publicly traded companies across industries and markets that have generated more cumulative profit and cash than Procter & Gamble. Only three have returned a higher percentage of earnings to shareowners.
That being said, returns have lagged the peer group and the broader market indices. We've lacked balanced growth, sometimes too much emphasis on top line with inefficient delivery on the bottom line. More recently, too little top line. We need to sustainably improve top-line growth along with continued margin progress to return to a leading total shareholder return position. We've structured a portfolio that is designed to do just this. 10-category portfolio historically has grown 1 point faster and is 2 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. These are categories where purchase intent and choice are driven by a specific job to do and a product's effectiveness in doing that job rather than by self-expression or fashion trends.
About a third of our categories were driven primarily by fashion, fragrance or flavor in 2007. It's effectively zero today. Even our remaining beauty brands are driven primarily by fundamental product performance against an important benefit or need. Think Head & Shoulders, SK-II, Safeguard. Consumers use these categories on a frequent basis, typically daily. Over 80% of the current business is now daily use versus about 60% in FY 2007. Daily use categories are more important to our retail partners. They drive shopping trips and dollars. Loyalty is often higher. The brand relationship is a closer one. We sell more product. These categories leverage P&G strengths, consumer understanding, branding, product, package innovations, and our go-to-market capabilities much more fully than the businesses we've divested. We have created a much stronger and more focused company.
One of the strategic choices each company must make is what will be its basis for competitive advantage, its basis to win. In slow growth, highly competitive categories we're sometimes pushed to lower prices, increase promotion, and tier down, a race to the bottom. We've made a different choice, to double down on meaningful superiority of products, packaging, brand communications, retail execution, and superior consumer and customer value in each price tier where we compete, with productivity to fuel investment and margin growth, and a stronger, more focused, more agile and accountable organization. While we've made significant progress, we must further improve superiority across our business to meet the external challenges we face and win against increasingly able competitors, all to enable stronger, sustainable top and bottom line results, leading to leadership levels of total shareholder return.
Using our new body of evidence methodology, self-assessed by each business unit, nearly 60% of tested products are now clearly superior, up from 30% two years ago. We've made similar improvement across other superiority vectors. While superiority metrics can often be disputed, the end results cannot. Where we're delivering superiority on four or more of the five vectors, we are consistently driving all business success metrics, sales growth, profit growth, value share growth, household penetration, and very importantly, market or category growth. Where we deliver superiority on three or fewer vectors, we're almost universally unsuccessful in driving each of these success measures. I'm gonna ask some of the business leaders to share examples of how improvements in superiority have driven outstanding results. We'll start with Shailesh Jejurikar, President of Global Fabric Care in the Fabric and Home Care sector.
Thanks, Jon. As I shared with you in the same investor meeting two years ago, our strategic imperative is to deliver strong growth in our priority markets, which account for 65% of sales and more than 90% of our profit. Our focus on driving noticeable superiority is delivering market growth and share growth. Market growth is accelerating, consumption of our products is up 4% over the past three years, while share is up almost 3 points across these markets. We've improved our percent of business with noticeable superiority, as Jon said, from about 30% of sales to 80% during this time. In markets where we are at 90% of sales with superiority, sales growth has gone as high as 8%. PODS is a great example of delivering product superiority.
Unit dose products now account for nearly 20% of laundry detergent sales in the U.S., 35% in the U.K., and over 30% in France. The form is growing globally at a double-digit rate. Our superiority has earned us an over 70% share of this segment globally. Even with this success, we've raised the bar further with our latest upgrade. The new PODS are hands-down winners, delivering a 15-point advantage versus our own previous PODS. We've grown share 3 points in Japan behind the new PODS upgrade, and we've accelerated growth in U.K., France, and Poland. The new innovation will be available in the U.S. early next calendar year. The upgrade also enables us to deliver much better performance in quick and cold conditions, which by the way, is also the biggest positive impact we can make from an environmental sustainability standpoint.
It delivers a step change in performance on new emerging spaces like malodor, which is now seen to be as big a challenge as tough stain removal. Let us see an example of how we are bringing this to life. Beads is an excellent example of delivering noticeable packaging superiority with its squeeze scent release that allows the consumer to experience the scent in the store. It is now a $700 million product growing at a 27% average growth rate over the last three years. New packaging innovations like Tide Eco-Box is focused on superiority in the e-commerce environment, improving shipment safety while also improving the in-use performance on dosing and pouring. We've made our consumer communication for even our well-known brands much more memorable. Let me make the point by showing you my favorite ad, and hopefully yours too.
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Hopefully you got to see it during the Super Bowl. This one has won multiple awards and driven gains, most importantly on our core cleaning equity. We are making our advertising work harder by investing significantly, as we have done in the U.S., on better reach, and leading the way on new approaches, as we've done in China, by moving 100% of our media to digital with no TV advertising, enabling us to grow the base business strong double digits while cutting costs 40%. A great example of how we are improving retail execution is the work we've done on Better Together in the U.S. market. This shelving and merchandising approach drives regimen and triples the size of the fabric care basket, growing the category for retailers and growing sales and share for P&G.
The biggest role we do and we can play in creating value for our customers is by growing the size of the pie. We continue to drive this in a variety of ways. We're focused on increasing the load penetration of fabric enhancers, which are used still in less than a third of laundry loads today. In the U.S., the category has grown at a 6% average rate over the past three years, and our share of it has increased close to four points. In Japan, the category has grown at a 7% rate, and our share has increased nearly three points. We also continue to drive a premium mix.
In the U.S., the Tide value added PODS are a 25% premium to the base Tide PODS, which in turn are a 25% premium to Tide liquids, which itself is a 100% premium to the balance of the market. Close to 40% of our PODS business is now in the value adds, a big value for retailers and P&G, and most importantly, a superior experience for our consumers. I am confident that this very focused plan will drive noticeable superiority in key markets and accelerate our growth for better shareholder value while delighting consumers and customers. Now, Jennifer Davis, President of Global Fem Care.
Thanks, Shailesh. Another category where meaningful superiority is driving results is feminine care, which has delivered 12 consecutive quarters of organic sales growth that's averaged over 3% during this time period. The global feminine care category is over $20 billion, with a market growth rate of around 5%. With our big brands, Always, Whisper, Tampax, and Always Discreet, we're the global leader in the feminine care category, sold in more than 130 countries worldwide with nearly a 30% value share. With roughly $4 billion in sales, these brands are creating significant value for our consumers, customers, and shareholders. We're winning by focusing on category growth and consistently growing value share over the past two years. Always Discreet adult incontinence products are contributing to these strong results in a category where we can make a real difference for women.
Always is a proven brand that she has known and trusted for years. Our Always Discreet product is significantly preferred versus competition because of its strong protection and odor control and a thinner and more discreet design. This superior usage experience is exceeding her expectations and helping to normalize the condition of bladder leaks. Before we launched Always Discreet in the U.S., one in three women stated they experienced bladder leaks. Only one in nine was using an incontinence product designed for her needs. Now, four years since we launched, our research shows that one in six women are using the category. Always Discreet sales are growing more than 20%. Value share in the 14 countries where we compete ranges between 10% and over 20%, disproportionately attracting new users to the category.
In those markets, category growth has accelerated as much as 50% post our launch, creating tremendous value for customers and shareholders. In the U.S. alone, Always Discreet has delivered 60% of the category growth over the past three years. In feminine care, we're accelerating growth by driving superiority across all five vectors of our brand propositions: product and packaging, communication, in-store execution, and value. Always Discreet has built and is extending its advantages in ways that accelerate our brand growth and the category. A great example of this is our most recent innovation, Always Discreet Boutique Underwear.
Once bladder leaks reach a degree that the underwear form is needed, many women experience a massive blow to their confidence, saying they don't feel like a woman wearing diapers, and they're embarrassed to put them on. This led us to the insight that what women want more than anything is to wear their real underwear. When they can no longer do that, they no longer feel feminine. Our scientists worked to design a consumer experience that looks and feels like my real underwear, and that inspiration is what led to the creation of Always Discreet Boutique. Boutique is a superior product. It combines our best absorbent technology with our thinnest core in the world. We paired our scientists up with lingerie designers to construct the shape and the cut of the underwear so that it fits much closer to the body.
They chose a fabric that's much softer, it has feminine details like different colors and prints. Each one of these elements makes it look and feel more like real underwear, helping women to feel feminine, regain their confidence, and even start to forget about their bladder leaks. The packaging for Always Discreet is also much more feminine than what you would typically find in the incontinence aisle. Just like real underwear, we showcase the product rather than hide it within a delightful design that helps women feel good about buying it. This has helped Always Discreet grow household penetration more than 15 points in North America and Western Europe the past 12 months compared to modest single-digit growth for competition. Our holistic communication focuses on the promise that she can finally have bladder leak underwear that not only protects her, but helps her feel beautiful.
Until now, other products have required her to make a trade-off between one or the other. Because the product looks and fits so much like real underwear, we haven't been shy about showing it off in our advertising. In the U.S., we chose an African American talent as the incidence of bladder leaks is 50% higher among these consumers, who also over-index with the usage of the underwear form. Let's take a look at the Boutique advertising.
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Strong in-store execution has transformed this historically clinical and often bleak adult incontinence aisle into something that's inviting and approachable. We brought the product out of the bag, we've had in-store displays where we actually put product on mannequins for shoppers to touch and feel just like how real underwear is sold. This, together with the packaging, helps to remove the stigma of shopping the category. Altogether, Always Discreet Boutique is a superior proposition that delivers on its promise of maximum bladder protection made beautiful, leading consumers to find its value superior despite being 60% premium to our base underwear offering. Consumers have thanked Always by saying, "I finally feel confident leaving my house again." The results from Boutique are very encouraging.
This premium line extension has been 100% incremental to our base Always Discreet Underwear, and it's accelerated household penetration of the brand and this form. Boutique now represents more than 20% of our underwear business and has added 2 points to our total brand share. In the U.S., adult incontinence category volume has accelerated since the Boutique launch, with Boutique driving the majority of the underwear form growth. At the same time we launched Always Discreet Boutique Underwear, we also improved brand communication and value on the Always Discreet pad business. We learned that because Always Discreet pads' thinner profile results in a smaller package, it compromised value impression with consumers at the first moment of truth. We created new advertising to address the issue head-on, reframing that smaller is better. Let's take a look.
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This advertising tested significantly superior versus competition and our previous campaign, and it's driven a 10% acceleration in our pad run rates since it went on air. Driving innovation on our core business and new products with new benefits and improving superiority across all five vectors has led to record sales and share growth for Always Discreet. Thank you. Now I'll turn it over to Alex Keith.
Thanks, Jen. Good afternoon. Two years ago, I stood on this stage and outlined the work underway to focus the Olay brand, elevate its presentation back to prestige benchmarks, and make its innovation more relevant and sizable, and speak to a new generation of women in more emotive and powerful ways. At the end of that talk, I told you I was confident that the program would return Olay to growth as it came to life. As you might imagine, I'm happy to be here today to tell you that confidence was well-placed. Olay Skincare delivered double-digit growth in fiscal 2018, growing organic sales in the two largest regions, China and North America. These two regions represent nearly 80% of global Olay Skincare sales.
In China, Olay has grown double digits for six consecutive quarters, a year and a half of double-digit growth in one of the world's most contested skincare markets. In North America, Olay has grown double digits over the past 12 months after multiple years of decline. The successful programs initially developed for China and North America are also delivering growth in smaller Olay markets around the world, with the next six largest countries all growing sales last fiscal year. The work to reinvent Olay and return it to growth was broad and deep in scope, raising the bar across all elements of noticeable superiority. First, the product. Olay CellScience, Olay's first ever super peptide formula, delivering visible skin transformation in 28 days. CellScience further accelerated Olay China's growth since its launch nine months ago. In North America, we launched Olay Whips in January of 2018.
Whips was designed to appeal to women who don't like the heavy feel of typical moisturizers. These consumers tend to be younger than the average skincare user. Whips feels light as air, with instant absorption and a matte finish. Let's look at the current creative that brings the product feel to life in a powerful way.
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Whips is winning with consumers. It is currently the number one and number two top-selling item, new items in the category. On packaging, we have upgraded Olay packaging to prestige-like quality and attractiveness. Around the world, we have introduced boldly simple and elegant cartons for the mass market shelf. These changes make the brand easier to shop and also to repeat purchase in a self-service environment, as the primary package is prominently and beautifully featured. On retail execution, in North America two years ago, we significantly streamlined our lineup, eliminating 20% of our SKUs. That has been a headwind since the discontinuations, but we have now fully worked our way through it. We have a new shelf architecture designed to guide shoppers to our bestselling items and our new launches. This approach is proven to deliver overall category growth driven by Olay.
In China, over the last several years, we closed unproductive counters, completely revamped our Olay beauty counselor program, and upgraded the remaining counters significantly with higher and tighter standards, shown here with before and after images. On value, as we holistically elevate the brand in the eyes of the consumer, we are able to command higher pricing and reduce the discount levels that had become part of the brand prior to its reinvention. Our recent product innovations have all launched and are successful at premium prices to our core Regenerist offerings. Globally, Olay Whips is priced at a 10%-20% premium to Regenerist, and in China, Olay CellScience and Olay Eyes launched at 60% and 25% premiums respectively. We are also offering her value through service, helping her match her skin needs and wants with the best products from Olay with Olay Skin Advisor.
Olay Skin Advisor launched in August 2016 and has reached 3.5 million women thus far, with AI-enabled diagnostic experience leveraging our intellectual property of comparing skin to a database. This tool is now the cornerstone of our Olay direct-to-consumer engagement and is posting key performance indicators well above the industry average. You can experience it yourself tonight if you visit the beauty booth. Finally, brand communication. China pivoted its media model and creative in March 2017 and has been growing ever since. The other superiority vectors have played an important role, but the media shift was the catalyst to reach new, younger consumers with relevant and powerful messages in a way that she naturally engages with media. The Fearless of Age campaign has driven consumption and contributed to e-commerce sales growth of over 80%.
The Women's Day execution delivered share growth across all main channels by achieving the number one share of voice. The creative is based on the idea that the number that defines a woman is not her age, but the number of her fearless stories. The actress featured in this spot is actually 42 years old. Let's watch.
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We have also changed the creative and media approach in the U.S., learning from China, but adjusting for different consumer and market dynamics. The U.S. Olay media mix is now a combination of powerful brand and product reframe stories, which have always been at the core of the brand, as well as new pull media content. We are seeing success with pull content, including a millennial-focused musical series for daily facial cleansers, which has grown 11% over the last year. Olay's recent Face Anything campaign launched last month. You might have seen it in Times Square. Let's look at both the surprising reframe creative as well as our Face Anything spot.
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Olay's new media platforms are activated by 200 influencers across traditional media such as Dr. Oz and the digital social ecosystem. With these changes, U.S. Olay is growing sales, category growth is accelerating, and share trends are improving up a half a point over the past few months. I left brand communication to the last point as it was one of the hardest to crack given the massive change in the media and brand landscape over the last several years. We learned from and reapplied the tremendous work that SK-II had already done in this area under Markus Strobel's leadership. His expertise and creative passion are helping us to accelerate on Olay and across skin and personal care in the last year as he took on leadership of the total global category. I'd like to turn over to him now to tell you more about SK-II. Welcome, Markus.
Thanks, Alex. Hello, everybody. SK-II's superiority has driven outstanding results. SK-II sales have grown for 16 consecutive quarters at an average rate of over 20%. The prestige beauty market is growing high single digits, SK-II growing share within the category. SK-II superior product is based on a proprietary formula and a unique ingredient called Pitera. Pitera works to dramatically improve the skin's natural rejuvenation process. It is not hope in a bottle. It's a product that solves problems for consumers in a noticeable, superior way. We are in a unique position to have conducted an over-10-year longitudinal study with more than 100 women, demonstrating that Pitera delivers results in the short term and over the long run. Our consumers experience these results. SK-II is presented in prestige packaging that builds the brand's equity and consumer confidence in the product.
In fact, the packaging of our Facial Treatment Essence and our GenOptics Aura Essence are so loved that Chinese consumers have given them nicknames. They call them the Miracle Water and the Little Light Bulb. SK-II's long-term success has been supported by many passionately loyal users. The challenge to sustain leadership growth rates has been to attract new users to the brand, ideally younger users who we can add to the passionately loyal base. SK-II has been on a mission to increase new users among a target group we call the young executives. To make skincare exciting for this group, we have invested heavily in packaging decoration technology, which enables us to come up with eye-catching limited editions in key consumption periods like Christmas, Chinese New Year, or the cherry blossom season in Japan.
Here's one of our most recent examples where we have combined the packaging design with our successful Change Destiny marketing campaign. Talking about Change Destiny, compelling consumer messages has been critical to driving growth, setting SK-II apart from competition. The SK-II Change Destiny campaign was introduced about three years ago to challenge the belief that destiny is set at birth. The campaign celebrates women who have gone beyond limitations to follow their dreams and achieve success. Let's take a look at one execution that's called I Never Expire.
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This compelling marketing campaign has delivered over 23 billion impressions since its launch, with close to 300 million views to date. Most importantly, this campaign creates high engagement among the young executives, driving buzz and talkability. The campaign delivered strong results, growing new SK-II users by 23%, and helping reduce our average new user age from mid-thirties to late twenties, contributing to the strong sales growth over the past three years. Excellent retail execution in store and online builds the equity of SK-II. This is an SK-II counter in Hangzhou Tower, one of the most prestigious department stores in China, where we managed to obtain the number one location with our new counter design. In fact, we have significantly improved space, location, and execution in more than 70% of all our top distribution points in the past three years.
The experience at SK-II's high-end retail beauty counters includes a beauty consultant who utilizes a state-of-the-art analysis tool called the Magic Ring to discover how a consumer's skin fares against the five dimensions of skin: wrinkles, texture, radiance, firmness, and spots, in order to personalize the perfect regimen. SK-II is also using digital and data analytics to reach consumers with one-to-one precision marketing to enable a very personal and engaging connection with current and prospective SK-II users. This targeted approach helps her select the right regimen for her skin and offers a direct-to-consumer purchase occasion. The combination of precision marketing and immediate purchase conversion has contributed to SK-II's strong online share that is significantly higher than our offline share.
We are currently bringing together SK-II online and offline experience in a series of pop-up stores. Powered by cutting-edge facial recognition technology, artificial intelligence, and robots to pioneer the integrated retail experience of the future. We believe this omni-channel approach will be the next frontier in retail-tainment. This outstanding combination of product, performance, package, communication, and retail execution delivers a level of consumer delight that supports SK-II's premium price. Consumers see the value. In the markets in which we compete, SK-II is running neck to neck for the top position in super premium skincare with the likes of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., Lancôme, and Shiseido. We're off to another strong start this fiscal year with 26% organic sales growth in the first quarter. This puts SK-II well on track to exceed $2 billion in annual sales this year.
Now, I'll hand it over to Gary Coombe, President of Global Grooming. Where is he? Here he is. Gary.
Thank you, Markus, and good afternoon, everybody. Our Grooming business has faced serious challenges in recent years, as you all know. We were not noticeably superior at every consumer touch point. As a consequence, new competitors entered and won share, while consumption trends reduced overall category usage. To address this, we've refocused all our teams on all five vectors of superiority, with new strategies and new plans that we are urgently bringing to market across our global business. We're seeing these interventions begin to bite and results begin to turn. We know there's still a great deal of work still ahead of us. It all starts with product superiority. Quality and performance remain our biggest competitive advantage. It's the reason why more than 800 million consumers trust Gillette every morning.
We have an exciting pipeline of innovation to roll out across the whole portfolio, starting right now with our biggest launch since Fusion in 2004. For over a century since our first safety razor was designed by King Gillette, we've been inventing better razors based on more blades or sharper blades to deliver an ever closer shave. Today, that changes. For the first time, we've designed a whole platform specifically for the 70% of men who suffer with sensitive skin while shaving. More than half of these men cope by shaving less often than they would want to or not shaving at all. When they do buy into the category, it tends to be at the lower value tiers. Gillette SkinGuard is a breakthrough in razor technology that changes this.
We've re-engineered the whole cartridge, repositioning the blades around our proprietary SkinGuard technology, which reduces cutting force and changes the way the blades interact with skin and hair. Feedback from the broad consumer testing that we've done has been overwhelmingly positive, and customer support, too, has been fantastic. It's gonna be in stores in the U.S. and Europe in the coming months, backed by heavy media investments that will help drive both our business and the category value forward. We're pioneering new shaving technologies through our GilletteLabs venture group as well. We released a limited range of the world's first heated razor on crowdfunding site Indiegogo to get the products in the hands of and on the faces of early adopters, and to gather feedback as we plan for a broader and bigger launch. We sold out in less than one week.
Now, this is a super premium luxury razor, but we're very encouraged by the early reception and the potential market for this kind of product. Much more to come in this space. Packaging, however, remains an improvement area for us. We've made some modest headway with recent upgrades, but it's still too difficult for consumers to shop our products. We're taking steps to bring clarity to the lineup that will improve the shopping experience and encourage consumers to trade into the range, trade across adjacencies, and trade up in the portfolio. Now, for competitive reasons, I'm not gonna share those designs today, but we're confident that we will reach superiority in the future. We're also making progress on consumer communication. Our marketing on both Gillette and Venus had become dated, and we weren't winning the hearts and minds of consumers, particularly the younger generations.
To address this, we've refocused on reaching Millennials and Gen Z consumers where they are most receptive through compelling digital and social content and influencer-led communications. On Gillette specifically, we're redefining the best a man can get and our place in the conversation about men and positive masculinity, sharing very different stories and using very different aspirational characters. Our first step in this journey, still rooted in Gillette's heritage in sports marketing and exploring the unique bond between a father and a son, has been to share the inspiring story of Shaquem Griffin and how he overcame adversity to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL. This is just the 30-second version that I'm gonna show you, I encourage you to watch the full long form available online. Let's take a look.
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On Venus, we've made an even more dramatic but necessary change. Previous advertising had only told one story, a slender woman in a white bikini on a white beach shaving already smooth legs. The world has changed. It was high time that Venus did too. Our new My Skin, My Way program is made by women for women. It has a female crew behind the camera and real women, not actresses on screen. It celebrates all women and all types of skin, telling real stories, shaving real hair. Let's take a look at the ad.
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Moving on to retail execution, I'm gonna focus my comments today on our online business, which I know is of high interest to everybody. Now, this is still a small piece of the global category, but we're committed to win wherever our consumers want to buy. As you know, competitors stole a march on us in the DTC space in the U.S., but we are fighting back. We've doubled our total male DTC share in the past six months, and our data suggests that we are the only company growing net new blades and razor users in the U.S. We've also launched a new online service on our female business in the U.S. called Venus Direct. We're investing in capability and consumer execution to step change our offering across our global markets.
Where we didn't have the capability in our organization, we've hired externally to source important skills and expertise. To drive superiority in our DTC business, we're doing many things, including the following. We've pioneered text to order services to improve convenience. We're adapting our marketing and commercial operations using real-time data and analytics. We don't force subscription when you're on our site, that's a key consumer tension with other services. We're offering unique capability for consumers to personalize and even now design their own razors. An exciting new example of this is Razor Maker. People can design their own razor handles online, we 3D print them in Boston and ship them straight to their door. The early reception for this has been terrific in the U.S., demand is growing overseas, where people can't wait to try it.
We've made important strides over the last 18 months to deliver superior consumer and customer value in the U.S. and indeed around the world. We've made significant adjustments to our range and our pricing to address value gaps where we had stepped out of line on pricing. We now have the right product portfolio and pricing ladder in place to execute our business model in the U.S., improving customer relationships and receiving strong support for our plans to grow the category. Our focus on superiority is starting to deliver results. We're growing sales, we're winning share, and we are creating value in the category. Our first quarter marks a solid step forward, we do know that it's just the start.
There will be bumps in the road, and competitive challenges still remain, of course, but we're confident we will continue improving performance, and we will achieve our goal of consistent, reliable top and bottom line growth for the grooming business. Thank you. Now let me turn it back to Jon.
As I hope you can see from these examples, we're making significant progress. Improving relative advantage, including superiority of execution, remains our largest opportunity. This holds true in both the core and in faster-growing more segments, where we're becoming much more deliberate and intentional. We're developing, for example, new superior product offerings that address the needs and wants of naturals consumers, who are increasingly concerned about ingredients that are in their products, and sustainability consumers, who are increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of how their products are produced, packaged, used, and disposed of. Success is maximized by meeting these emerging desires while also solving the fundamental problems consumers are trying to address with the product, efficacy and natural or environmental benefit. We've introduced products in nearly every category to address these emerging consumer needs.
Our natural segment offerings quadrupled sales last fiscal year, and we expect to more than double sales again this fiscal year. We're in the game in this important segment. We're making progress on packaging. Five P&G packaging innovations were recently recognized with Dow Chemical Packaging Awards, including the top honor, Diamond Award, for our Air Assist package. P&G received five of the 29 awards given. No other company received more than two. We've stepped up retail execution. In the most recent Global Advantage Monitor report, an independent retailer assessment of manufacturers across seven key areas, P&G ranked number one globally. We are in the highest number of countries ranking P&G as number one, and we ranked number one in all seven evaluation areas.
When we get the product package, communication, shopping, and value equation right, we attract consumers of all backgrounds to our brands, including Millennials, which account for about 80 million U.S. consumers. Over the past year, 17 of our top 20 brands in the U.S. held the number one or number two share position with Millennials, including brands like Always, Bounty, Cascade, Charmin, and Crest, Dawn, Downy, Febreze, Gain, Gillette, Oral-B, Old Spice, Pampers, Puffs, Swiffer, Tampax, and Tide. You just heard a few examples of how our brands continue to find ways to connect with this important consumer segment. Millennials do a lot of their shopping online. Last year, P&G sales and e-commerce grew 30% to nearly $4.5 billion, about 7% of our total business, roughly the size of the next two largest consumer e-commerce businesses combined.
We're making good progress on extending our margin of advantage and increasing the quality of our execution. We face highly capable competitors who continue to improve their products and their business models. Addressing these challenges and extending our product and package advantages, superior execution, and consumer and customer value will require continued investment. The need for this investment and the need to drive balanced top and bottom line growth, including margin expansion, underscore the importance of productivity. We're driving cost savings and efficiency improvement in all facets of our business, approaching the midpoint of our second five-year, $10 billion productivity program. We've consistently delivered $1.2 billion-$1.6 billion in annual cost of goods sold savings. I expect we'll be towards the high end of that range again this fiscal year.
Another area of savings is elimination of substantial waste in the media supply chain, eliminating media waste and reducing media costs by 20%, delivering nearly $1 billion of savings in agency fees and production costs over the last four years. We see more savings potentials in these areas, along with more efficiency in media delivery. Marc Pritchard will talk more about how we're disrupting the media supply chain later this afternoon. We're continuing to drive savings in the organization, redeploying resources closer to consumers and customers, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our business to operate at the speed of the market. We've reduced P&G roles, as I said earlier, by 23% on an apples to apples basis, 30% including divestitures, 35% including contractor roles.
Of 48 companies with a market cap of over $150 billion, only three have reduced enrollment more than 20%. We're focused on cost productivity and cash. We've made great progress on working capital. Over the past five years, we've improved receivables by three days, inventory by 10 days, payables by more than 30 days. We're driving down cost and inventory with our supply network transformation. We're making progress towards our vision of synchronizing the supply chain with real-time point of sales data, with a consumer purchase triggering updates to our manufacturing schedules and orders of materials to suppliers. Our six new mixing centers in North America are enabling faster customer response times and optimized mis-mixed product loads to improve customer service levels. P&G consistently holds best in class receivables positions.
We're making further improvements by leveraging technology, using robotic process automation to digitize key elements of the work process. Over the last three years in North America, we've delivered $100 million in improved cash flow by reducing days outstanding by more than one day, while simultaneously improving productivity, reducing roles by 30% and organization cost by 50%. An important cash productivity project has been supply chain financing, which we continue to expand. This program, which is a win for suppliers and for P&G, has yielded nearly $5 billion in cash in the five years we've been driving it. We improved payables by five full days last year alone on a constant currency basis. Along with our productivity efforts, we're working to strengthen both our organization and culture.
As we streamline the organization, we continue to move resources closer to the consumers we serve, creating organizations with higher autonomy, accountability, agility, and speed. We supplemented our internal talent with skilled, experienced external hiring and improving category dedication and mastery. We're strengthening compensation and incentive programs, increasing the granularity of annual bonus awards, expanding participation in both the annual and three-year bonus programs, changing evaluation metrics to focus more on performance relative to competition and performance of local teams. We're increasing the amount of total compensation at risk and widening the payout range to deliver greater upside reward and downside consequence from over or under performance. Each of these organization and culture changes are aimed at creating a company designed to win in today's market with today's consumer.
More agile, more accountable, more efficient, more productive. The steps we've taken so far have been well received by our own organization. Bigger jobs, less complexity, faster decision-making, more responsibility, greater ownership for results, and greater impact on the rewards that can come with it. We're taking further steps to ingrain these positive changes more deeply into our structure and how we operate. David will talk about this after the break. I hope it's evident that we've already significantly disrupted P&G over the last number of years, productivity, portfolio, noticeable improvement in product packaging, communication, go-to-market and value equation, and a stronger organization and culture. We've made good progress, and it's showing up in improved results. We're accelerating organic sales growth, driven by strong volume and consumption growth, with market shares improving. Constant currency earnings and adjusted free cash flow are off to a solid start towards fiscal year targets.
In the quarter we just completed, organic sales grew 4%, driven by strong organic volume growth of over 3%. Pricing and mix were a net positive to top line growth. Nine of 10 categories grew organic sales. Skin & Personal Care grew in the teens, Personal Healthcare grew double digits, Fabric Care, Home Care, Feminine Care, Family Care, and Grooming each grew organic sales mid-single digits. All channel consumption, very strong, up in line with organic sales and ahead of underlying market levels, driving a return to aggregate market share growth. 33 of our top 50 country category combinations held or grew value share, up from 26 last fiscal year, 23 in fiscal 2017, 17 the year before that. Eight of 10 global categories holding or growing market share. Core earnings per share was up 3%.
On a constant currency basis, core earnings per share up 11%. This against the backdrop of significant commodity and transportation cost challenges, about a five-point headwind. Net strong underlying earnings progress. Productivity savings remain strong, 250 basis points in the first quarter. This is crucial to mitigating the $1.3 billion of after-tax headwinds from foreign exchange and commodity cost increases this fiscal year alone. Cash flow remains dependably strong, with adjusted free cash flow of 95% in the first quarter. We returned over $3.1 billion of cash to shareowners, nearly $1.3 billion of share repurchase, and $1.9 billion of dividends. In summary, a relatively strong quarter, clear evidence of the progress in the most dynamic and challenging environment we've faced in a very long time.
Still, there is much to do. We're not winning everywhere, not in every category and not in every market. We're not growing our markets consistently enough. We're losing share in 17 of our largest category country combinations. Our world continues to change at a dizzying pace, and our ever more able competitors are not standing still. The work we've done to focus and strengthen the portfolio, to establish and extend advantage of our brands, to drive productivity improvement, to fund investments in superiority while expanding margins, and to improve the organization and culture, has clearly been necessary, but has not been sufficient to deliver superior returns. We must continue each part of this effort, but step up its pace and add to its scope. We must lead constructive disruption in our industry.
After a short break, David will lead the balance of our discussion this afternoon focused on how we're doing this, how we're constructively disrupting our industry to return to superior relative total shareholder return.
Great. Thank you. Welcome back, everybody. As Jon said before the break, the focus areas that have driven the improvement in our results remain our priorities going forward. We're making improvement, but there's still much more work to do. To win in this highly dynamic and competitive environment we face today, and will face for many years to come, we must lead further constructive disruption in our industry. The work ahead of us will be even more important and impactful than the significant work behind us. For the balance of the presentation this afternoon, we'll discuss some of the disruptions we're focused on. First, lean innovation that improves speed to market, shots on goal, and success rates of new products. Next, we'll talk monetization of internally developed technologies to build value and fund even more innovation investment. Brand building 2.0, digitally enabled 1-to-1 mass marketing.
Followed by supply chain transformation enabled by robotic process automation. Digitization and data and analytics that disrupt all facets of our operation. I'll come back then and cover organization design changes that will prepare us to win with consumers and customers at the speed of the market and at an even more efficient cost structure. Finally, I'll discuss how we're building citizenship in to how we deliver our business results. We'll start with our lifeblood, which is innovation. Kathy Fish, Chief Research and Development and Innovation Officer, will take us through some significant changes we're making to how we innovate. Kathy?
Thanks, David. Good afternoon, everyone. Innovation has always been the lifeblood for P&G. In the dynamic and competitive world that Jon described earlier, we must disrupt the way we innovate to drive growth and value creation, delivering irresistibly superior consumer experiences, accelerating the speed and quality of our learning, and step changing our approach to open innovation.
The traditional view of innovation typically focuses on functional superiority, often measured at a lab and with consumers. A few years ago, if you looked at only our functional superiority test results, you would've thought P&G was growing in every category. Now you know the truth. Our results were clearly lagging. We had to disrupt our own thinking about what noticeable advantage means, viewed from the eyes of the consumer in real life across the entire experience and compared to all competitive options. When we first remeasured ourselves against this higher standard, it was very humbling to find that we weren't nearly as good as we thought we were. We've redefined innovation success as delivering irresistibly superior experience. An experience so delightful, it's hard for the consumer to go back to what they were using before.
To clear this higher bar, products must be meaningfully differentiated. Products and packages must be holistically crafted, where design is fully integrated to communicate and highlight the functional benefits, to deliver a quality experience, and most importantly, to make an emotional connection. Delivering irresistibly superior consumer experiences is how we keep our core business and our big brands healthy, relevant, and growing. Tide has stayed relevant for more than 70 years by transforming and reinventing itself, offering powders, then liquids, and more recently, unit dose. As consumer needs and wants have evolved, we added natural and sustainable options with Tide purclean and Tide Coldwater Clean. As you heard from Alex, Olay has completely transformed itself, eliminating the signs of an aging brand and delivering outstanding growth. This new definition of superiority has redefined success for what we deliver to the consumers.
We're also disrupting how we innovate, leveraging a lean innovation approach to improve the speed and the success rate of innovation on the core business and in developing new revenue streams, either new jobs to be done in our existing categories or in new categories entirely. Lean innovation is most easily explained in the context of creating new revenue streams. The objective is to act with the speed and agility of a startup to create the future. The first step of lean innovation is to fall in love with the problem that we wanna solve for the consumer. We explore multiple possible solutions with a plan to iterate based on what we learn. The solution process often involves creating minimum viable prototypes, maybe starting with only 10 or 20, testing and measuring their effectiveness with consumers in real-life situations.
We then apply what we've learned, refine, and hone our assumptions. If the project stays on track to meet predefined learning goals, it will be funded to test again until we arrive at the optimal result. This is basically a pay-as-you-go model. This approach is delivering significant benefits in both speed and cost. We use small, fully dedicated teams that act like owners, very passionate about the work, and willing to do whatever it takes to quickly reach the next development step, reducing our learning cycles from months to days or maybe weeks. We have found that metered funding forces real discipline, enabling us to take more shots on goal while reducing the funding per project. Since applying lean innovation principles, we've tripled our end market experiments.
Today, we have over 130 experiments covering all of our categories currently in market with consumers, including 11 that have launched in market. Our lean innovation learnings are also being applied to innovations that are much closer to the core. As we identify consumer problems, we're moving more quickly to solve them. Two great examples are Pampers Pure Protection and Whisper Koala Overnight Pads. Here is Fama Francisco, President of Baby Care and the Baby and Feminine Care sector.
Thank you, Kathy. I'm happy to be here again, this time to represent our baby care and our feminine care sector. I'm excited to talk to you about how we use fast cycle innovation to really constructively disrupt the categories that we are in. Let me start with the China Whisper Overnight segment. The China feminine care market is probably the toughest and the most dynamic that we have in the whole world. Here we have competitors that not only have very strong products, but they have very visible features, and our consumer, our Chinese consumer, is incredibly demanding, not just in terms of quality, but also in terms of trends. Within this market, there is a very sizable segment, which is the overnight segment, which is 20% of the market, and actually growing faster than the rest of pads business.
We only had a 3% share of the overnight segment with Whisper. It was very clear that we had to change, and we had to change incredibly fast. When you look around the world, there are some common benefits about what consumers want from an overnight pad, obviously they want a pad that protects. With the Chinese consumer, we found there were three very interesting and important things that were unique and we could not find anywhere else in the world. First, she really wants a much bigger and a much longer pad. The pads, overnight pads in China are probably 2x longer than what you would see here in the U.S. She believes the longer, the better.
In fact, if you look at the packaging on the shelves, the actual length of the pad is very prominent on the front of the pack, so she knows how long the pads are. Second is while she likes these long pads, she is also concerned that they can be hot and stuffy and not very good for her skin. The third thing that is very unique about our Chinese consumer is that at that time of the month where she is feeling a little bit down because of her period, really little delightful and sometimes quirky surprises help uplift her mood. This concept of mood lifting was something that we found quite unique in China. Unfortunately, our previous overnight lineup was not delivering on any of these three unique insights for China.
We gave ourselves a challenge, and we said, "In less than 12 months, we need to come up with a holistic proposition designed for the Chinese consumer to win in China." We put together a team, both our team and our agency creative team, and we put them together on a three-day immersive consumer creative boot camp. Instead of our normal process, our previous process, where we would do the concept, the product, and the packaging very sequentially, there was obviously no time to do that, so we had to do things in parallel and very iteratively, which was incredibly powerful. Within three months, we had locked the creative idea, we had locked the product design, we had locked the packaging design, and we had agreed the commercial direction.
We also did something quite unique, which is we worked with an external supplier to modify our equipment designs, so we could go to the market in less than half the time than we normally do. Within actually less than one year, 11 months to be exact, we brought to the market the holistic proposition called Whisper Koala Huhu, which not only was the longest pad, the longest overnight pad in the market, but it was based on this consumer insight of sleep as deep as a koala. Because if you know anything about koalas, they actually sleep quite well. This pad was actually shaped like a koala with koala arms and ears that would wrap around like an adhesive, and it kept her well-protected through the night, and the pad was incredibly thin and incredibly absorbent.
Also the choice of the name Koala Huhu, huhu actually in Chinese means the sound of sleep or z. We called it the Koala Huhu pad. In about six months after that, we launched Koala Huhu's partner, which is an overnight underwear, called Koala Kuku. We have Koala Huhu and Koala Kuku delivering on the same idea and the same performance and the same delight. Let's take a look at Koala Huhu and Koala Kuku. Everything again was designed around this unique idea of the sleep as deep as a koala, and you can see the in-store execution was very holistic, and it generated a lot of support in store, which was a big source of awareness.
Today, we are growing this overnight segment actually 4 x the growth rate of the overnight segment since we launched Koala Huhu and Koala Kuku. It's a great example because at a 50% price premium versus the market average, we importantly have demonstrated that we can grow the overnight segment, and we can grow the Whisper share behind it. Another great example in which we really started with a consumer insight for the Chinese consumer, we committed to design to win for the Chinese consumer, and we designed to operate using fast cycle innovation to run at the speed of China. Another great example that we have on fast cycle innovation, this time from our North America, our U.S. baby care business, is the story of Pampers Pure.
We took a lean approach in which we were able to bring Pampers Pure to the market in less than half the time it normally takes to bring a baby care initiative to the market and with significantly less resources. Similar insight, where we started with a consumer in which we found out that among our consumers, most especially the Millennial consumers, there's about 15%-20% of them that really want and have tried natural products, particularly diapers. The same amount of consumers also told us that only 3% of them actually make a second purchase or a third purchase because the performance was really not commensurate to what they were expecting. They felt that they were expected to make a trade-off. Obviously, this does not bring the full potential of the natural segment.
We took, again, a very small team, dedicated, as Kathy said, and we gave them the task to really immerse themselves with these consumers. Once again, instead of a sequential process, we did a parallel process in which concept, product, creative execution were all happening at the same time, very iteratively with the consumer. In March of this year, we launched the Pampers Pure collection of diapers and wipes. Our diapers are crafted with premium cotton, very soft plant-based materials, and we made it free of the ingredients that this group of consumers told us that they did not want in their products. Free of chlorine bleaching, free of fragrances, free of parabens. Our wipes, Pampers Aqua Pure Wipes, is made of 99% pure water, also made of premium cotton, and has much less ingredients than our regular wipes lineup.
Most of them come with the dryness, with the protection, and with the cleaning that you would expect from a Pampers diaper or a Pampers wipe. We also developed a communication plan that relied very much on influencer, digital and social. Here's an example, and you'll see it's quite different from what we would normally do on Pampers.
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This is our in-store execution, you will see the very, very distinctive Pampers Pure packaging, as well as the significant amount of displays that we received from our retailer partners, was really a major source of awareness and trial for the product. Once we decided we were going to launch this segment, we decided to go fast, we decided to go lean, and I think we've made quite an impact. Since we launched Pampers Pure in the market, and you'll see we are the teal line on top, we took over share leadership of the tracked channels in the natural segment, overcoming some of our more established natural competitors, like Honest and Seventh Generation, within the third month of the launch of Pampers Pure.
Most encouragingly, what is most important for us, is the total natural segment since we launched in the U.S. has almost doubled in size and continues to grow every month. The same is true on the share of Pampers Pure. I'm really confident, I am hopeful that we will continue to appeal to this group of parents who really want the very, very best for their babies in terms of protection and cleaning, but also really not the ingredients that they would not want. We are right now expanding Pampers Pure in Canada, in the U.K., and in France, and we will continue to do so around the world. Thank you. Kathy?
Thanks, Fama. I hope you see those are really great examples of irresistibly superior innovation that were created leveraging lean innovation techniques. Many of the rapidly changing demographic trends that Jon outlined will create new problems for consumers. Take urbanization. Apartments with washers and dryers have significantly higher rent than apartments without that convenience. As a result, more and more consumers are choosing to send their laundry out of the home to be done. We're testing a solution in six cities brought to consumers by Tide, and we're learning a lot. Another example is resource scarcity, especially water. It's a problem we're working to solve. Let's watch this video on a product that we're testing with Indiegogo, an innovation startup crowdfunding website.
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Isn't that amazing? I hope you think it's as amazing as we do. The early end market learnings we've received on DS3 are significantly influencing our next steps on this innovation. We've disrupted what superior innovation means and how we're creating it. We're also disrupting our thinking on who we partner with to scale our inventions to do the most good for our brands, our company, and for society. We create some amazing technologies in our innovation process. These technologies are critical to create winning brands, but can be very expensive to develop. Many times, these inventions are only applied to our P&G products and packages.
However, more and more, we are deliberately considering and pursuing external partnerships to monetize P&G innovation in non-competing industries, and occasionally, when we think the benefit of sharing the innovation will enhance value creation and the societal benefit can be meaningful, we may make the technology available to our competitive set. We are creating a revenue stream that can then be reinvested back in the game-changing technologies we need to create winning brands. We're doing this with P&G innovations that provide significant sustainability benefits, and I would like to share three examples. First, manufacturers and consumers have voiced a strong desire for more recycled plastics in a variety of industries and products, including consumer goods packaging, automobile interiors, food and beverage packaging, electronics, construction materials, home furnishings, and many others.
In fact, the Association of Plastic Recyclers has identified 720 million pounds of demand for high-quality recycled polypropylene, one of the world's most common plastics. It's a $100 billion industry requiring new technology to meet a compelling unmet need. Until now, the low quality and high cost of recycled polypropylene have been barriers to its use. P&G invented a breakthrough technology that removes the color, the odor, and the contaminants from used polypropylene to restore it to a virgin-like quality resin. This process fully closes the loop in the use of recycled plastics while making it more affordable and more accessible. We knew this technology could be a big benefit to P&G, but we also knew it could be a bigger benefit to society.
To drive the scale of its application, we licensed the technology to PureCycle, which began operating its first feedstock evaluation unit earlier this year and plans to open a full-scale recycling operation in 2020. We're monetizing this technology for P&G shareholders by making it widely available, and we're helping to revolutionize an industry that reduces waste to our landfills. AeroFlexx or AirAssist is the second example. Packaging which provides a breakthrough in performance and sustainability for both e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar channels. AeroFlexx uses 50% less plastic and eliminates the need for bubble wrap to ship. With less plastic, less waste, less mess, and lower shipping costs, it's a more sustainable consumer-focused packaging solution. We're partnering with Innventure to industrialize, commercialize, and monetize this technology. The third example is iMFLUX, a patent-protected injection molding technology that provides real-time adjustment for mold and material changes.
Using iMFLUX, molders can increase productivity by up to 50% on existing injection molding machines. This process is ideal for most molding applications, but is especially advantageous for recycled materials and can help a biomaterial work for many more applications, delivering a sustainability benefit, which is a growing focus for both molders and brand owners. We made a strategic pivot on iMFLUX last year to seek partnerships with press manufacturers in addition to the press operators. This strategy enables partners to share in the installation and maintenance to ensure the technology is applied to the partner's exact specifications. By allowing others to utilize and commercialize technologies we develop, we'll lower costs and unlock value for P&G and improve environmental sustainability of entire industries.
To develop winning innovation in a dynamic world, we are building a culture of disruptive innovation, disruptive technologies, disruptive approaches, and finding new ways to innovate faster and cheaper than ever before to deliver irresistibly superior consumer experiences. Now I'll turn it over to Marc Pritchard to discuss brand building 2.0.
Great. Thanks, Kathy. Good afternoon, everyone. Mass marketing is being disrupted, and P&G's objective is to lead that disruption. There are several trends industry-wide. Traditional TV and print media continue to decline, and seven out of 10 people say that ads are annoying. Digital media now dominates, but 30% of people use ad blockers, which are growing in double digits, and many are cutting the cord completely with over-the-top viewing and no ads at all. E-commerce is growing exponentially and driven more by algorithms and ratings and reviews than by ads. There's a steady stream of direct-to-consumer startups growing users with one-to-one engagement, bypassing media networks. The agency world is in flux with startup agencies everywhere, crowdsourcing models being invented, even consulting firms are entering. Data analytics and technology are pervasive with tech stack, programmatic media, machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, virtual reality, and voice soon.
I'm told the new CMO is gonna look something like this. We've started to address this disruption by taking more control. We held digital media players accountable to provide transparent performance data on viewability, audience reach and frequency, bot fraud, and brand safety, and we're about 90% complete now. It exposed substantial waste, and we reduced non-productive digital spending by as much as $200 million, as much as 50% with the big players, so we could reinvest it into better performing media, such as data-driven programmatic media, higher reach on prime time TV, and even digital audio. We gathered consumer data on our own platforms, made possible because our brands touch 5 billion people every day.
Our data management platform now has over 1 billion consumer IDs worldwide with data that's collected and used in a way that represents consumers' desires for more privacy and transparency, of course, in compliance with relevant laws. We accelerated performance analytics, hiring our own data scientists and creating new ad tech capabilities such as artificial intelligence and chatbots through access to 275,000 tech companies in our own startup ecosystem. We reduced overall media waste by 20% while increasing media reach by 10%. With this foundation in place, we're reinventing brand building from wasteful mass marketing to mass one-to-one brand building fueled by data and technology. Our goal is to enable sales and share growth while reducing waste to save $2 billion to either take to the bottom line or reinvest.
Today, I'll talk about three of the key actions we're taking. We're reinventing media, reinventing advertising, and reinventing agency partnerships. Action 1: reinvent media from wasteful mass blasting to mass reach with one-to-one precision. We still need to reach a lot of people because billions use our brands every day to clean their clothes, brush their teeth, wash their clothes, and wipe their countertops. Data and analytics is facilitating greater precision, so we can remove waste and increase effectiveness. In China, 80% of our media is in digital, and nearly 30% of our sales are in e-commerce. We have one of the largest data management platforms in the country, which we use for performance analytics and to directly buy most of our media.
We get real-time behavioral data, which enables us to do propensity modeling, cap ad frequency, and engage people when and where it matters. We've already saved 30% of non-productive digital media spending in China while increasing the number of people that we reach by 60%. In the U.S., we have a data management platform that covers 90% of the population with anonymous audience data, which we combine with purchase data into a data and analytics learning lab. What this allow, allowing us to do is to move from generic demographic targets like women ages 18- 49, which is quite broad, to more than 350 precise smart audiences like first-time moms, Millennial young professionals, first-time washing machine owners, so we can reach the right people at the right place at the right time.
What this is doing is helping us stop one of the biggest problems in mass marketing: annoying consumers with too many ads. Now, it's not hard to remember if it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide. We found that while the average person saw a Tide ad three times a month, the averages hid the fact that too many people were being reached more than 10 times and some as many as 20 times. We're cutting off that long tail of excess frequency, eliminating 20% of media waste and reinvesting, so we can reach more people, and it's making the ad experience better for consumers. Now along with media reinvention, we also need action two, which is to reinvent advertising from mass clutter with too many ads to less doing more.
For example, Olay was running up to six different ads at a time in many markets, changing every few months, really adding to the clutter. What they decided to do is to focus on one high-quality national ad and then stick with it over time. With fewer ads, they started more one-to-one digital engagement with Olay Skin Advisor that Alex showed you. This is an AI-powered system that enables you to take a selfie, get your skin diagnosed to reveal your skin age versus your actual age, which is a frightening experience, and then get a product regimen and expert advice instantly through email from one of our tech startup partners. The algorithm gets smarter with every selfie. It's actually not an ad at all. It's a useful and engaging experience. Doing less push advertising has led to more pull influencing through talkable branded content.
We work directly with professional content producers, so we can create engaging stories. Then we use data and analytics, so we can choose the strongest opinion leaders who start conversations about our brands with their own social media followings. For example, China Olay developed authentic stories from top celebrities for their No Fear of Age campaign, which Alex showed you earlier. What they also did is collected 100 stories from 100 women for Women's Day, so they could engage millions of people with this talkable content. It's working. With 50% less push advertising and far more pull influencing, Olay is growing sale in double digits. That's less doing more. The shift to more pull content has elevated public relations to a more significant strategic role in how we reach consumers with less paid media, so we can get more earned media.
For example, the Super Bowl It's a Tide Ad ran once. It delivered 3 billion earned media impressions. U.S. Olay's #FaceAnything campaign has already generated 5 billion earned impressions in just a few weeks. Our Olympics campaign, Love Over Bias, helped fuel 10 billion earned impressions during the Winter Games. Paid media accounted for less than 1% of the views for this content because others talked about it through PR. That's less doing more. Reinventing media and advertising has inspired what may be the most exciting part of marketing disruption, action 3: reinventing agency partnerships. From outsourcing too much of our work to getting our hands on the keyboard. Over time, marketers have steadily delegated too much work to agencies, resulting in too many touch points between brand managers and consumers, and too much project management and not enough brand management.
We want fewer project managers and more brand entrepreneurs that are closer to consumers. That means focusing only on what creates value for consumers and discerning what work is done by P&G versus what's done by agencies. For example, data and analytics is helping us bring more media planning in-house, which we're already doing in China and in four U.S. categories. We're doing more media deals in-house in multiple countries, negotiating directly with media providers. Like a startup, we're directly buying more search and social media. We're implementing new agency models such as fixed and flow, where we invest a fixed amount for work that requires experienced creative resources, like on big campaigns, and then we supplement that with a flow-to-the-work approach through open sourcing creative as needed for fast cycle creative.
SK-II has a fixed contract with Publicis for their Change Destiny campaign, along with several specialty agencies and producers who created content such as Marriage Market Takeover and The Expiry Date you saw earlier. We're co-locating with agencies, so brand entrepreneurs can amplify their brand assets with consumers in real time through search, social, and earned media in command centers like we have in Singapore, Cincinnati, and Guangzhou, hand in hand with local creatives on one side and data scientists on another. What this is enabling our brands to operate like is more like a startup, working in a seamless way without functional silos. SK-II operates with a brand entrepreneur at the center who works with a hacker or a data scientist, a hipster or creative designer, and a hustler or demand creator, using direct consumer performance marketing tools with their hands on the keyboard.
Now this means we need to reskill employees for this hands-on-the-keyboard world. We trained nearly half of our U.S. brand employees with an intensive, externally sourced five-week training course. We're expanding coverage during the next year. We're creating strategic partnerships and are acquiring new capabilities. For example, we're forming partnerships with third-party experts in data-driven email marketing who are also providing ongoing coaching and training and performance marketing. We've already hired several performance marketers from the outside. We're working to bring in more. We're starting experiential competitions with multiple teams of three to four people who compete to achieve the most sales in a 12-week period using direct-to-consumer performance marketing tools.
Teams create an e-commerce storefront and a landing page in just a few hours using third-party software services, extract smart audiences from our data management platform, create, buy, and publish ads and offers on social media, search, and email. They rapidly iterate between multiple alternatives or A/B testing and analyze performance in real time to see which ads or offers do the best. Getting our hands on the keyboard is not only saving money, nearly $1 billion in agency and production spending in the last five years, it's leading to better quality, more entrepreneurship, and greater creativity. Marketing is being disrupted, we are embracing it to lead disruption. We're reinventing media to achieve broad reach with one-to-one precision, reinventing advertising with less doing more, and reinventing agency partnerships to get our hands on the keyboard.
Now I'll turn it over to Ioannis Skoufalos, P&G's Global Product Supply Officer. Thank you.
Very good afternoon to everybody. On behalf of all of us on product supply, a warm welcome to this particular event. I am really thrilled of joining you again to update you on how we are transforming our company supply network. As Jon Moeller said earlier, I too am pleased with our progress since the beginning of our productivity effort. Together, since year 2012, we have delivered a cumulative cost of goods sold reduction of $10 billion, including nearly $3 billion in the past t woyears.
On adjusted free cash flow, we delivered fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2018 at 94% and 104% respectively, averaging ahead of our commitment of greater than 90%. Since 2012, we have meaningfully reduced inventory by $1 billion through optimizing our supply network from our suppliers, plants, distribution centers, all the way to our physical distribution partners and retailers. We have also significantly improved days payables behind a cash acceleration program that has delivered $5 billion through a great work on supply chain financing. $2 billion of these $5 billion have come in the last two years alone. With this momentum, ladies and gentlemen, I am confident that we are on track to deliver our productivity commitments through fiscal 2021. Our mission remains one, to continue to create and provide P&G with a sustainable competitive advantage.
It is time to develop and continue to enable the next S-curve in supply chain that delivers our objective of cost reduction, cash, agility, and dare I say, an unparalleled service to our customers. The last time we were together, it goes back in 2020 where I shared with you our product supply 2020 vision. I also talked you through the five strategic choices of how we are connecting through a creation of an entire synchronized end-to-end network that brings together our company, customers, physical distribution partners, and suppliers all operating in a seamless ecosystem. Today, I wanted to share with you some of these examples of how we're bringing these strategies to life. I would like to start with planning, move to manufacturing, talk of quality, and then move to the supply network that is being underpinned by our colleagues. It all starts with planning.
We view our planning service centers as the conductors of our end-to-end supply network, we want to ensure that our suppliers, production sites, distribution centers, customer logistics work as one team across a seamless ecosystem. We have integrated major material suppliers into our planning service centers across the globe. In North America, suppliers that account for about half of our entire material spend are co-located with P&G planners. This significantly improves our ability to respond to fast evolving business need, such as natural disasters and an ever-increasing retailer expectations. We are also incorporating customers and distributor into our planning cycles, supporting major initiatives such as the Double 11 event in China. iPlanning is our flagship program, which is transforming the way we work by encoding market, human, and supply chain behavior and strategies into algorithms using advanced capabilities and analytics. That's planning. Next to manufacturing.
Our manufacturing of the future framework builds on our industry-leading integrated work system methodology that has been our approach to systematize operational excellence, dare I say, for decades now. The core principle, total employee involvement, zero losses. Our supply network is quickly becoming touchless, as automation solutions have revolutionized how repetitive work gets done. Touchless, ladies and gentlemen, is a culture, a culture shift where every touch in the supply chain is being viewed as a loss. The video clip that you see showcases our state-of-the-art manufacturing site in West Virginia. The autonomous guided vehicles, or AGVs as they are called, or the collaborative robots, cobots, you see may have been introduced into many of our flagship manufacturing sites. What are they?
They are 3D enabled elements which connect to our digital platforms. They work alongside with people where we are piloting online sensors and measurement devices to eliminate any manual sampling. Suppliers are with us on this journey. At our Tabler Station, we have suppliers' AGVs connected into our warehouse, which is also co-located at the site. These are fully integrated into digital platforms for a seamless transition between the supplier warehouse and our manufacturing operations without any human touch. Okay, planning, manufacturing. Now on to quality. We view quality as a true vector for growth. Our consumer trust us. We take this responsibility very seriously, as you can see in this example of Pampers. We have invested in predictive algorithms that map consumer behaviors to reveal product vulnerabilities. We have transitioned from manual quality detection to fully automated online analysis and operational dashboards.
We can also now predict when certain components or machinery will fail quality testing, and may require replacement. Finally, ladies and gentlemen, our supply network. Our new site at Tabler Station in West Virginia is an example of how we are transforming our entire North American European supply networks. We are designing scaled, digitally enabled sites that give us the geographical ability to address any omni-channel fulfillment and ensure that we have 80% of products in our largest markets broadly within 24 hours reach of customers and consumers. In North America, this has proven to be a winning strategy in the face of many challenges, such as the tightening of transportation markets and natural disasters that we are encountering. We are also partnering with retailers to step change the responsiveness across all of our supply networks.
In Europe, for example, we have optimized both distribution and manufacturing infrastructure to fewer scaled multi-category operations in optimum locations. What is this doing? It's paving the way into redefining customer order lead times and full assortment requirements across the region. Based on early successes in both North America and Europe, we are executing similar programs in Latin America, India, and with plans to expand into China very shortly. All this is being underpinned by our women and men in product supply who are really embracing these new capabilities. We are leveraging all available data in real time with action of the results. We are automating material ordering, receipt, consumption, and return. We are exchanging information real time with our external partners to operate the supply chain as one, enabling end-to-end synchronized network. We are integrating citizenship and sustainability in all that we do.
Our product supply leadership model fosters a culture that develops unique blend of business savviness, end-to-end supply network mastery, and importantly, digital competency. Our people act as business owners who take personal responsibility for their own learning and their own development. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid we don't have enough time to talk about all areas of product supply where we are transforming our work. I want you to know that we are working on many, many facets. For example, we are actively partnering with our research and development colleagues for the development of breakthrough new to the world platforms in trends and biosciences. We are also reinventing our approach to transportation, where we are striving for optimized management for our transportation partners.
In closing, I would like to tell you that product supply lies at the heart of P&G, confirming that P&G is very much in the business of marketing, selling, and supply of noticeably superior products. Jon Moeller, by being laser focused on our strategic choices together with our own demonstrated track record of strong results, I am more than confident that we will deliver at least $7 billion in cost of goods savings in the current productivity program and further and contribute more towards our company's goal of greater than 90% of free cash flow productivity. The next generation of digitization and synchronization will contribute additional savings beyond the current five-year productivity program that we have.
I want you to be reassured that in product supply we have the technical leadership, the technical mastery to excel in this digitally disruptive era while remaining a demonstrable competitive advantage for years to come. I would like to invite Mr. George Tsourapas, our President for Global Home Care, who will share examples of how product supply transformations are impacting his business. George.
Thank you very much, Ioannis, and good afternoon, everybody. As Ioannis said, the constructive disruption of our supply chain is creating significant value for our Home Care business. In fact, the superiority of product, packages, retail executions, and the investments we're making across many vectors, including marketing and consumer value, are fully integrated and actually powered by the disruption and the transformation of the product supply. The product supply transformation, first and foremost, has enabled a significant improvement into our noticeably superior product and packaging in an accelerated way. Here are a few examples. Through our standardized packing, making, and converting technologies and platforms, we have been able to roll out within very few months globally, both a major restage of our superior concentrated Hand Dish liquid business and at the same time our superior proprietary unit dose on Autodish.
As a result of this, we have extended our global value share trends over the last 12 months. In fact, we have added about 50 basis points for our Hand Dish business extending leadership, and we have managed to achieve a milestone for the first time ever, global leadership in the markets where we play on Autodish by actually adding 1 point of share over this period. We have also developed a new making platform for our hard surface clear cleaner businesses, which we are rolling out as we speak. This platform allows actually our research and development department to create formulations which are both cheaper and superior in cleaning and versatility versus the competitive offerings. Equally, home care is reapplying baby care converting technologies to be able to provide significant innovation for our Swiffer pads business, differentiating those further from the competitive offerings.
We are doing this while reducing capital, increasing speed of the lines, and reducing dramatically also the material losses. The platform, as I said, brings superior innovation in the marketplace in the next few months. We are deploying a new blind to shape packing technology across our businesses that allows us to create a wider range of bottles without the need of major retooling every time we're changing shapes and sizes. That allows us to be able to re-respond a lot faster and much more affordably against the consumer needs, and importantly, the evolving needs of customers and channels. It allows us to be able to create demand in store in a much more holistic way by leveraging more convenient case formats, shelf-ready packaging, secondary packaging, and also exceptional on and off the shelf executions. Here you see some of those.
Specifically for the growing needs of e-commerce, we have created what we call ship in own container and executions. Those executions are by definition allowing us to do three things. One is they are definitely allowing us to ship without interventions across the different supply systems from P&G to the customer to the consumer. Second, the consumer gets a superior and more delightful experience. Third, these are evidently a lot more sustainable solutions. In summary, those innovations create cost and cash efficiencies for Home Care by being able to reduce capital, by being able to reduce investments, increasing line speeds, reducing changeovers, actually reducing the need for staffing, and even allowing us to use space more efficiently into our manufacturing facilities. We have already begun to apply those technologies beyond Home Care on the rest of our businesses like Hair Care as well as Personal Care.
Home Care has also implemented a new manufacturing capability that allows us to deliver both best levels of process reliability, allows us to improve quality standards, and actually allows us to improve customer service. As a result of this, we are able to serve customers more efficiently. One example is our participation in the responsive network for customers in North America, where our products are able to be shipped within 24 hours to all the customers. We're also delighted that we're participating, one of the first units to participate in the Tabler Station manufacturing site that will bring us a new level of end-to-end synchronization and further increase our competitive advantages, allowing us to expect and receive higher customer support in store. Excuse me.
The work we're doing to transform our supply chain is critical to the success of Home Care. Fiscal year 2018 was actually the 12th consecutive year of organic sales growth for Home Care. The segment in which we compete, dish, air, and surface, are all growing currently between 3% and 5%. These are very healthy level of consumption, and P&G Home Care is actually growing share across all of the time periods. Growth is in fact accelerating. In the last quarter, we have been able to deliver strong middle single digit growth sales in sales and also leverage, leveraging the topics discussed above, as well as innovation, which is truly demonstrating ability to create new consumption for our categories and our brands.
Hopefully, these examples demonstrate how disruption and the transformation of the supply chain is creating for Home Care and for the rest of the company a competitive advantage for now and for years to come. I will hand it over to Javier Polit, P&G's Chief Information Officer. Thank you very much.
Thank you, George. Good afternoon, everyone. You heard earlier about how dramatically the world is changing. Nowhere is that more evident than in technology. It is literally transforming the way we compete, and today all companies are technology companies, and the line between physical products and digital products is clearly blurring. Consumers expect, they even demand real-time digital relationships that are frictionless. We at P&G are meeting that need, leading the application of disruptive technologies to the development of connected consumer products. We're eager to show this. For the first time, P&G will be present at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. CES for 50 years has been a gathering place where leading innovative companies come and share their future roadmaps on technologies, and they share with business leaders and pioneering thinkers.
Our presence is gonna demonstrate for the first time that we are gonna start sharing our future roadmap the same way that technology companies do. I'm excited about what we're gonna share at CES, and I'm excited about the opportunity to talk to all of you today, how we're leveraging technology to transform the way we serve our consumers. When I think about data is at the heart of our strategy. Today, we're enabling, we're optimizing, and we're transforming the foundation that already exists to create disruptive capabilities. We're standing up data hubs in our businesses to capture petabytes of data, millions of gigabytes that are relevant to our business leaders, so we can make better decisions. We are gleaning unique insights to solve big business problems.
What we're doing is we're embedding those skill sets into the business to be able to accelerate some of the decisions. This is happening in every region, spanning business units and brands, and across our internal work processes. You know, it has always been and always shall be about the consumer. The what has not changed, but the how we drive superiority has changed significantly through insights and actions that we take today. The consumer is still at the center, and our ambition is to understand the consumer and serve the shopper better than anyone else in our industry. Data and analytics and technology are core to helping us do that. This covers a little bit about how we think about our data strategy, and I want to share a few examples of disruptive work we're doing in our categories in our regions.
Superiority starts with products so good that consumers recognize the difference, we're applying data and analytics to remove friction so consumer does not need to figure out what or how they need to order. They want to be focused on personalized recommendations, auto-dosing, and replenishment capabilities. One great example that Alex and Marc discussed is Olay's Skin Advisor, which applies artificial intelligence and machine learning to help women find a skin regimen specifically designed for their unique needs. Another great example is the Oral-B Genius toothbrush. Consumers can download an Oral-B application to their smartphone and connect it through Bluetooth technology to get real-time feedback on their brushing habits. The oscillating, rotating, pulsating brush heads provide consumers with the best clean, while the app makes sure that we're spending the right amount of time and covering the mouth equally to get a good clean.
As innovative as it is effective, more than 80% of people today that are using the brush realize an improved oral health hygiene in less than six weeks. We're excited about the Oral-B work that we're doing, and we're gonna be sharing a lot more of that at CES. It is clear that our data science work continues to enable superior consumer experience, personalized through deeper insights, which further informs our future product design. Let me give you a few examples of other work going on in our regions. As Marc mentioned, we're using data science to transform the way P&G does marketing. The data science algorithms use consumer and shopper data to optimize our audience selection. Data and algorithms allow us to be surgical with the audience we target, making us more efficient and effective.
To make sure that we are serving the right product message to those most likely to buy, resulting in 2x to 3 x our normal conversion rates, driving top-line sales, media savings, and bottom-line growth. With dramatic improvements in efficiency and effectiveness through the optimization of our reach and frequency across linear TV and addressable channels, an approach we have successfully leveraged in the U.S., Europe, China, and the Asia Pac regions. Shifting to superior retail execution, we launched a program called Neighborhood Analytics in the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pac. This program gives us the ability to use data and analytics to better ensure the way we are precisely serving at the right stores, down to the neighborhood level, with the right shelf sets and placement. Using a proprietary algorithm, we work with our retail partners.
We combine store and sales performance data with anonymous demographic and lifestyle data. Slide that you see behind me basically shows the work that we did in the U.K. We overlaid data about category development with sales and demographic strength data. It basically gave us an opportunity map, so you know what stores to target, down even to the store and shelf level. By knowing precisely where and how consumers are shopping, we can better optimize our distribution, our merchandising, shelf sets, target sampling, and marketing. The result is better consumer experience and category growth in our stores. In China, we created a platform called Golden Eye, a program where we leverage crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence methods to better analyze our stores. Previously, we had been using partners to mainly do this in about 200 stores.
With Golden Eye, we brought those capabilities in-house and are now capturing and analyzing more than 1 million images a month from 40,000 stores in real time using image recognition technologies. We're driving faster insights, suggesting priority interventions in our stores that will help our retailers as well as P&G. We're activating and personalizing recommendations to our account executives in regards to this work directly to their smartphones. None of this work that I shared with you today would be possible without our team. Some of them are P&G IT veterans. Other are external hires like myself that brought in with specific skill sets. Many are experts in the business units, and coupled together, we bring business and technological expertise. We have been purposeful about establishing these capabilities in-house.
Related to data science and other technologies, we continue to push this capability. These are people that have hands on keyboards and are really focusing on the consumer. Together, they're relentlessly solving some of our biggest business challenges. Beyond the work that I have shared already, they're focusing on broader things such as our global network modernization. We're focused on a cloud migration and making certain that we have the latest cybersecurity platforms and technologies that safeguard our systems and our operations. These examples I shared and all the work that we're doing across IT is a relentless focus on delivering value in the form of top-line growth, bottom-line growth, and cash. This is helping us to deliver superior consumer and customer value.
In closing, technology is changing at an exponential speed, leading us to have a 360-degree view of our consumer, helping us interact with her or him in a more contextual and relevant manner. Our focus is very, very clear. Through technology, with a purposeful IT strategy that is woven into the very fabric of our business, we are constructively disrupting our business and solving business challenges and transforming the way we serve and delight our consumers, and with much more to come. Thank you, and now I'll turn it over to David.
Thanks, Jon. All right, we're on the home stretch. The constructive disruption we're leading in all areas of the value chain is critical to the future success in this dynamic world. We must be and are willing to change anything, and I've said it many times, in everything needed to win, including our organization design. The only things that will not change in this company are our purpose, our values and our principles, and our commitment to winning and delivering results. As Jon outlined some positive changes we've already made, and they're contributing to the stronger results. We are operating through a stronger and more focused portfolio of 10 product categories. We've streamlined central organization and moved resources closer to the consumers and the customers we serve. We've supplemented our internal talent with skilled, experienced external hiring and improved category dedication and mastery. We've strengthened compensation incentive programs.
We've also made changes to how we operate in markets. Since our last major reorganization in 1999, product categories have had responsibility for innovation, manufacturing, and marketing and full profit and loss responsibility, but had little influence over direct selling, which was owned by the SMOs. Over the last several years in our largest markets, such as the U.S. and China, the categories have taken partial ownership of sales staffing, giving them more end-to-end responsibility. In smaller countries, where it doesn't make economic sense to have fully staffed organization for each product category, we began implementing what we call a freedom-within-a-framework approach. The intent was for these markets to execute within predefined strategies to deliver the plans set by the categories. As long as they were on track to deliver these plans, they had freedom to make executional changes without the need to engage category leadership.
We've learned a lot over the last two years while operating with this new approach, and it's helping us to improve results. However, we can and will go further. What's clear is the current structure that does have three-dimensional matrix of GBUs, SMOs, and corporate function, now 20 years old, still creates some complexity that impacts our ability to meet the demands of consumers and customers in a rapidly changing environment. Today, we're announcing a new structure designed to de-matrix the company and provide a greater clarity on responsibilities and reporting lines and to strengthen leadership accountability and enable P&G people to accelerate growth and value creation. Starting next fiscal year, effective July 1, 2019, P&G will operate through one axis of industry-based sector business units led by the sector business unit CEOs who will report to me. Fabric and Home Care led by Shailesh Jejurikar.
Baby and fem care, feminine care, led by Fama Francisco. Family care and new ventures led by Mary Lynn Ferguson-McHugh. Beauty care led by Alex Keith. Grooming led by Gary Coombe. Healthcare led by Steve Bishop. Within these SBUs or s-sector business units, we will manage the 10 product categories. Each of the SBU CEOs will have the latitude to decide how they staff to win in their categories. The SBUs will have direct sales, profit, cash, and value creation responsibilities for the largest markets, which we're calling Focused markets or Focus Markets . That includes the U.S., Canada, China, Japan, U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, and some smaller adjacent countries, accounting for about 80% of company sales and 90% of after-tax profits.
These SBUs will have responsibility for all facets of the business for the Focus Markets : consumer understanding, product and package innovation, brand communication, selling and retail execution, and supply chain. In fact, we'll change reporting lines for between 4,000 and 5,000 people in sales and supply planning, officially moving them to report directly into the SBUs. In each focus market, we will have market operations that provide scaled market services and to represent the company externally. Importantly, the SBUs will determine the optimal level of services needed to efficiently support their businesses. The SBUs will also retain responsibility for global strategy, innovation, and supply to ensure winning results worldwide. We are consolidating profit responsibility for the remaining markets, which we're calling Enterprise Markets, into a separate unit with sales, profit, and value creation responsibility.
The SBUs will provide innovation plans and operating frameworks to drive growth and value creation in these Enterprise Markets. The intent is to give these markets executional freedom with just enough framework. Jon Moeller will have responsibility for these Enterprise Markets and will further expand his responsibilities to include the operations side of the company, reporting to me as Vice Chair, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer, including focus market operations, global business services, which are valuable to the scaled services, and functions that support the operations of the company. We are significantly reducing the level of corporate resources, completing the move that I've talked about previously of moving about 60% of our corporate roles to business units and markets.
We will retain a core set of corporate resources needed to sustain the ongoing health, viability, and sustainability of the corporation, including back office services, governance and stewardship. In some areas that require very high technical mastery. In particular, we will retain corporate R&D that invents upstream platform technologies, you heard about some today, to benefit multiple businesses and to get us into entirely new businesses. We are further solidifying these changes with a new approach toward talent management. Talent development, staffing, promotion, performance appraisals, and pay will shift from being managed by the functions to being managed by the business units. This enables business units to develop and apply the knowledge, skills, and mastery needed to succeed in their business against local and multinational competitors. It also eliminates the complicated approach where multiple people are involved to make a staffing move. We see important benefits from this approach.
We see more opportunities for better value creation in both focused markets and Enterprise Markets with this new design. The sector business unit CEOs will have more focus on innovation, commercialization, and value creation opportunities in the most important markets. More than 80% of total value creation will come from these focused markets. Modestly faster growth in these big profitable markets can and will create significant value. The Enterprise Markets often demand a significant amount of time and attention from business unit leaders due to the unique retail dynamics and market-specific volatility, like currency shocks and policy-driven disruptions. Having dedicated enterprise market leaders who are closer to the market and giving them more freedom to operate will enable them to deal with the challenges and more quickly take advantage of opportunities for growth and value creation. We will have a much simpler management structure and reporting lines.
The sector business unit CEOs will report to me, along with governance functions, legal, HR, finance, and diversity, and innovation functions, R&D, and brand. Jon will continue to report to me with responsibility for operations, including enterprise market and focused market operation presidents, along with global business services and function resources that support the operations side of the business. We understand that some of you may be skeptical as to the significance of these changes. We believe this is the most important organizational change we've made in the last 20 years. The design eliminates the three-way matrix and moves to one axis, sector business units. Sector business units will now have full end-to-end responsibility in the large markets. Evidence that this approach can work, coupled with our focus on superiority, is in the U.S., where we're furthest along in showing improved results.
All resources that have business unit-specific roles will be in the business, including those that are moving from corporate functions, which will be reduced by 60% when completed. In the Enterprise Markets, we have more freedom to capitalize on opportunities and the profit and loss responsibility that goes with it. To summarize, we'll have a more engaged, accountable, and agile organization operating at a lower cost, focused on winning with consumers through superiority, fueled by productivity, and operating at the speed of the market. Now, before we wrap up and open up for questions, I do want to take a few minutes to talk how we will continue to actively build strong citizenship into how we deliver our business results. In this area, our aspiration is very clear. We want to be a force for good and a force for growth.
We know that the more we integrate and build citizenship into how we do business, the bigger the impact we can have on the people we serve, the communities we live and work in, and the broader world that surrounds us. In turn, that helps us grow and build our business. We continue to constructively lead in each of the four areas of citizenship where we've determined we can have the greatest impact. Communities, Diversity and Inclusion, Gender and Equality, and Environmental Sustainability, all executed with a strong focus on ethics and corporate responsibility. In the area of community impact, our Children's Safe Drinking Water program delivered more than 1 billion liters of clean drinking water last year and has provided 14 billion liters of water to those who need it most since this program began in 2004.
Through our diversity inclusion focus, we've increased our internal representation of women, now at 46% of all P&G managers globally, and we increased our U.S. representation and workplace satisfaction of African ancestry, Hispanic, and Asian Pacific American employees. Externally, Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and even Boomers today want to see and understand what brands and companies do, what they believe in, the people behind them, their values, and their points of view on relevant issues like equality and the environment. Our leadership brands can impact these areas with their wide reach, so we're using our brands' voices for good and in a way that's good for growth. We've shared some of it today. We've used videos like The Talk, Love Over Bias, and The Words Matter to spark important conversations that motivate positive change among racial, ethnic, sexual orientation and identity, disability, and gender lines.
Potentially the most positive example of constructive disruption. These ads have had outstanding and received outstanding third-party recognition. Each of these ads won awards at the 2018 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. The Talk won a Cannes Lions Grand Prix Award, a top honor, and also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Commercial 2018. Specifically, on gender equality, the Always Like a Girl campaign is launching its fifth chapter and has changed attitudes on gender bias, with 76% of people who've watched the ad now considering the phrase, "Like a girl", a positive expression, versus only 19% before watching. Importantly, the brand has been growing share, sales, and users since the start of the campaign.
Some of P&G's best performing brands have the most gender equal campaigns, including SK-II Change Destiny, Olay Live Fearlessly, as well as Tide, Dawn, Swiffer, and Ariel, which show men sharing the housework load, like in this ad from Ariel France.
[Presentation]
On environmental sustainability, we innovate to deliver product and package superiority in ways that are good for the planet and good for business. Our brands solve everyday problems for people, but they use water and energy to manufacture, transport, and consume, and can generate unwanted waste after use. We ask, what if our brands could have a positive impact on the environment by promoting responsible consumption, reducing, renewing, and recycling water, energy, and waste just by consuming our brands? It would be good for consumers, good for the planet, and it would drive growth. For example, what if using laundry detergent could help save energy? Ariel designed formulas to deliver clean clothes in cold wash conditions, lowering energy usage because 80% of a washing machine's energy consumption comes from heating the water.
Switching to cold water cleaning for a year can save enough money to charge your mobile phone for a lifetime. Ariel's cold water cleaning products are growing double digits, one of the key drivers to Ariel growing sales 5% worldwide. What if we found a way to turn beach plastic into shampoo bottles? We've done that with Head & Shoulders and Herbal Essences. Our objective is to convert our European bottles to 25% post-consumer recycled plastic from beaches and other sources, reducing tons of new plastic every year. What if products made with more plant-based ingredients actually delivered superior performance? We have a growing list of examples now. Tide purclean, Gain Botanicals, Herbal Essences bio:renew, Whisper Pure Cotton, Pampers Pure Protection, and Native Deodorant. This is where I think our scale can drive big sustainability outcomes. Think about it in terms of P&G's business.
We serve about 5 billion consumers and have operations in more than 70 countries. With our global reach, our understanding of the consumers we serve, and our innovation and supply chain capabilities, we have a unique ability to make a positive difference for our consumers, our society, and our world. We can help protect our world's natural resources, and we can do so while delighting consumers and growing our business. This is what's behind our new sustainability goals, which we call Ambition 2030. Ambition 2030 aims to enable and inspire positive impact on the environment and society while creating value for the company and consumers. Our Ambition 2030 goals span our brands, our supply chain, society, and our employees.
By 2030, our 20 leadership brands will enable and inspire responsible consumption through packaging that is 100% recyclable or reusable, ingredient transparency on 100% of our brands, and launching more sustainable innovations. Our sites will increase water efficiency by 35% and source at least 5 billion liters of water from circular sources. Manufacturing sites will cut greenhouse gas emissions in half and purchase enough renewable energy to power 100% of our plants. We will continue to create transformative partnerships that enable people, the planet, and our business to thrive, including using more recycled plastics, protecting and enhancing forests, expanding recycling solutions for absorbent hygiene products, and protecting water in priority basins around the world. We will engage, equip, and reward employees for building sustainability thinking and practices into their everyday work.
We reward progress and integrate recognition into performance appraisals. We're being recognized for this leadership in sustainability, including the Dow Jones Sustainability Index, the FTSE4Good Index, the Arbor Day Foundation, the Forest Stewardship Council, and recently the EPA with their Green Power Leadership Award. As I hope you can see, we've built citizenship into the business versus making it a separate effort. It's not only doing good, it's building trust and equity with consumers and driving growth and value creation for shareholders. A force for good and a force for growth. The work P&G is doing to be a constructive disruptor across all pillars of citizenship is the best demonstration of our commitment to living out our purpose, values, and principles that are the foundation upon which this company was built, and have been our guiding force for more than 180 years.
Now, my hope is this discussion throughout today has helped you understand our view of the world that we're operating in, the changes we've already made to deliver improved results, and the work we're doing to constructively disrupt ourselves and our industry to position P&G for success in the future. I'm gonna end where I began. We are defining winning as consistent, sustainable, balanced growth and value creation. Our long-term growth algorithm is aimed at delivering organic sales growth modestly ahead of the underlying growth of the markets where we compete. Our markets are growing currently 2.5%-3%. We wanna 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 top line results.
While we'd obviously prefer to deliver the high end of the range every year, we feel this range reflects the volatility of market growth rates in the macroeconomic environment. This range also reflects our intention to maintain strong investment in the business to support top line growth, including in periods where macro factors, like foreign exchange or commodity costs, are working against us, like this year. We expect to turn these earnings into strong levels of cash generation, delivering free cash flow productivity of 90% or better every year. Consistent, sustainable, balanced growth and value creation. Thank you very much for your attention, and now we'd be happy to answer your questions. Jon will come up and join me. Our Vice Chair, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer will come up here. Maybe.
Hi, Nik Modi from RBC. Jon, congratulations on the new appointment.
Thanks.
David, just thinking about this, you called it the largest reorganization of the company since in the last 20 years. How do you think about this transition? You have pricing, you have a lot of volatility going on, around the world in some of your key markets. Seems like a lot of stuff to do, you know, in a, I guess, over a 12-month timeframe. Maybe help us think about how you transition into this new structure.
That's great. First, I like the fact that you asked me why we're moving so fast versus so slow, this is already a great start to the Q&A. Many of these changes that we're making are continuations of the direction we were moving. I've talked before back in CAGNY 2016 about more end-to-end and more freedom within a framework. We're going further in directions we have been going, and the organization's embraced and is moving that way. There are still additional moves we're doing to further accelerate it, but it's to address the outside world. We didn't ask, what do we think we can do? We asked, what is required to win? What I've seen throughout the last couple years is the organization rises to meet that challenge. In both of the areas, it's accelerating things that we're doing.
The other change, the big change that we mentioned, is the talent management. It's in to support the changes we've made, 'cause at times, even though we've done many things to reduce the interaction that may be duplicative, we still had, in some cases, multiple people that had to be involved, in some cases, multiple people that had to say yes, but one could say no. We're being very clear, making a choice, so that the businesses, we operate through these six sector businesses, and we set up the company to support that, the operations to support that, the talent management to support that, and the market services to support that. Also recognize that there are differences across the markets. A lot of that exists, and we've been moving in that direction, I believe we can do that and do that very well.
Our priority is to deliver our commitments and to do this so that we're set up to deliver next year and the year beyond. We've learned a great deal the last few years as we've moved in this direction, and we've been working, and we continue to work with the leadership team, and we'll work deeper in the organization to make sure we execute this while delivering this year and next. Jon, you're gonna have to pick. Lots of hands.
Thank you. Olivia Tong from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Obviously, lots of change, but the targets are still the same. Is it just that much harder? Is the cost of doing business that much higher? Can you just give a little bit more color on how we end up at the same targets? I was also struck at two things. Number one, leaving Mexico and Latin America out of the focus market. If you could give a little bit more color on that. In your brand and product discussions, we didn't talk about diapers. Given that that has been a big focus category, if you could give a little bit more color on that would be great as well. Thank you.
Okay, many questions here. We have multiple questions here. We'll get one, and then we'll make sure we get the compound questions. One, why didn't we change our targets? First step is to deliver our targets. To me, what we're working hard to do, and you saw progress in the first quarter, is we want to get back to growing share in a constructive way and deliver strong bottom line and cash flow. You all have been very open about the inconsistency we've had over a number of years. Step one is to make progress and continue to make progress every quarter. One of the reasons we share, and frankly, I feel good about these multiple year charts, what you're seeing is the focus on getting each brand in each market better is helping.
We also recognize there are many forces out there, including foreign exchange and commodities, and what we're doing is work to do the best we can, and I think the first quarter was a good demonstration of strong progress. There are a lot of things. We're now taking pricing in many markets. We'll have to see how the market responds to that, and certainly, we'll take appropriate actions. Our aspiration is to get back to winning and to delivering consistent growth above the market growth rate and to getting back to delivering the mid to high single digits. As we said in the prepared remarks, we wanna be at the high end of that. Again, if you look over time, that hasn't happened a lot in the last few years for a lot of reasons.
Job one is to deliver those targets, and I think that's the appropriate way to approach it. The second question was around Mexico and Brazil, and why didn't we make those Focus Markets . Depending on which category you look at, there's a number of countries that are more important than others. What we looked at is for the all of Latin America, we looked at what is the best way to operationalize the change into some degree to address the comment that Nik made, which is, what level of change do we think is appropriate, and how can we best operate in a way when you turn it into an action? We thought keeping it together because while Mexico and Brazil are very big and important, if you look at the trade structure, it still has many distributors.
If you look at the volatility of the market, be it currency or other dynamics, it still has characteristics more similar to Enterprise Markets. It doesn't mean if it's enterprise that it won't get an appropriate focus if there's value creating opportunities. If you recall, when I said what the sector business unit's responsible for is the global strategy, global innovation and supply chain. They're working to maximize value contribution. Certainly when you look at some of the bigger markets that may be in the Enterprise Markets, there'll be appropriate connection to make sure they support. The change, which I think is important, is we've learned a lot on freedom within framework, where we're making very good progress in the pilots we've run.
What we want to do is give more freedom. We've opened up the P&L for the Enterprise Markets so that they have much more agility and less transactions. Again, I think this can work very well. It's a build on what we've done. We've got very good success in the pilots that we've run the last two years with a modest amount of flexibility, so we're giving the Enterprise Markets more. We will address bigger markets in enterprise. Recall, 90% of our after-tax profits in the Focus Markets , and value creation is the top priority here.
Diapers.
Diapers, okay. First, we did talk diapers. Pampers Pure. We did do that. Beyond Pampers Pure, we're also working in each one of the regions to address the challenges. We've talked them before, whether it is in China with our mainline product or whether it is in Europe, where we had some product quality issues that have been addressed. Each region, each country, the same formula that we used in the other categories were taken. In baby care, it is taking longer, and we've had to make some significant equipment changes, and because of that, the timeframe is a little different than others. I think the progress made in Pampers Pure is a good indication of the speed that we can move at. To me, there's many positive indications, we're not yet where we wanna be.
As Jon mentioned in the opening comments, whether it's eight of 10 categories holding or growing share or nine of 10 that are growing sales. We didn't say all of them, and at any given time, there will be some that may have a competitive issue or have a challenge in our execution. We're gonna address it. What we're doing is investing to make sure our product is right, our package is right, our go-to-market capability. There are many positive sides. Pants, doing very well. Premium taped, making very good progress. We still got some work to do to make sure we address the middle of the market or the mainline side, and right now, Fama and her team are all on this right now in the key markets. Somebody, wherever the mic is, please stay in. Somebody.
Hey.
Ali?
Thanks, guys.
Yes.
A lot of good progress.
Thank you.
I wanna see how you guys could talk about mitigating three risks here.
Okay.
One is, much of what we heard was about SKU increases. You've gone through this period where you cut a bunch of SKUs.
Cut a bunch of portfolio. How do you mitigate the risk that you repeat the mistakes of old, which is just too much SKU proliferation?
Okay.
That's one.
Okay.
Two is, you know.
Write it down.
Sorry, you can write it down. I'll repeat at the end if you want as well.
Okay.
Two is, you know, in many areas, whether it be Gillette and otherwise, you've talked about expanding the price tiering, both up, but certainly downwards as well. What's the risk there from a margin perspective or price mix perspective? I know Jon's gonna talk about we have been having positive pricing for a while. It's been massively below the inflation FX, and that gap is getting worse. How do we think about the risk of price tiering impacting downwards on that?
Okay. Let's get two, and then you get the third, fourth, fifth here.
Nice. Okay.
First on SKUs. Each category's gotta decide what they need to grow value. What I don't want, and frankly, 1 of the reasons we're running through 1 lens, which is the sector business unit, is they need to decide what's required to win and create value. I do agree, if you go back and look at the data, we did go too many SKUs, and we've taken a lot out. At the same time, they have to be responsive to the needs in the market. In some markets, there are fast-growing segments that we think aren't fads that are real, some of the natural moves, and we're addressing those. Now, we wanna address those, and even if you look at Pampers Pure, it's not with 50 SKUs.
It's with a focused portfolio that addresses both the performance issue and with the free of or full of dynamic that is needed. In grooming, this takes a little bit of the first and the second question, we've had a full ladder, all the way from double edge up to premium systems. What's different about that, to me, this is an appropriate choice the sector made, is we need to innovate on all, where we've primarily only innovated at the top. We've lost a lot on the lower part of the portfolio. In the end, the total business wasn't growing. We didn't address some emerging segments that may have needed a different entry price point package or consumer user experience. Again, now Gary talked about here's what we're doing to address that.
What I want is each one of the sector business units to define what it takes to win and create value. If it's a little more SKUs because that's right because of differentiation or serving a group of consumers, segments that are growing, that's okay. What we don't want is absence of meaningful superiority, brands and products that are meaningfully different. Instead of that, have a bunch of line extensions that just give you more shelf space that last maybe one year, often six months. We'll see if in one year Pampers Pure is still on the shelf. We've seen what happens when we came out with the Beads. Those grow and continue to grow because they're meaningfully better than the best competition. To me, the bar that you ought to challenge us on, and frankly we're challenging ourselves, is the product meaningfully better?
To me, that's what underpins this whole superiority strategy. It's not proliferating the ton of SKUs. It's if there's a meaningful segment, and you can create value, serve it, but serve it with something that's enough better that it will last. If that means there's some more SKUs and it's sustainable, that's fine. We're not having an artificial goal that you can't increase more than 3% the SKUs because of what happened. We're learning from the past, we are not encumbered by the past. We're looking for what it takes to win in the future.
I would just build on a little bit of what David's talking about. I do think that superiority, in addition to all the obvious benefits, is the governor, and it's not just product superiority that David was talking about. Go-to-market superiority. I mean, when you over-SKU that shelf, you do not have a superior shopping experience. Clear focus on both of those things, I think will help on exactly the issue that you raised appropriately so. On pricing, I think there are many reasons to be optimistic and positive, and then there are some watch-outs, and we'll have to see where that nets out. Reasons to be positive.
A lot of the innovations that we talked about, that our colleagues talked about that are growing markets and growing very rapidly, whether that's Beads, whether that's PODS, whether that's adult incontinence that Jennifer Davis talked about, those are premium priced items. That's one reason for optimism. If we look at some of the markets that we operate in, we've talked about China as an example, premiumizing very quickly. Another reason to be positive. If we look at so far the competitive dialogue and experience on their own need to price, that's a positive. Now, what are the negatives? The negatives are, and I've been very clear about pricing introduces volatility, and it has an impact on markets, and we're gonna have to see where that nets out.
I don't have a crystal ball that allows me to see that. Private label in some markets and the retail transformation that I talked about in our opening remarks, which drives sometimes a disproportionate focus on private label and have an impact on category pricing. Net, as we stand here today, I continue to be positive, as you predicted I would be, but there's puts and calls.
Thanks for those. Just my last one is, again, one of the risks. Much of what we heard from a constructive disruption perspective that I think is the right way to think about it is about disaggregation of your scale. Descaling, right? Whether it be the brand entrepreneurs or getting the outside consultants that Fama talked about for Pure manufacturing or increasing employee ownership or even the S-SBU, the sector business units now. How should we think about that? What does that mean in terms of your advantage of being big? What does that mean in terms of you know, your ability to fight against smaller players who are inherently already small and descaled?
Sure. Well, first, I didn't say we were gonna be small. If you look at the choices we've made, is we have scaled market services and the SBUs and the Focus Markets will look at what they need, but we will have a market leader that can work with customers, and you're still P&G. If you show up to Tesco as P&G, and we have a customer team leader that can show up to Walmart, Target, Kroger as P&G, we're able to still carry P&G scale. If you looked at the supply system that Ioannis talked about, we have the scale of P&G, and we're able to leverage, whether it's new plants and automation, that we're able to generate 'cause we can monetize it over the six sectors which are playing in ten categories.
We're working very hard on trying to get much more agile, but still keeping, to me, the critical part of our scale advantage. What I didn't want, and we do not want, is scale is not the objective. The objective is being agile enough to win, but there are tremendous opportunities not to descale the company by going and saying, "You don't have a market leader," so the six sectors will independently go to Tesco or go to whatever. We still have a market leader because we've chosen that that provides advantage. The choice, though, is the sector business leaders and senior leadership will get together and say, "What are the services you need?" I take a lot of confidence and encouragement from what we've seen in the U.S. We did not have the results we wanted.
They've been working against this end-to-end in a very smart way. There is a market leader that's done a beautiful job working with the external audience, be they customer CEOs or other key stakeholders, to leverage the scale of P&G and create an environment where the categories could go in. She calls it the superhighway. We want you to be able to get there with an advantage versus anybody else. What we need, when you get to selling at the buyer's desk, category mastery, expertise, superior products and propositions. To me, that's a wonderful combination of the scale of P&G in many ways. In the back office, our global business services, that's scale of P&G that small companies don't have. I see many advantages, and we're gonna try to get that balance right.
I do believe, and many have highlighted, we had a period of time where we were not fast enough, period. We're addressing that.
I think as well, in some cases, agree completely with David, that scale for scale's sakes is not something that we're interested in. Some of the disruptions we're talking about are enabled by scale. Marc's ability to work with our digital and social media providers and literally change that landscape in a meaningfully important way. Would not have happened without the buying power and purchasing power of P&G, which we actually had to use and to get that change affected. I know working closely with Javier, our ability to attract top-notch innovation from the digital ecosystem that wants to be part of our success would be very different if we were a smaller company. That doesn't mean that size is always good and there are some. Again, scale should not be the objective in itself. Similarly, I would not look at it as a universal negative. It's a huge positive in many of the things we're trying to accomplish.
Yes. Next. Somewhere. Microphones. Okay.
Thanks. Kevin Grundy at Jefferies. David, two questions both on the U.S. market, if I may. First is category improvement, and the second one would be on fabric care. Category has accelerated up to about 2.5%, 3%, U.S. being your largest market, obviously at about 50% of profit. Talk about the largest factors driving that category improvement and maybe your visibility on how sustainable those factors are, given the importance to the algorithm. The second piece in your biggest business in North America, U.S. laundry, where Henkel's had some success with Persil, largely coming at Tide's expense. Can you talk about your commitment to price discipline? It's a category where we've seen episodic price wars over the years, and if I'm not mistaken, this is a category where you have not discussed taking price yet at this point. Maybe you wanna comment on that, and then how you intend to restore market share with Tide, specifically in liquid. Thank you.
Okay. I'm gonna make.
Jon, can we get a mic for Shailesh to help us?
Get a mic for Shailesh, yeah. Let me first address broader U.S., but then I'm gonna ask Shailesh. We've got the sector president right here. On the broad U.S., to me, there has been tremendous improvement for several reasons. Frankly, I've got many of the people right in front of me that have led that. It's been a combination of adopting this end-to-end where we have the businesses own all the way to the buyer, making sure you've got a winning proposition. We've created and taken advantage of the fact that we have the ability to meet with very senior leaders and our customers. Importantly, we declared that the U.S. was a top priority, and therefore each of the organizations made sure they had superior products to win in the U.S. and made sure on each of the elements.
In many cases, because of the expansion, we've talked about it before, in many parts of the world, if you go back a few years, we were under-supporting our U.S. business. We said top priority was you must grow in the U.S. It is our home. It's over 40% of our sales, even more than that of profit. What you've seen over the last couple years is consistent improvement in the U.S., as each business said, "What is required to win on the superiority, and then implement that?" That with the choice to dedicate more salespeople. We've added, Carolyn, how many? 100- 200 salespeople in the U.S. 'cause we said that's the priority. Put whatever you need to win 'cause it's got a high payout. We have very good margins in the U.S., we added a couple hundred salespeople.
The other thing we made, and we've talked about in the past, we changed the way we move folks to ensure we had better category mastery. We have kept what is working, which are customer teams that are able to work with key customers and create the environment for our categories then to have access to key decision leaders and then taking advantage of the scale advantage. What you've seen is meaningful progress each six months for the last couple years, culminating with a very strong quarter. If you look at our share, growing share in the last one and three months, and six months, so and 12 now, which is good. You're seeing consistent.
Because it's driven by products that win, packages go to market, the communication campaigns that win, as well as the other one I'd say that has been very important, in addition to consumer value, we've worked very hard with our customers to understand our role in growing the category and improving their profitability with our business. That message has been very clear with our customers as well. We can do that when we work together and say, "How do you create joint value?" Each of our key customers and categories has joint value creation plans, which tells me it is sustainable. It's driven by the right combination of superiority, and it's mutually helpful to both us and our customers. Second one on fabric care. Let me turn it to Shailesh.
Let me break it into three parts. I don't know whether that'll fully answer the question, but there's one question about Persil. I'm not going to qualitatively judge it, but it has been, for the last 18-24 months, somewhere between a 2.5%-2.9% market share. It has been pretty much in that range and continues to be in that range across time periods. You can make the conclusion you want on that one. Our Tide share is actually at a probably 40-year high right now. One of the things on share data, keep in mind, is a lot of the share we talk about is an all-outlet share, which includes some of the channels which are not covered in track, which are very fast-growing and now meaningfully big.
That may be some of the delta. Tide is actually at a all-time high on household penetration, all-time high on share. I'm talking a few decades now. There's a third element around pricing. On Tide, one more thing. When you look at the Tide Total brand, remember the unit dose is growing very fast as well. There is some form shifting that happens within that. On pricing, I would look at it two ways. One is fundamentally, we believe a lot of our pricing, we are already, as I was sharing earlier, at very high premiums. Our liquid is 100% premium to the market. PODS is 25% to liquid. Driving the mix is a huge part of our pricing equation in U.S. laundry.
As we get more and more of the business moving to the premium forms, the price mix moves very significantly. The second aspect of it is promotional in nature, okay? In the last 12 months, we've had a lot of change in how, as new tools like digital coupons have evolved, the promotional calculations and calculus has changed. We've adjusted a lot of that, and I see that getting significantly better moving forward. The last, but probably the most important is generally we have seen when the category, total category market size is growing, volume sold on deal tends to come down, and we have a pretty robust plan, both in terms of dosing as well as pricing to ensure the category is healthy because that normally results in a better volume sold on deal. I hope that covers that.
Here we go.
Thanks. Andrea Teixeira from JP Morgan. I wanted to go back to the price differentials for against private label. If you feel like now especially on the interventions you've made for Gillette and also for Luvs. If you feel like there's any other categories that you need to intervene more in order to become more competitive. I've seen obviously in outlets we don't have outlets, I mean, just the scanner data has shown that the gap has been diminishing. I would like to hear more if there is any other additional investments you need to make or otherwise you'd see more of your cost save flowing to the bottom line. Thank you.
All right. Yeah. Generally, each of the individuals that leads the category is gonna have to make call, and we won't talk ahead of time about anything we might do. Generally, I'd say we've made the interventions where we thought there was a big issue. What changes over time we're gonna have to deal with. In terms of like Gillette, where we got significantly out of line and there were two issues in Gillette. There was a pricing issue, we did not have a price point covered as well. There was a combination of challenges that we had with Gillette innovation, presence in a very popular price point, as well as some value work we needed to do, which is why we had a very big intervention, and it made a big difference. Do I see many of those? No, I don't see many of those.
I'll also say each one of the categories has to be agile to deal with what happens. We have seen cases where others may drop price because of whatever their choice may be, and we'll have to deal with that. That may create a different dynamic, but certainly what you've observed is certainly fair. It's closed down and in areas where we may have been more vulnerable. Luvs is another one where the pricing on baby care has moved a good bit up and down, and it depends on many retailers choose to get very aggressive at times because they want that consumer and at times other retailers do as well. We'll have to decide what's appropriate, you know, when it happens.
There's another general dynamic which isn't specific, and I don't wanna draw too strong of a correlation. As we've talked about market sizes globally, also in the U.S., have started to improve modestly. Typically as markets are more constructive and growing, the need for, or the interest level on the part of our retail partners to drive private label as their source of growth obviously is, you know, less significant. Right. We'll see how that evolves.
Others? Yeah, wherever. Just please.
Okay, thanks. Bonnie Herzog at Wells Fargo. I have two questions on the new structure you just announced. First, I'm curious how much consideration went into, you know, the current categories you're in and if they are in fact the right categories. I'm asking that because you are needing to spend more to drive growth, even the same level of growth, and especially if you want to accelerate that growth. You know, was that a consideration? Secondly, I'd be curious to hear from you, what were the risks, you know, that you considered in making this change or some of the concerns as you're implementing it? Do you think that you're giving anything up? I'd like to hear from your perspective, the cons.
Sure. Okay. First one, let's get, which is do we have the right core categories and how much consideration was given to that? Every year with the Board, we spend a significant chunk of time to look at the total portfolio and say, "Do we believe this portfolio is about right?" I do believe the 10 core categories we're in are very good categories. We are looking at some additional areas. We talked about some of the innovations. We have a group that is looking to do that. We have a ventures group that is looking at new jobs to be done.
Within those 10 categories, we have looked and said, "Are there some spaces we can play and make some changes, some organic and some inorganic?" You're aware certainly of the Merck change in the healthcare area, which we see as very helpful and could be a positive mix, and some of the choices we've made on smaller acquisitions in the beauty care area. Do I think the 10 core categories are attractive? Yes. Do I think there's some things we can do over time to improve our general mix, either by segments we play in or our footprint? Yes. Each of the business leaders is responsible to figure out how to maximize value.
Once a year with the board or whenever it's appropriate, we would go back and look at the total and say, "Is there any broader choice?" As I mentioned, when we closed the Coty deal back in 2016, we believed then the big changes were done. It would be looking at bolt-on or other ones that we thought were or bigger, whatever that we thought was appropriate. The biggest opportunity we see by a meaningful margin is getting superior on each one of our brands right now and opening up a big enough advantage and playing in segments, and sometimes it's new forms and segments that can open up significant growth. You've just seen some examples of it in some of the presentations today.
I mean, the growth is amazing on many of these, whether it was Pure, whether it was the China example in fem care, these grow categories. When they grow categories and we drive the growth in the category, we tend to disproportionately benefit in share and in profitability. The other thing we get, which is great out of that, is the retailers tend to reward us when we do that with support. The second one was on?
Risks of making the organization change.
Risk of making the organization change. To me, in my mind, there was a bigger risk not to continue to change from what we've learned for many, many years. Because we did pilots, we don't do a lot of things without thinking about them or testing them. We had already run end-to-end for a number of years. It was a couple years now in the U.S., we made a step, then we made another step. Frankly, some in the organization would say, "Let's just go. If we're gonna do that, let's just go, change the reporting lines and just go." Keep what was really working, the customer teams, the market scaled resources. We had moved some, you know. First, you have a oversight, then you have the bonus, and then we move the direct reporting lines.
We said in markets that have similar conditions, big and generally biased toward more developed trade, we could do the same thing to different degrees and appropriately adapted. On the Enterprise Markets, again, we had those two pilots and some other examples that said this made sense. You know, what we have made the choice, and it was to some degree tied in the answer I gave on Latin America, is we're not gonna get overboard on making everything absolute. We're gonna say be very pragmatic 'cause we do wanna deliver and manage the risks. We're not looking for a dip, and then we'll come back. We did a big organization change, the last really big one in 1999, and there was a couple years of significant people moving around, lots of job changes, and that's not the way we're approaching this.
We named the people that are leading the big categories, and we're organized in a way we're taking advantage of things that are moving in the right direction. Again, we want to do this in a manageable way. We fully intend to do this in a way that allows us to deliver, and certainly I can't predict the future on the external environment, but certainly I feel good about the actions we're taking on bringing us our strategy to life.
Thank you very much. In this format, that's all the time we have for questions. Thanks to those of you who have been listening to the webcast.