Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for—sorry, good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us at Oppenheimer's 25th Annual Consumer Growth and E-commerce Conference. My name is Rupesh Parikh. I'm the Senior Food, Grocery, and Consumer Products Analyst here at Oppenheimer. I'm pleased to introduce our next presenting company, Perrigo. Joining us today are President and CEO Patrick Lockwood-Taylor and EVP and CFO Eduardo Bezerra. Thank you both for being here today. Just a quick note on the format of today's session. To start, I'm going to turn it over to Patrick for a brief overview of the company. Then we'll move to a few questions that I've prepared, and then finally move to audience Q&A. If you do have questions, please enter them in the question panel below the video. With that, Patrick, I'll turn it over to you.
Thank you, Rupesh. Good morning, everybody. Please, can you take a look at the forward-looking statement at the beginning of this presentation? Perrigo is a uniquely positioned global leader in the self-care market, holding the number one U.S. store brand share, a little over 50%, for a top 10 branded company in Europe with leading brands across multiple categories. We are a resilient asset in the global self-care market, offering products across all price points, allowing us to cater to shoppers across different economic cycles and periods of shifting consumer sentiment and habits. We've identified what makes Perrigo unique, and that's the complementary nature of our business, where each part of the business plays a specific and reinforcing role. Firstly, store brand and infant formula generate significant cash, enabling investment in key growth brands.
Branding and innovation capables also enable brand and store brand demand generation, leading to stronger customer partnerships and category growth. Consumer-led innovation can be scaled across our brands, our store brands, and different geographies. Our supply chain enables us to compete with more molecules and more price tiers than any of our competitors. A fundamental differentiating asset is that we have 250+ molecules and dosage form combinations, competing at 100% price point coverage, giving us the opportunity to serve more consumers given what they can afford and the treatments they need. Our core relative strengths are the breadth and scale of our innovation, the scale of our strategic customer relationships, the scale of our global regulatory interface, and the scale of manufacturing supply base, where we produce 64 billion unit doses a year, and we can now accelerate it for growth.
As you can see, we've got a phenomenal asset base to build from, and we have recently announced plans to further enhance our organization. We've anchored our strategy and initiatives behind three clear imperatives to drive cash and TSR growth and unlock the company's asset base. Those are to stabilize, to streamline, and to strengthen. We're stabilizing our core by returning U.S. store brand to growth and ensuring reliable, quality infant formula supply. We're streamlining our operations to reduce complexity, accelerate decision-making, and improve execution. We're strengthening our high-growth brands with focus on innovation and investment to drive $100 million - $200 million in incremental revenue as margin accretive by 2027. Today, we're continuing to realize the benefits of our stabilization efforts, primarily in infant formula and store brand OTC growth.
In 2026, we expect these stabilization benefits to continue, in addition to realizing the early benefits of our high-growth brands in the second half of the year. Looking out to 2027, we expect a full year of high-growth contribution, a meaningful step up in free cash flow conversion, and net leverage below three times as we exit the year. Looking at our portfolio, we're extremely diversified across essential global self-care categories. We provide scaled, predictable growth, with 40% of our sales coming from our branded products and 60% from our store brand contributions. Our store brand business has significant scale across consumers and customers. It provides important access to much-needed over-the-counter medications. We're also the largest store brand provider. Our products can be found in just about every major U.S. and U.K. retailer. We have unrivaled household penetration. Perrigo products are present in nearly two out of every three U.S.
households and over 80% of households in the U.K. We're the largest OTC manufacturer by volume in the U.S. and the U.K., with lots of opportunities for competitive takeaway, trade-down into store brand, and more recently, a potential tailwind from the Big Beautiful Bill in the U.S., where up to 8 million Americans could lose health coverage. We're highly cash-generative. This enables investment in our higher ROI branded growth opportunities. Today, this business is trading at a massive discount to consumer health peers, which we believe presents a tremendous value opportunity. Let me tell you why. Applying a branded consumer health multiple to Perrigo, based on our 40% branded split, means you could own the store brand business at an extreme discount.
As we execute on our 3S plan to stabilize, streamline, and strengthen our organization, we believe there is meaningful value to capture through multiple expansions, as we deliver low, mid, single-digit top-line growth, and mid-high-digit EPS growth. We deliver on our plans to reduce net leverage. We improve our free cash flow to net sales ratio, all while growing our dividend. I also want to highlight the continued strength in our branded portfolio, led by our international business, which has really seen turbocharged growth over the past few years. This business embodies the potential of our 3S plan on a global scale by delivering high-margin growth. Our international business has also meaningfully expanded operating margin from our streamline and strengthen initiatives.
We're seeing good share growth on high-potential brands, with disproportionately driving investment and focus on our most accretive opportunities, and we've moved to regional clusters, passing those savings to the bottom line. The macro environment remains very fluid, and we're seeing a continuation of pressures on consumers. This has translated into lower consumption across most OTC categories, partially driven by lower consumer confidence, slower start to allergy in the summer seasons. Specifically, U.S. consumers are seeking how to stretch their dollars further, which plays into our favor of being the largest store brand provider. U.S. OTC store brand volume share has increased 110 basis points in May, following a 50 basis point gain in April. Importantly, store brand share gains tend to be sticky. Additionally, we're seeing a trade-up within store brands to higher pack sizes, which is driving the store brand volume share gains.
These gains demonstrate the advantages of our store brand business in a challenging environment, and in particular, the defensive nature of this asset in the self-care space. In closing, we continue to execute on our 3S plan to deliver sustainable TSR. We are reinvesting in our highest growth brand opportunities. We're streamlining our portfolio and our organization to enable more agility and profitability. We're becoming more predictable cash flow machines with diversified revenue streams. We're committed to a growing dividend policy and deleveraging the balance sheet. We expect double-digit adjusted EPS growth in 2025, trading at a high single-digit P/E multiple. We're extremely excited about the future of this company increasingly, as we continue to provide the best self-care for everyone. Thank you.
Thank you for that overview, Patrick. Patrick, it's been nearly two years since you joined Perrigo. Looking back, what do you feel are the biggest opportunities of the—sorry, looking back, what do you feel are the biggest accomplishments of the company and lessons learned, and what has you most excited as you think about the path forward?
Thank you very much, Rupesh. Yes, it is coming up to two years later on this month. Thank you for commenting on that. I mean, as I look back coming into this company, the three biggest opportunities and the three biggest things that we've had to address to get to a strong foundation and opportunity for accelerated growth is firstly in the critical U.S. store brand business, which was losing volume share, and our service and innovation and cost competitiveness not where it needed to be. We're now back to 90% plus service levels. We're addressing cost competitiveness, and we're net new business contract wins. We're expanding our share as store brand expands its share. The international business is highly fragmented in terms of brand portfolio, in terms of spending, in terms of organization, which was putting a lot of pressure on OI margins.
We've now prioritized the brand portfolio down to five to eight brands, and we're focused on scalable growth platforms, developing innovation and marketing programs, etc., that can be scaled across multiple brand carriers and geographies, giving us much, much higher growth rates, share gains, and ROI. The infant formula business was also deeply troubled. Some of that external factors in terms of regulatory changes, international competition being opened up. After significant investments and focus in 2024, we're achieving the highest standards of quality on our infant formula business. We got to the highest FDA inspection standard of no action indicated for all of our sites. A turnaround of that business and much more competitively positioned for the future.
We went through a lot of work to get clear on our strategy, clear on the operating model, the business model, and our portfolio, and that now positions us to really focus on growth, okay? Attractive, scalable, margin-accretive growth.
Okay, great. How do you see the company positioned today in the self-care industry relative to peers?
Thank you. I mean, we have a unique and scalable position. I think our model is unique. I think as we look at key markets, what's driven that growth, it's obvious to me that that provides really our game plan to expand within the markets we currently compete in to start to think about new markets. We are clear now on our how-to, and it's a question of executing it in a sequence, financially prudent way. Consumer healthcare continues to be a very attractive growth opportunity, typically 3% - 5% across multiple self-care categories, fairly consistent around the world. Why you see a number of pure plays starting to emerge in the landscape, and they continue to develop their game plans and their long-term strategies as well, which I think are distinct and in many ways complementary to ours. We have a clear, expandable, unique role.
We've been a leader here for over a century. We're approaching 140 years old, and our mission has always been the same, actually: driving accessible, affordable self-care for consumers who otherwise can't access self-care. It's the same 140 years ago as it is today. As we start to sort of scrape down into our asset base, we have a highly diversified portfolio, 5x - 10x more diversified than some of our nearest competitors. This allows us to offer multiple molecules across different treatment areas. Stated simply, we can compete in more places, but also across the entire value spectrum. We compete in premium price brands. We compete in mid-tier store brands, mid-tier brands, but also critically, we can access the lower-income consumer with genuine day-to-day value offerings, basically allowing 100% price point coverage, enabling much more household penetration access. Store brand OTC and infant formula, very strong cash-generative businesses.
This allows us, providing they're growing and we're managing them prudently, to extract cash to reinvest in very attractive branded ROI opportunity, which we can realize very often within the same fiscal year. It really is a virtuous investment model for us. We've identified a number of high-growth brands. We're very focused on those. The programs are already starting to impact. They're driving consumer preference and share. We will continue to disproportionately invest in those through A&P, R&D innovation, which we have significantly scaled down to get to bigger, more scalable, more financially attractive, more consumer-meaningful innovation. Also, we will be putting our very best marketers and the best marketers we can access to work against these global categories.
Okay, great. Another area that we've asked really all our companies is the U.S. consumer backdrop. How do you feel—how do you view the U.S.—how do you view the consumer environment in the U.S. today? Where are you seeing trade-down most prevalent in the categories where you play? Are you seeing the same trade-down effect in Europe as well?
Yeah. This is a volatile environment, literally changing on a weekly basis. It is an exercise in understanding and agility and customer partnership. I've been pleased how we're managing that. It is not straightforward, but the team is organized very well. We are seeing trade-down in nearly every category, including allergy, cough, cold, nicotine replacement, etc. The key concern for all of us, and particularly our retailers, is consumers trade out as opposed to trade down. We provide an essential consumption safety net, hence why we're just so strategic to our retailers at the moment. Actually, most of the pressure that we're facing from the retailers is investing in demand generation and innovation in order to accelerate category growth. We're able to uniquely do that because we play across so many molecules. Okay, we're category agnostic. So different. We're brand agnostic. So different.
Therefore, we can focus on what's right for the entire category. The good news is essential OTC products and categories are much less volatile for obvious reasons than other CPG categories. The volatility we're seeing is but a fraction that other categories are seeing that are far more discretionary. Our business model is serving us well here. It allows us to win in this environment, and we have a unique share growth and category growth opportunity. That's the difference. I think a lot of other companies, understandably, are having to play very defensively. We're playing very offensively. We want to win more contracts, and we want to generate more consumer demand and drive mutual household penetration. To your final part of your question, no, we're not seeing, which is encouraging, the same trade-down in Europe.
I think this is a short-term uncertainty effect, and it's for us to now convert that to a long-term business-building opportunity.
Great. Thank you. I'm going to jump to another topic. You're clearly putting more emphasis on brands. What are you most excited about over the next three years?
We have a lot of brand assets. We're getting focused on which of those brands matter most as it relates to long-term opportunity, ability to get to number one or number two position in attractive categories across multiple geographies. I think there is too little emphasis on the role and the tremendous market-leading growth that we're seeing in our branded portfolio and the role of our international business, which has really been a mid-single-digit plus revenue growth for several years now. It's been a high single-digit OI margin expansion for several—so it really is a high-growth machine. We think we can sustain that by focusing on a narrower range of categories and a narrower range of brands and scaling what we call our innovation chassis, our marketing chassis across more carriers in more geographies. One of our biggest brands is Compeed. This is a skin blister brand.
We're actually diversifying that proposition to a number of other related areas. $150 million. It's growing at over 30%. It's also globally relevant as a proposition. Mederma, our fastest-growing brand, grew net sales at over 35%. Both of these brands compete in what I call the skin healing category. Okay? That is a large, very fast-growing, relatively low-penetration, globally relevant category. Okay? And we enjoy a strong, very strong market position in that wherever we compete. April Daily Crunch Ascension is ramping up. We've seen repeat rates now of the mid-50s, which is the highest I've ever seen in CPG, which is incredible. And we're really narrowing in on the cohorts where that is most relevant and expanding our share of those groups.
As we look at our three-year top-line growth target, we do expect high single-digit growth contribution from our high-growth brand, mid to high revenue growth in our international business continuing whilst expanding margin. Most importantly, it's scaling those branded opportunities to more brands in more geographies because, frankly, we're just getting higher returns from those initial investments in innovation and in our marketing programs. We expect, after being appropriately risk-adjusted, $100 million - $200 million of incremental revenue coming from these high-growth brands. Really, again, at the core of who we are is what we call this Perrigo chassis, which is about scaling our innovation, focusing our innovation, and using that to drive growth in more brands in more geographies because it's just highly margin-accretive. Again, as an asset, store brand to win with low-income consumers, particularly in an uncertain economic environment.
High growth in categories that are underdeveloped where we enjoy very strong market positions, drive household penetration in the markets where we currently compete, and enter new markets in order to expand our footprint and our long-term growth potential.
Great. As we think about the stabilization efforts, can you provide some color around the recovery of infant formula? Any thoughts on Operation Stork Speed?
Thank you. Yes, Operation Stork Speed is moving at speed and is occupying a lot of our thinking. However, it is a constructive long-term program, is my view on it now. Whilst I understand, how can I say, some of the media highlights recently, it is a responsible program of which we are strongly intertwined, but I'll come to that in a moment. Firstly, for Perrigo, we had to get to quality-assured manufacturing. That has been an outstanding success for us. Our production attainment, packaging attainment, customer service levels are at historical highs. These are more reliable, more efficient, more quality-assured operations than we've ever had before, and in our view, they're market-leading. Share recovery is going well. Of course, it's never fast enough. It has recently slowed because of some slightly strange pricing executions that we saw in the market.
In the last four weeks, share is up to actually is up 20 basis points versus the prior four weeks. We continue to see very strong building blocks to exit the share in the sort of 20-22 range, which has been our publicly expressed target. How are we doing that? We're launching 60 new SKUs, which are rolling out at the moment. That will build our share of distribution, share of shelf, and allow us to reach more consumption needs than we can currently. Those retail shelf resets are actually happening now. They've actually already started, and they're in execution on those. We have to work through the emergent competitive risks we saw over the last few years, addressing uniform manufacturing standards across the industry. Subsidized foreign product has posed a shorter-term competitive risk.
We have to start to think about the consumer and the consumption opportunity and, frankly, get more competitive against that. We are under a lot of positive pressure to drive demand generation with these customers, whose consumers favor European formulation by starting to get national brand equivalent and, frankly, even within our brands, be more competitive at that. That competitive opportunity has just become more front and center for us in infant formula. Stork Speed. I met with the Secretary a couple of months ago. It was clear what the areas of focus were. We've been very encouraged by the FDA Commissioner's recent comments that the FDA will step up inspections of non-U.S.-based companies and try to move to a more level playing field in terms of notification, number of swabs, etc. Okay? We support any competition as long as it's fair and equal competition.
We share the desire to continue to innovate formulas to be as close as breast milk as possible, driven by good science, clinical evidence, and responsible, undisrupted manufacturing. We have significant interface with the FDA as the program progresses. I think we've had somewhere in the region of four to five detailed technical consultations. They will continue. We all share the same interest here, which is close to breast milk as possible for the long term in a stable supply environment. We believe U.S. formula is the most efficacious in the world. There is no high-fructose concentrate in any U.S. infant formula. Heavy metals are below the most stringent global standards, including California. I want to restate that. These are below the most stringent standards in the world. Okay? I know there is a lot of focus on heavy metal. It shouldn't become distracting because it's extremely safe today.
Gain will be extremely marginal, and we need to consider the return on that effort versus focusing on other safety and efficacious efforts. This is also a matter of national security. We're talking about feeding U.S. infants. All stakeholders need to understand the importance of this national security and work with that in mind. It is extremely dangerous to become overly reliant on foreign suppliers of such a critical food source. We do not expect the new guidelines to be developed without industry input. We can trace that from two years ago where there was limited input on the manufacturing guidelines, and that created, as correct as the focus was, because of that lack of industry partnership, did lead to significant supply disruption. I don't believe that will happen this time, and we embrace that.
Great. Another area we've been getting a lot of questions at our conference and just in general the last couple of months is just tariffs. Do you see any impact for Perrigo?
Yeah. Hi, Rupesh, Eduardo here. So again, the tariffs landscape continues very fluid today. Based on what we shared at our Q1 earnings, still based on 145% China tariffs, we expect 2025 COGS increase of about 1% or around $35 million. The annualized impact of that is about 5% or about $150 million. All impacting our Americas business with Oral Care representing about 80% of that and U.S. OTC 20%. As we highlighted at that time, we're working on the mitigating action plan right through pricing. We continue to look and work with our customers about potential benefits of insourcing manufacturing mainly in Oral Care into our Michigan facility and also looking to, we already have for many of the products that we have across our portfolio, dual or triple sourcing, but we continue to explore other alternative sources around the world.
If tariffs remain at the current, let's say, agreed 30%, right, we expect these impacts to be skewed significantly lower. Also, we're tracking the whole conversations that are going on with the European Union, right, because there may be some specific products in our portfolio that we have parts of sourcing that comes from there. We continue to watch that closely and maintain a close relationship and contact with our customers to make sure we implement the mitigating actions as fast as possible.
Great. Another question I have is just, is there any update on the strategic review of the oral care or dermocosmetic businesses you may look at potentially divesting?
Yeah. Just to give a little bit of background, right, so we did an extensive portfolio review over the last year and a half. As we highlight in our 3S plan, we streamlined our portfolio and prioritized our assets significantly on the strategic role that they play in the portfolio, focusing on the synergies of both innovation as well as category work, etc., that's required to win the long term. We really focus on the ready-to-scale brands in those high-growth categories that we have. We feel that we're positioning the other parts of the portfolio to focus on the cash, allowing us to reinvest on that. That's what Patrick alluded to in his presentation on the role that store brand and infant nutrition plays significantly on generating enough cash to fuel the investments on the growth side.
These two segments, these two categories that you mentioned, right, are both very attractive businesses, but as I mentioned, with less synergies with our current focus portfolio. We continue running that. You can imagine that Oral Care, given all the potential tariff impact, is creating further deep analysis that we're working as we speak. We are going to continue to share any updates as the analysis moves forward. At this time, there is nothing else that we are able to share.
Okay. I'm going to try to fit in two more financial questions. So Eduardo, your three-year plan targets a reduction in net leverage from 4x today to below3x by the end of 2027 with potential upside. Can you walk us through the key drivers and functions behind achieving that goal?
Yes. First of all, we expect a deeper growth to achieve that will help us in 2025 to achieve 3.5x . Also, in the near term, by 2027, we expect about $500 million of our payment loan A to be paid down so that we'll get those below 3x . We also have the ability to accelerate the achievement of those targets with any proceeds that could come from these portfolio assessments that we're doing to maximize shareholder value.
Great. My final question, just following up on your leverage targets, your three-year plan also calls for a 200 basis point improvement in free cash flow as a percent of sales. Can you walk us through the key building blocks that drive that free cash flow expansion?
Yes. One thing that I want to really emphasize, this is a metric that is very critical for us, given all the feedback we got from investors and many other stakeholders, to the point that our long-term incentives, it's really based on how we're going to be able to really increase that free cash flow or net sales ratio over time. I would say there are mainly three components that will enable us to really significantly increase that. We continue to work on our inventory levels, right? Both in A and I, as we optimize our operations in A, as we continue to work with our retailers on how do we optimize our IBP, integrated business planning process, forecast accuracy, we expect that to have a positive effect, as well as in our international business.
As Patrick highlighted, focusing on the key growth brands, we're going to be able to adjust our safety stock higher on those areas, but deprioritize on our lower brands. That is a key emphasis on us. The second piece is, over the last two years, you saw significant restructuring costs and also associated with the accretive initiatives, both the supply chain reinvention as well as Project Energize. That also will help free up more cash. In the absence of the infant formula self-remediation cost, that drove a significant impact in 2024 on the one-time cost that we had to incur. The last piece, we continue to focus through our beta growth to improve our operating cash flow.
With some key investments that we're doing CapEx on our infant formula network to really optimize that, that will also help beyond 2027 to achieve significant upside on our free cash flow over next years.
Great. Thank you. Thank you, Patrick and Eduardo, for joining us today.
Thank you, Rupesh.
It's a pleasure. Thank you.