P&G would like to remind you that today's discussion will include a number of forward-looking statements. If you will refer to P&G's most recent 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K report, you will see a discussion of factors that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from these projections. Additionally, the company has posted on its investor relations website, www.pginvestor.com, a full reconciliation of non-GAAP and other financial measures.
Okay. Good morning, Jon, Andre, thank you very much for being here. Let's get some near-term stuff out of the way.
Sure.
Okay, we'll start there and we'll get into longer-term strategic topics. The first thing is, you know, as the benefit from pricing continues to wane, you know, how do you think about volume progressing, both for the industry overall and for P&G specifically? And, you know, bridging from the 1.5% volume growth for fiscal 2024, a more steady state in the interim market.
I'd say a couple of things. First of all, if you just look at my situation, the volume progression has come along nicely. So two periods ago, minus, then minus three, then last quarter, minus one, more positive volume growth in our market, the U.S. And, you know, we only need probably two, maybe 3% volume growth on a going-forward basis, combined with mix and some pricing with innovation to really drive the model on cost that we're.
And I guess the theme coming out of second quarter earnings season overall is that the company's really, you know, starting to step up the investment spending. You know, more conversations for sure on, on innovation, on marketing. We talk about companies raising their marketing, spend for the year, and that's all a barometer of cost coming up on us. So I'd just kind of love to hear your take on that, if you're seeing it in the industry, separate from just, you know, what P&G is planning specifically, and how you think this will play out competitively.
So I'll start with P&G, and then I will address the industry. You know, we've been investing, as you know, at a very high level across those networks for the last five years, and the results have been great in our view. So if we look at the last five years, top line growth, +5, +6, +6, +7, +7. And we don't see any reason to change that trajectory. In terms of the industry, we're not seeing a significant increase, for example, in promotions across the industry. There's some, but not anything to be terribly concerned about. You heard it from Mike this morning as well.
The spend on innovation, on equity building, brand building, that's very industry constructive, and typically done well, that can lead to market growth, which is good for us, good for our competitors, good for our retail partners, and reflects the benefit the consumers are receiving. So that's the direction that additional investment takes. Bring it on.
Okay. Okay, great. And then for you guys also, you know, the way 2024 is shaping up with the, with the gross margin recovery, easing in ocean freight, it seems like there's a lot more flexibility in the P&L to spend back into the business. As you said, you've already been spending throughout, but as you think about fiscal 2024, you know, where does some of that flexibility go? Where are you in reinvesting the flexibility?
I'll turn to my friend, Andre.
He's going to tell me it's not flexibility.
Right.
Sorry.
No, look, if, if you, if you just look at the cumulative impact, we saw almost 50% of earnings wiped out from commodity effects, transportation, labor inflation over the last 2 years. We right now see about $800 million of after-tax help from commodities, but that's offset by headwinds of $400 million-$500 million from FX and about $200 million from interest expense. So that flexibility to the P&L is, is still very limited compared to the, incremental cost increases that we saw. So, that's not to say that we won't invest, as Jo n said, I think the ROIs of our investments are generally very high. The ability to generate higher ROIs with more capability in media, for example, better copy quality. We've got strong innovation out there that still has runway to support, drive volume growth and penetration.
And we'll continue to do that, but it has to deliver a positive ROI, not because there's flexibility in the P&L. So I think our guidance reflects the flexibility of P&L that we see, but we tend to run the businesses very decentralized. So the CEOs of the sectors make the decisions on what is right for their business to invest behind, and we generally don't step in. We trust them to generate positive ROI, and ultimately, their scorecards are focused on Total Shareholder Return. So that's how the system works. But I wouldn't see, again, for me, there's no correlation between investment levels and flexibility generated by commodity declines. It's more about the ability to create return on investment.
Just to bring some quantification to that constructive discipline that Andre refers to, looking for high return investments. If you look at the last 5 years, the team built $15 billion in incremental sales, which puts us at the 85th percentile of the S&P 500. At the same time, they built $5 billion in incremental profit, which puts us at the 90th percentile of the S&P 500. Over that 5-year period, building $180 billion in additional market cap. That's, you know, that's the model, and we'll stick with it.
Okay. I know it's only, you know, a little over a month, I guess, since you reported, and Andre, you referenced this, but I, there's been so much change, right? All the time, very, very short period time. So just wanted to confirm kind of current expectations for raw materials and FX, as you know, $400 million net headwind, net, excuse me, net tailwind, still the right way to think about the outlook for 2024. And I guess also, you know, should the $800 million in raw material benefits not materialize, you know, what would be some levers you could pull in the P&L to keep the, well, keep the strategy intact?
Yeah, I think we're still in that ballpark. What I'll tell you, though, is the commodity basket is not stable. So there's run-ups in some commodities, and some commodities are easing. It's still changing on a weekly basis. There is no consistent easing of input costs, I will tell you, that we see beyond what we communicated in our guidance. There's obviously a number of other dynamics at play, which we generally accommodate in our guidance, so we have a level of volatility that we include when we put the guidance range together. We still feel very comfortable with that, with that range. The best news, I think, is the business continues to grow strongly. Again, as Jon said, 5, 6, 6, 7, 7% organic sales growth, and we, for guidance, want to remain at that range.
When volume returns, that provides leverage in the manufacturing and the logistics side, that will be helping our productivity. Our structural savings, our productivity efforts have returned to pre-COVID levels, so between $2 billion-$2.2 billion of gross savings, that provides flexibility. And again, if we do it right, every dollar we invest will increase top line, will increase growth contribution. So we feel, I think, sufficiently equipped within the P&L to deal with the variability that's out there. That's no guarantee. Big things can go wrong, but within the reasonable range that we see, I think we feel confident in our ability.
And then last quarter, this time, you know, P&G was in a spot where capacity wasn't keeping up with demand, you know, in certain spots in the U.S., so Tampax, Tide PODS. So today, give us where you are in that capacity rebuild opportunity, and if there are other spots that are still kind of newly or, you know, continue to be capacity constrained.
Yeah, certainly. So let me first frame the capacity constraint dynamic. I think this is important. It does. You know, during COVID, we had days or weeks where we were constrained with our ability to operate, to procure materials, to secure transportation for finished product to our retail partners. The dynamic now is not that. We're largely through that. There are days and hours, but generally, we're through that. The dynamic is actually a very exciting one, I think. How can you be excited about capacity constraint? Well, it's being driven by those instances where we bring superiority together, product, package, communication, go-to-market, and value. When that all comes together, we frankly underestimated the demand that's associated with that and the market growth that's associated with that.
So the vast majority of areas where we're still working to quickly build more capacity reflects those situations. The capacity situation that we had on detergents towards the end of the year prior was driven by that. The capacity situation that we've had on our high-end sun and protection products was driven by that. Now, we've now got capacity on stream, are shipping those products to full demand. There are still a couple of areas that just for competitively sensitive reasons I don't want to go into the details, but we're in much better shape. We'll continue to try to stretch our supply capability through demand creation, and we'll work to bring capacity on stream.
Okay. Let's switch to get a little more specific.
Okay.
So I guess, you know, last year, last quarter, right? So much talk about the health of the consumer, and I think a big concern had been how P&G's brand portfolio would fare in a more challenged economic environment. Like global value share, flat over the past year. So it seemed like held in pretty well. But I guess as we look back, are there some brands or categories that, in hindsight, you maybe would have managed differently in terms of pricing, innovation, or merchandising? And if there's anything, you're doing to refocus these efforts to capture more of this, like, cash-conscious consumer particularly, is there concern about things could still get tougher from here?
Of course, we don't have a 100% accurate view of all the moving pieces in the marketplace at any given time. So it's difficult for us to predict exactly what competitors are gonna do, exactly what retailers are gonna do, exactly what consumers are going to do. So yes, there have been situations over the past number of years. Well, we found ourselves with the wrong answer, and we had to adjust, do that quickly and help our retailers understand that it was very to work with us to do that quickly. And the organization has done a great job in that regard.
So our job is to wake up every morning, put both feet on the floor, understand the situation as it exists today in reality, not as we would want to see it, and respond accordingly, which we have increasing tools to do more effectively than in the past. Much more visibility into what's happening in the stores, what are the relative competitive price points, et cetera. Now, aggregate macro standpoint, do I think that we made significant errors that need to be corrected for? I don't. The business results bear that out and are consistent with that. So this is, you know, by channel, by brand, by country, operations, nothing that's strategically misaligned.
I think the biggest, just to add, Jon, the biggest learning, I think, for the team and for us was when we are able to combine strong innovation with pricing, it makes all the difference. Western Europe was the most difficult market through the last 18 months, but we've had probably the strongest innovation pipeline combined with pricing in those markets. Even in the most difficult environment, we're now able to grow volume share and value share by combining it with innovation, providing value to retailers and to consumers. So the recipe really worked.
Okay, let me. I'm gonna stick with Western Europe, because your growth in your European focus markets, even prior to the latest wave of pricing, has been really resilient, as you pointed out. Market shares are stable or look stable in the open data we get, anyway. I mean, even in some cases, you're growing share where there's high private label exposure. So I am curious to talk more about kind of what could derail the strength. Let's take it on the other side. You know, and how might you tweak the playbook in that case? And your views also on Western European growth in the medium term. I mean, does anything change in terms of the growth profile of the Western European marketplace?
As long as we continue to successfully innovate and delight consumers, there's no reason that any of our markets can't grow and grow profitably, and that includes Western Europe. It's the progress of the team there is just remarkable. And there's nothing in the story that causes us to blink, to step back, to change. In fact, we want to double down on our strategy in Western Europe and other markets and keep moving. So if everything that we've experienced really across the world just strengthens our resolve to do exactly that, and if we do it well, we'll be in great shape. If we don't, we could have the problem that you refer to. I don't know of a substitute.
We have to succeed with this approach, and so far, we've demonstrated a pretty strong ability to do that.
You talk about there being no silver bullets, you know, when you think about strategy, and there's not one thing, and it's the collection of things.
Yeah.
I mean, the ability to excel in Western Europe, where would you put it on the continuum, maybe, of kind of innovation, market-marketing, org structure, go-to-market? You know, I don't know if it-
You, you've already provided the answer. It's-
But I want the rank order.
All of that.
Rank order.
You know, this is—it's a very interesting conversation because it's one that we have with our teams quite a bit. You know, human beings have a very understandable desire to simplify and focus. So I have this conversation in my office almost every day with: Okay, I know you want me to do these five things, but I can only do two. Which are the most important? Wrong answer. That won't work. You know, I'll just, I'll give you some data to back that up. If you look at our top... This analysis is a couple of years old, but if we re-ran it, I expect the numbers would be the same. If you look at our top 40 category country combinations, where we judge ourselves, this, this is about superiority.
We judge ourselves to be superior on four out of the five factors of superiority: product, package, communication, go-to-market, value. We grow the market, we grow household penetration, we grow sales, we grow share, we grow profit 80% of the time. Where we judge ourselves to be superior on three or fewer of those elements, we grow those metrics exactly 0% of the time. So the data are very, very, clear that the answer is the, totality. If we were still working through the old organization structure, I don't expect our results would be as good. If we didn't have the innovation on those areas I just described, I don't think our results would be as good.
If we didn't have a commitment to productivity to generate a financial flexibility to invest in these things, I don't think our results would be as good. Excuse me. So it's a combination of all those things, and that's, that's important. Not only important for our organization to understand and to execute, it's also important and to the question of what if your competitors just do what you're doing? Well, it, it's not that simple. It's a, it's a big ask because you, you've got to be successful across all of this in order to make, in order to make it work. I'll leave it there.
Okay. China. So you started to see sales recover after declining in the first part of the year. But just kind of taking a step back and thinking about the market longer term, changing demographics and an aging population, declining birth rates, lower consumption. How do you factor these, these pieces into your longer-term view on, on market growth? And, and how does it impact your work to grow categories and by definition, your market share, you know, in that process?
China is a market that we, it's our second largest market in both sales and profits. We expect it'll be a continued source of growth as we go forward. When we started coming out of COVID, we were very clear that we didn't expect, in our representations to you, we were very clear that we didn't expect the recovery path to be linear and didn't expect it to be necessarily as fast as people were talking about. And that's exactly what we've seen. It is growing, we're growing with it. You know, I think worst case, China on a going basis is a mid-single-digit market growth story.
When you take the size of the market, the amount of the population that's moving into the middle class within China, there's every reason to believe that under reasonably normal situations, that market will continue to be a source of both growth and value creation for Procter & Gamble and other companies.
I think, just to add maybe one point, I think the more normalized growth will also change the industry dynamics, where we've seen investment in growth at all costs, from a product investment, pricing investment, promotion investment, that's coming to more reasonable levels. Because folks realize it's going to be a mid-single-digit market, and in order to create value there, I have to pace my investments. I think it's going to be a more rational market environment that hopefully helps create value there.
Just want to touch on your distribution footprint in China. You know, brick-and-mortar versus online. I know your online penetration has grown significantly, but earlier, I think it was earlier this calendar year, maybe, or is it even this time last year? Talked a little bit about your relatively lower exposure to online channels being a headwind during Zero COVID. So I guess, what are you doing to shift distribution? Is it sort of a brute force or is it a, you know, is it a more gradual shift in the model?
Well, we like, you know, brick-and-mortar distribution. There's nothing wrong about that, and it can be even more profitable. But we do need to ensure that we are fully serving consumers wherever they choose to shop, and increasingly, they're choosing to shop in a social commerce context or e-commerce context with delivery to their door. And so we're working around the edges of our portfolio to ensure that we have relevant offerings in those channels that work for those retailers and that work for the shoppers that are shopping those channels. And that's a very deliberate concerted effort. But it doesn't involve typically saying, We'll take distribution out of the traditional channels, it's just a growth story in the emerging channels.
We're still, I mean, very candidly, we're still weighted to the more traditional channels, and it will take probably a couple of years to fully address that.
Switching gears a bit. Supply Chain 3.0. So, you know, we've written that we think supply chain is kind of like the next frontier where P&G will set the pace for the industry, and further separate from peers. So first, I guess, do you think that's a fair assessment? And secondly, kind of, what inning are you in implementing this next layer of improvement? How should we think about the development of the march towards Supply Chain 3.0?
I think it can be an accurate assessment, and I see this as a big opportunity. But let's start from current state. We have one of the best supply chains. I don't say that with arrogance. If you look at our retail partners, and their ranking of us in the annual Kantar survey, we've been number one for eight years in a row. So we have a very good team that's executing with excellence in the supply arena. But you have to ask yourself, across all areas of our value creation activity system, are there additional opportunities? And there are big opportunities in supply. So we mentioned earlier, supply constraints. When we were in COVID, in the U.S., 24% of our SKUs were on allocation, meaning that we weren't meeting demand for those products.
That's a huge opportunity right there. Now, most of those SKUs were our smaller, SKU offerings, but still, big opportunity. We talked about some of the big categories in the U.S. and other markets where we have opportunity to more fully, supply demand. That's a big opportunity. Automation is a significant opportunity, and COVID really pushed us along that journey, because we, we had to. We couldn't operate in a, in the same proximity to each other that we had been used to operating in. We needed, we had, we had sometimes of the, of the week or month, we'd have 50% of employees who were supposed to be in the plant were in the plant because they either were sick, they had family members that they needed to care for, their kids weren't in school.
So I think it opened up everybody's eyes to this big automation opportunity. One example, quality. Pretty important if you're going to offer superior products, and pretty important if you're going to be in continuous supply. We're still, in most of our facilities, assessing product quality at the end of the line or in the warehouse that's past the end of the line. And if it passes inspection, then it gets shipped. If it doesn't, it either gets reworked or scrapped.
If we could instead, on a real-time basis, with sensors and cameras, assess the quality and the purity, and identify any contaminants and ingredients as they were coming in the front door of the plant, and have continuous sensing along that production line, such that we immediately identified any issue, one, we'd be able to to correct it much more quickly, and two, the cost of that operation is going to be a lot less than the one that we're operating today, just given the very little scrap that would be associated with it. So those are just some examples of the opportunities. We're working hard with our retail partners to ensure. The conversation I have with our retail partner CEOs is: Let's think about this as one supply chain.
We spent years with us trying to optimize our portion of the supply chain, you optimizing your portion of the supply chain, and there's a lot more opportunity if we can look at this as one supply chain, which we're increasingly doing. So, yeah, I do think there's significant opportunity, both in terms of productivity and in terms of customer and consumer service. Whether that will differentiate us as a company or not, I can't really speak to, but we're all over this.
Good lead-in to talking about SKU simplification. So kind of a new area that you introduced on the earnings call, a new simplification initiative to improve quality of the shelf and accelerate sales growth over time. So, maybe you can talk a little bit about, you know, SKU proliferation, you know, if there's been an increase in, you know, SKU count on your part, what kind of drove that? Or if this is something that is more from a steady state, and we can just simply be more efficient. You know, is it corrective or is it, you know, a structural improvement, and how the conversation with retailers, or if we're there yet, you know, to have the conversation with retailers?
I'd say it's a little bit of both, but André, your perspective on the SKU simplification opportunity?
No, look, the, it's not that the number of SKUs during COVID or post-COVID has significantly changed, right? Our SKU count is relatively stable, and the category SKU count is relatively stable within the big brand of manufacturers. I think what has happened is, retailer sensitivity to the SKU count is significantly increasing as their shelf gets more and more cluttered. They have to fulfill not only their demand in store, but also their online demand from the shelf, which means in many cases, on the bigger brands, they don't even have the holding power. So they, over the weekends, they run out of stock, both in the back room and on the shelf, because of the number of SKUs that they need to restock. The cost of restocking is increasing, with labor cost increasing and labor availability issues.
So their desire to engage in that conversation, I think, is increasing. Generally, the categories we operate in are very inefficient. 50% of the SKUs across the world deliver less than 5% of sales on the shelf. So that in and of itself represents a huge opportunity to simplify the logistics system, take cash out of the system, take operating expense out of the system, but most importantly, make it a much better shopping experience for the consumer. So that's what we're after. From our side, for the first time, we're able to use retailers' data to convince them of the opportunity. So we have basically images of every shelf set that exists in the U.S., for example, and we're able to correlate that shelf set and the completion of the set with sellout data.
So we can go to retailers and explain to them, "Here is what it does if you have a simpler shelf set to your sellouts, to your ability to restock, to your on-shelf availability." That's a very strong discussion to have with them. So the opportunity is huge. It's important for us to make it a category discussion, not a P&G discussion. So that's the process we're in.
Just add one thing. You'd think you'd be serving consumers better by having a wider assortment, so more SKUs in the store. And you've probably all had the experience of the reverse being true. If we test consumers and ask them to assess the assortment level of a shelf, they will assess a heavily SKU'd shelf as having less assortment than a more lightly SKU'd shelf. How could that be? Well, they can't process that very complicated shelf, so they don't get to an endpoint in terms of what's really there. And that's why I said, I'm sure you've all had the experience, at least I have, of walking up to a shelf and walking away. I'm defeated at the moment I arrive.
I have no idea how to shop this thing. So we think that this can be something that grows markets, grows sales for our retail partners and ourselves, and does that more profitably. So it's a win, win, win.
So since you're trying to have a, you said, a category-level conversation about this with retailers and not just P&G specific, that's maybe a little controversial. So, like, how does that go? Is it a test store, you know, to understand data can be powerful, but-
We're category captains as nominated by our retail partners in a disproportionate number of our businesses. So this is a conversation that they ask to have, and we're very objective and data-based in that conversation. This isn't about - this is an attempt. It has to be about an attempt to truly improve the velocity of that shelf. And if you hold yourself to that objective, you don't run into some of the problems that you might with a different approach. And typically, because of the innovation, the branding, the communication of that branding, we fare very well in that objective analysis.
But you have to let the data speak. Having done this myself with many retailers, if you let the data speak and the, it's their own data, the credibility is there, the conclusions are clear. What we don't do is make recommendations on behalf of other, other manufacturers, but we present the data as we see it from the, algorithmic tools that we have.
Are there differences in scope for this program by market? Is it the biggest in the U.S., or is it biggest in other markets? I think we said U.S.-centric.
I would say the opportunity exists everywhere. We are further along in our understanding and implementation of the opportunity in the U.S. than we are in some of the other markets, but it's a global opportunity.
I want to just quickly touch on ESG, because going back to your Investor Day last year. You'd spoken about sustainable superiority, you know, and sort of using the same language, you know, on superiority and taking it into an ESG lens, and the idea of integrating sustainability into every aspect of the strategy. So could you give some examples of what that means in action and maybe like the trade-off between offering these types of products at scale and the impact on margins?
I think we can have it all. We need to have that mindset. So, we need to continue increasing our margin of superiority. We can't compromise on that. We need to do that more sustainably. And I'll give you some examples in a minute. And we need to do that profitably. That's the charge to the organization, and they're executing against that very well. We look at sustainability across three opportunities. One is our own footprint. I'll give you a couple examples. Another is helping consumers reduce their footprint, but doing that in a way that delights them, doesn't disappoint them. And then, innovating to create multi-industry solutions to very difficult problems. So I'll give you just a couple examples in each of those pillars.
The change we've made to razor packaging, first in Europe, moving from a plastic container, the same on blades, to a fiber-based container, almost all of which is recyclable. Parity cost, more or less, once we got the design right, but importantly, and this is how it should work every time, increased consumer delight. Why is that? Well, some of you have heard me joke before about having to stop taking my blood-thinning medications before I attempt to open a Gillette package, because it's almost impossible to do. Very easy to open, very easy to shop at the shelf. The graphics are very clear. The shelf is very well organized. That was not the case historically. I give an award every year for the worst shelf. Gillette received it two years in a row.
So that's an example of improving sustainability while improving consumer delight and customer delight and superiority. And that's just a red line. Because, look, we've intentionally focused our portfolio into categories where performance drives brand choice. If we give up performance, we don't have a, we don't have a business, number one, but number two, no sustainability objective is advanced because no one's buying those products. They're buying products that are less sustainable, that do the job. Another good example is the Ariel. Ariel is our detergent brand in Europe, or one of our detergent brands in Europe. At the Ariel ECOCLIC packaging, which takes single unit dose detergent packaging that you're familiar with here, that's a plastic tub or a jar, and puts it in a fiber-based package.
Consumer delight off the charts. 70% of consumers who have used that package prefer it versus their liquid detergent or powder detergent package. I could go on. I won't, but you, you get the idea of what we're trying to accomplish.... In the consumer use area, we've talked a lot about cold water washing. The energy to heat the water has the biggest footprint of the whole job. And our objective is to get wash water temperatures down by five degrees Celsius in Europe. We're already down two on average, so that's progress. We have the same opportunity in the U.S., where we'd like to get to a point where three-quarters of laundry loads were done in cold water.
And we've very intentionally innovated in the cold water space to ensure that we have a detergent for you that will do a better job than most of our competitors in warm water. So again, this isn't about compromising your experience, it's about enhancing your experience. And, oh, by the way, what happens if you wash in cold water? Assume your clothes get clean, that the colors on your garments stay truer, the shape of your garments stays truer, you get longer life out of your clothes. So that's an example of helping consumers reduce their footprint. The last piece of this, I'll just give you a couple of examples. Polypropylene recycling exists today, but the process, it's a mechanical process which doesn't remove odor or pigment.
So the product that you get out of that process is not usable by a lot of manufacturers. Think about food manufacturers, for example. Our team has created a process for polypropylene recycling that removes odor, removes pigment, and gets you to 99% virgin quality product at the end of the process. We can't make economic sense out of that just for our own operation. We've licensed that technology to a company called PureCycle, which is working to build capacity for multiple industries, the automotive parts industry, the healthcare device industry. We've done the same now for polyethylene.
We also have created and basically given it to companies who will help participate and scale this with us, the ability to put a digital watermark on a piece of plastic, so that when it goes through the sorter at a recycling facility, it can be easily sorted without a lot of effort in terms of what the content is of that piece that's coming in. So when you start improving the economics on the front of the recycling operation, you improve both the yield and the quality on the back part of that operation; you now have an economically viable model, which attracts capital from the capital markets. And now we're talking about real solutions to very big problems.
So sorry to go on and on about that, but it's another area of huge opportunity, where I think we can lead.
It was an upbeat note to end on, so thank you. Okay, we're going to do a breakout. Please join me in thanking Jon and Andre for being with us again this year.
Thanks.