Coty Inc. (COTY) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
February 19, 2025
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Unknown Analyst
analystGood afternoon. If we could find our seats, please. Our next presenters are Coty, which is home to over 30 fragrance, cosmetics and skin care brands globally, including Gucci, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Kylie, COVERGIRL and Sally Hansen and is dual listed on the NYSE and Paris Exchange. Joining us from the company are CEO Sue Nabi and CFO Laurent Mercier. Since Sue became CEO in September 2020, Coty has grown ahead of the market by leveraging both its prestige and mass fragrances, building out its Consumer Beauty franchise and reaching key sustainability milestones. To talk about Coty's growth from here, please welcome Sue and Laurent.
Sue Nabi
executiveThank you, [ Olivia ]. Welcome, everyone. So we're happy to be presenting this year again at CAGNY. So of course, we are mindful of the many crosswinds facing the beauty market today. But thanks to our 120-year history, Coty knows better than most that beauty is a resilient and purely offer-driven industry. Beauty has grown at an annual rate of 3% to 4% over the last 20 years alone, and it is widely expected to continue the same trend. While we can rely on the consistency of beauty demand, we also know that the only constant in this industry and the world, by the way, is change. And nobody knows change better than Coty. After the last 4 successful years of reinvigorating our portfolio, significantly strengthening our financials and outperforming peers, 2025 will be a pivotal year for Coty as we adapt. We will find new ways of working, new efficiencies, new culture, new moves, new frameworks to organize and fuel our outperformance for the many years to come. So our focus today is to show our strong strategic and financial progress in the last 4 years and how we are adjusting our strategy in step with the rapid evolution of the global beauty market to fuel our outperformance. At our core, Coty is the best-in-class scenting player with multi-category beauty expertise. As you can see, Coty is a global beauty leader. In fiscal '24, we generated $6.1 billion in revenues and $1.1 billion in EBITDA -- in adjusted EBITDA. We operate in over 120 countries. We have roughly 12,000 employees, and we have 8 manufacturing plants, including the largest global fragrance plant. And we maintain the top 2 position in fragrances and mass color cosmetics. Our beautiful portfolio of brands reaches consumers across all price points, as you can see. Our mass brands like COVERGIRL or Monange in Brazil have product offering price at under $10. And our -- on the ultra-premium side, we have brands like Orveda or Infiniment Coty Paris, which are priced between $150 to $450. Importantly, our focus on diversification means no brand is larger than 10% of our sales. We are also diversified geographically speaking with North America comprising roughly 1/3 of our revenues, Western Europe around 25% and Travel Retail around 9%. We are relatively small in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa. But of course, we see a lot of opportunity to grow meaningfully in these markets. A key differentiator is our end-to-end capabilities and manufacturing footprint. We have 8 manufacturing facilities across 4 continents, and several are ready carbon neutral. We produced over 1 billion products annually in state-of-the-art facilities with 80% of production being in-house. Our manufacturing capabilities are a crucial competitive advantage in today's complex supply chain and tariff backdrop. We also have extensive commercial and distribution reach. We run operations in over 20 countries and directly and indirectly reaching over 120 markets. Our brands reach over 100,000 doors globally from leading luxury department stores to perfumeries to e-commerce retailers. There are a few players who rival our commercial scale and reach in beauty. As beauty brands enter and exit the market regularly, one of the keys to Coty's staying power is our proprietary technology and proprietary capabilities. Our brands are strong with decades of relevance, whether it's Calvin Klein fragrance existing since the 1970s, Lancaster since the '60s or Rimmel since the late 1800s. Coty's internal R&D capabilities are the heart of the reactor, fueling our growth and staying power in contrast to hundreds of brands that outsource development to the same external parties. Coty has over 80 active patents and patent applications in fragrances, over 180 in color cosmetics and over 50 in skin care. In fact, Coty invented the amber and the sheep categories in fragrances. And we have the only patent in the industry around fragrance longevity. Our portfolio is uniquely diversified, as you can see on the slide, across categories but also price points. On one -- on the one hand, we have strong expertise across price categories and points. On the other hand, fragrances are at the heart of our business, accounting for over 60% of our sales and the majority of our profits. We are the only global player with a presence in fragrances spanning from mass fragrances up to ultra-premium fragrances. Our diversified presence supports our ambition to outperform the beauty market. Most of our portfolio plays in categories with a very attractive growth profile. For our biggest category, which is prestige fragrances, we see growth in the mid- to high single digits in the medium term. The mass fragrance category, which is 7% of our sales, is expected to grow mid-single digits. We are building our foothold in ultra-premium fragrances and in skin care, and these categories continue to grow strongly despite this complex macro environment. And the mass cosmetics and nail categories has been flattish to somewhat lower recently, though we expect these categories to return to moderate growth in the medium term as growing channels like e-commerce overtake declining ones. As we've continued to drive the premiumization of our portfolio, our Prestige division accounts for 63% of sales, up from 52% in fiscal '19. With our focus on continued premiumization, we expect prestige will account for over 2/3 of revenues by fiscal '27. Let me turn it over to Laurent to discuss our financial progress in the last 4 years.
Laurent Mercier
executiveThank you, Sue. We are in our fifth year of strengthening and elevating Coty. And it is important to remind you that our financial position is the strongest it has been in many years. We have outperformed our global beauty peers in 9 out of the last 14 quarters. While we were not satisfied with the sales results in Q2, no other global beauty player has had the consistency of our overperformance in the last 4 years. Between fiscal '21 and fiscal '24, we grew our like-for-like sales at a 13% CAGR. Challenges pressuring the beauty sector are driving our fiscal year '25 like-for-like sales outlook to be flattish, compounded by ForEx headwinds, but we do expect growth to improve heading into fiscal year '26. Since fiscal '21, we have grown our gross margins by over 400 basis points to 64.4%. And even in the current environment, we are on track for continued expansion to roughly 65%. This is squarely in line with the target we laid out at our initial 2021 Investor Day, when we guided to the mid-60s gross margin by fiscal year '25. We also delivered very strong profitability improvements. Our EBITDA margin expanded by 130 basis points from fiscal year '21 to fiscal year '24, reaching 17.8% and is on track to reach over 18.5% in fiscal year '25. This equates to over $1.1 billion in EBITDA in fiscal year '25, in line with the target we set for fiscal year '25 at our 2021 Investor Day. We grew EPS multifold in the last 4 years. And excluding the discrete $0.02 tax benefit recognized in fiscal year '24, we are on track for roughly double-digit growth this year. And again, our fiscal year '25 EPS outlook of $0.50 to $0.52 is right in line with the EPS target we set for fiscal year '25 at our 2021 Investor Day. The strong profit expansion we have delivered has been underpinned by a virtuous circle of strong savings delivery fueling brand reinvestment and profit growth. We have generated over $700 million savings through fiscal year '24. For fiscal year '25, we are on track to deliver savings of over $120 million and are solidifying a further project pipeline, which will deliver even higher savings in fiscal year '26. Our strong financial performance has fueled close to a 4x reduction in our leverage. We are proud to have reached a major milestone at the end of calendar year '24 with our leverage at 2.9x, the lowest level in over 8 years. Our consistent deleveraging has been recognized by debt rating agencies. Since fiscal year '20, we have been upgraded 12 times by Moody's, S&P and Fitch. Our goal remains to reach an investment-grade profile. And importantly, we are only one notch below investment grade across all 3 agencies. This will continue to lower our cost of debt, leading to real P&L and cash savings. Let me turn it back to Sue to discuss our strategic updates.
Sue Nabi
executiveSo thank you, Laurent. In fiscal '24, as you know it, we grew ahead of the beauty market, fueled by our fragrance leadership, strengthened cosmetics performance and accelerated growth across e-comm, key markets and key categories. While various disruptions are affecting near-term results, we remain confident in the industry's growth and Coty's ability to outperform in the coming years. As we organize the company to win in the beauty market of tomorrow and as we lean into our category, channel and market growth engines, we expect to return to a healthy growth algorithm in fiscal '26 and beyond. Beauty has always been and will remain a highly resilient category. Even in periods of macroeconomic slowdown or regular challenges, global beauty demand has grown 3% to 4% most years in the last several decades. Despite the current backdrop, this reinforces our confidence that consumer demand will remain steady even if selling may be lower due to tight retailer inventory and cash management. While beauty market growth remains resilient, it continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and we must evolve the strategic vision we laid out at our 2021 Investor Day with it. The first pillar of our strategy, remember, was to stabilize and grow our Consumer Beauty business. We achieved that, growing this division at a 7% like-for-like CAGR through fiscal 2024. Even so, we recognize that the mass cosmetics category is facing headwinds driven by shifts in channel preferences and consumer tastes, and we must adjust accordingly. Our second strategic pillar was accelerating our luxury fragrance and makeup business, and here, we have excelled. We've seen a historic shift in how consumers approach fragrances in recent years, which was not our initial projections. Our Prestige sales grew at a 14% like-for-like CAGR in the last 3 years with Coty outperforming the category, and we expect continued outsized growth in the fragrance category in the coming years. Our third strategic pillar was building a skin care portfolio. This takes time and patience, but in the last 3 years, we've strengthened our skin care capabilities, expanded distribution and grew our skin care sales at a 6% CAGR through fiscal '24, driven primarily by Lancaster and by Brazil mass skin care. Our fourth strategic pillar was building e-comm capabilities. Here, we've seen tremendous success, I have to say, as our e-comm penetration reached 20% in the last 6 months, which is to be compared to 15% in 2021. Our fifth strategic pillar was expanding in China. While China was a major growth driver for beauty for over a decade, it's clear that China is no longer an industry growth engine in the short term. While we remain invested in China, we are now driving outsized growth in a broader set of emerging markets and here in the U.S., where we see tremendous growth potential. Our final strategic pillar was becoming a leader in sustainability, and we are advancing on this. As we adjust our strategy to the rapidly evolving beauty market, our strategic focus is to leverage and overdrive our leadership position and best-in-class capabilities in global fragrances to fuel strong expansion with fragrances already over 60% of our revenues and an even bigger portion of profits. At the same time, we will grow Coty's footprint and diversification in a limited number of structurally profitable and growing beauty categories and geographic markets at scale. We expect the structural drivers that have fueled the renaissance in the fragrance category in recent years to continue. In fiscal '24, fragrances were the fastest-growing category in prestige beauty across the U.S., Europe and China. There are multiple durable drivers fueling this outperformance. First, household penetration. Prestige fragrance penetration in the U.S. has grown very strongly, but penetration remains well below that in Europe. Similarly in China, prestige fragrance penetration remains in the single digits, while amongst Gen Z consumers in Tier 1 cities, penetration is already over 20%, which is a great leading indicator. Second, consumers are using prestige fragrances more frequently. Half of U.S. prestige fragrance consumers are considered as heavy users, up a couple of percent from a year ago. And there are even more heavy fragrance users amongst Gen Z at over 60% of this cohort. And third is the fragrance wardrobe effect. Consumers of all age groups are using around 4 different fragrances regularly, which is a significant change from a decade ago when they had one signature scent. In this attractive backdrop, Coty remains a global leader in scenting. We have a beautiful portfolio of fragrance brands spanning price points from $5 to $500 and a full range of positioning: value-priced brands like Chanson d'Eau, masstige brands like Nautica, premium and premium plus brands like Hugo Boss and Burberry and ultra-premium brands with Infiniment Coty Paris. In today's very competitive market, we are strengthening our competitive moat against upstart brands as well as dupes. First, we have our own in-house master perfumers rather than relying on external suppliers. Second, we've developed proprietary technologies for compositions and consumer testing over time. Third, we have patents for long-lasting scents, which consumers prioritize. Fourth, we increasingly integrate rare, exclusive ingredients into our scents, which are difficult for a smaller player to access. And finally, we are deploying proprietary methods to prevent reverse engineering of our winning compositions. While these strategies don't prevent new brands or dupes, they do ensure that consumers gravitate towards our winning products and clearly make the difference between the quality original and the inferior knockoff. In addition, our studies show that many consumers view dupes as a method of sampling before they commit to purchasing the best quality original fragrance. The strength and breadth of our portfolio of fragrance brands is enabled by the fact that we are the partner of choice for global beauty brand licensors. Leading global luxury brands entrust us to build their beauty business through our leading end-to-end capabilities. And in return, we pay them a royalty fee. Our leading end-to-end capabilities span many areas, from industry-leading IP, including long-lasting scents, to a track record of winning blockbuster innovation, robust consumer insights and multi-category expertise, all complemented by state-of-the-art fragrance manufacturing. We have unmatched distribution capabilities with over 20 directly managed markets distributing our leading brands in over 20,000 doors. It's important to stress that the playing field is also quite limited. There are very few truly global beauty players operating and licensing business and offering true end-to-end beauty capabilities. Because Coty is one of the best fragrance operators and one of the few embracing the licensing model, we've seen great stability in our portfolio. Since fiscal '18, as you can see on this slide, the first full year after our transformative P&G Beauty merger, we have generated significant growth in our core licensed fragrance brands. And we've let multiple licenses for smaller unproductive brands expire, which combined accounted for only 5% of our license sales, highlighting the minimal revenue contribution. We also sold a few smaller licenses when there was limited strategic fit. The key takeaway is that we actively manage our license portfolio to focus our resources, make our stronger long-term brand bigger and prune the portfolio with negligible financial impact. Having prioritized our business turnaround in recent years, we are now back on offense, actively expanding our license portfolio. And the beauty of the licensing model is in its attractive return on investment, no upfront license costs, while established brand equity increases the probability of success and payoff. Key to operating a successful licensing business is diversification of the portfolio and reducing the license duration risk. Recently, we've proactively renewed and significantly extended many key licenses, including Hugo Boss, the biggest brand of the company today, Marc Jacobs, adidas and Davidoff for 15-plus years. In total, the licenses we proactively renewed and extended account for 25% of revenues. Big picture, 76% of our portfolio is either an own brand, a perpetual license, which is like an own brand, or a license with very long-term remaining durations over 10 years. This underscores the strong foundations of our portfolio. Licenses with the medium-term remaining duration of 6 to 9 years contribute another 10% of our portfolio, and we'll push to bring them into the long-term license bucket. Finally, 14% of the portfolio comes from licenses, where the remaining duration is shorter at approximately 3.5 years. Within this 14%, no single brand accounts for over 10% of sales. 3.5 years is still a relatively long period, especially in the world of today, which could result in any number of outcomes. Importantly, we are preparing our business for all scenarios to ensure that even if one brand is no longer in our portfolio after 3.5 years, this does not set our business back. How are we doing this? First, we are proactively overdriving the brands in our portfolio with the biggest growth potential and very long remaining license duration. Second, we are adding new licenses to our portfolio, creating a pipeline of brands to unlock new geographies, channels and consumer territories. In fiscal '24, we not only renewed and extended our long-term license with Marc Jacobs but also expanded the scope of the license to include makeup. With the scope expansion and active development underway, we are on track to launch Marc Jacobs makeup in calendar year '26. In fiscal '24, we also signed licenses with 2 distinct Italian luxury brands Marni and Etro. The beauty lines for both brands are expected to launch in fiscal '27. In December, we announced the major license agreement with Swarovski. This iconic crystal and jewelry brand known for pop luxury has been around for over a century with a presence in over 100 markets. We see tremendous opportunity for Swarovski, and we -- and when we launch in fiscal '27, we'll unlock distribution in Swarovski's 2.300 doors in addition to thousands of traditional beauty retailers. We are, of course, continuing active discussions with many other fashion and lifestyle brands covering many different price points and brand territories with the goal of continuing to add 1 to 2 licenses per year to our portfolio. Between Marc Jacobs makeup, Marni, Etro, Swarovski and other brands in the pipeline, we are targeting over $300 million in revenues from new brands by fiscal '29 with continued expansion in the following years. By proactively extending the duration of our major brands, overdriving the growth of our high-potential, long-duration brands and adding new attractive brands to our portfolio, we are well positioned for sustained growth in our fragrance business. Now I'll share our strategy and outlook for our categories. Prestige fragrances are our largest business, accounting for 56% of our fiscal '24 sales. We believe the structural changes in consumer behavior should drive mid- to high single-digit growth for this category globally in the medium term. In the last 5 years, the prestige fragrance market in the 3 key geographies, U.S., Europe and China, expanded by 1.5x or a strong CAGR of 8%. We estimate that the biggest contributors to this growth were premiumization to more concentrated and sophisticated scents, pricing and the fragrance wardrobe effect. Contributing, to a lesser extent, was international tourism and the increase in household penetration. Our forecast suggests the category should grow at 5% to 7% CAGR over the next 5 years, led by premiumization, penetration growth in the U.S. and in China and unit per user. Our analysis show the U.S. will drive the category growth in the coming years, too. The global prestige fragrance market remains highly concentrated, dominated by designer brand. And this slide is very important. And over the last 5 years, despite the inflow of new brands, the category has retained its concentration. Designer brands like Burberry and Hugo Boss account for around 90% of the top 20 brand revenues. This is the best demonstration that prestige fragrances are immune from the dupe phenomenon as the concentration of the top 20 brands and the designer brand proportion have both modestly increased in the last 5 years. So why are prestige fragrances more immune to fragmentation than other categories? We believe that it has to do with the emotional and aspirational nature of fragrances. Top-quality juice and packaging are a must, of course, but consumers also view fragrances as an extension of the aspirational luxury world, driving them to leading luxury names. In this highly attractive $50 billion prestige beauty market, we are the second player with 15% market share. And importantly, amongst the top 50 global fragrance players, only 2, Coty and L'Oréal, operate licensing models, which means that luxury brands have a limited set of partner options who can build global and multi-category beauty businesses. Our end-to-end best-in-class fragrance capabilities allowed us to build a multiyear track record of top-ranking fragrance innovations. Whether it's Burberry Hero in fiscal '22, Boss Bottled Parfum in fiscal '23 or Burberry Goddess and Kylie Cosmetics in fiscal '24, our innovations consistently rank at the top across all key markets. In the first half of fiscal '25, we've brought more successful launches, including Gucci Flora Orchid, Boss The Scent Elixir and Burberry Hero Parfum. With our top-notch capabilities, we are able to activate a broad range of our brands. Shifting now to ultra-premium fragrances, a category that continues to grow double digits but accounts for only 1% of our sales. The ultra-premium fragrance market totals over $5 billion. And given the robust growth outlook, we intend to capture a bigger share of this pie through our various ultra-premium collections you see on screen, including Ateliers des Fleurs, BOSS the Collection, Burberry Signature and the just launched Jil Sander collection. And on the niche native brand side, we are steadily expanding distribution and awareness of our internally developed brand Infiniment Coty Paris. Consumer beauty fragrances now, which account for 7% of our sales, are a key area of focus and are expected to grow by mid-single digits. Importantly, mass fragrances are a very profitable business for us. As the only global fragrance player with a portfolio across all price points, we leverage our R&D, consumer insights and manufacturing capabilities across the full range. The traditional mass fragrance market, including eau de parfum, eau de toilette, is a sizable market at $7 billion in developed regions, including U.S. and Europe. And we are the #1 mass fragrance player in these developed markets. Not only we are the top player in the fragmented mass fragrance market. We are also significantly larger than the next several players, positioning us well to add new license brands. Importantly, the mass fragrance opportunity in developing markets now is almost double the size of developed market at $12 billion, including Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, and we are only starting to crack the surface of these markets. Similarly, we are becoming -- we are beginning, sorry, to extend our brands from traditional eau de toilette and eau de parfum to fragrance mists, which are much lighter in concentration with lower pricing. And this, again, represents a huge opportunity given the market size of mists of $7 billion. To expand in each of these markets, we will leverage our strong brand portfolio. Our brands like adidas, David Beckham or Vera Wang each have strong brand equities, distinct positionings and different and complementary geographic reaches. We've accelerated recently our mass fragrance business through the adidas Vibes fragrance collection, our largest consumer beauty launch in over 6 years. Early results are very strong with double-digit brand sales growth, market share gains in launch market and plans for further expansion. Importantly, as we expand the distribution of the adidas Vibe collection, we are cementing adidas Vibes as a scenting platform, which can extend into additional scenting adjacencies. Our right to win in many scenting adjacencies, including fragrance mists, is exemplified in Germany. Our leading fragrance brand there, Bruno Banani, which is more or less the size of Hugo Boss in the same country, expanded to fragrance mists and has become the #2 mist collection on the market in terms of both value and volume. We are also co-creating scenting projects with key retailers you see on screen. Through these projects, we have secured distribution in nearly 2,000 Target doors, 4,700 Walmart doors and over 5,000 doors in the A.S. Watson network. Under brands like Pret a Porter and Chanson d'Eau, we also -- we are also launching value price collection as part of our strategy for bringing Agile Beauty to all parts of Coty's portfolio. Shifting now to our Prestige Cosmetics business, which is 3% of our sales and continue to be an attractive category growing at a mid-single-digit pace. Our goal is to steadily expand our distribution in Prestige Cosmetics, aided by our balanced portfolio with a timeless brand like Burberry on the one hand and an indie brand like Kylie Cosmetics on the other hand. When we launched Marc Jacobs makeup in calendar '26, the brand will play in both areas. While we had negligible Prestige Cosmetics sales in fiscal '19, we've strongly expanded our footprint with a sales CAGR of over 20% between '21 and '24. Transitioning now to Consumer Beauty makeup, which accounts for 17% of our sales. Our focus is on continuing to elevate the competitiveness of our maker brands in the ever-changing market while improving profitability. Makeup consumers are increasingly selecting brands and product based on social media recommendations. We have, therefore, significantly ramped up engagement with thousands of influencers for new launches and broader brand building, driving real significant results. Influencer activations behind viral COVERGIRL launches drove a 4x increase year-on-year in COVERGIRL's earned media value. This continued strength in social media advocacy, coupled with on-trend innovations, resulted in COVERGIRL gaining 60 basis points of online market share last quarter, which is a great indicator of the real health of the brand. Similarly, Rimmel's earned media value grew 13%. The EMV momentum and Rimmel's leading innovation, including Better Than Filters foundation, supported 30 basis points of online market share gains here again. Leveraging this influencer playbook, strong e-comm activation and a robust innovation pipeline, our omnichannel market share of Rimmel, COVERGIRL and Max Factor is modestly lower but with strong gains online. Our cosmetics brands are outperforming other established brands, which have seen more pressure. It's also equally true that many disruptor makeup brands that entered the market in the last 5 to 10 years and saw strong initial momentum are now struggling to maintain relevancy. The picture holds true in the U.S. as well. Last quarter, COVERGIRL maintained stable to slightly lower market share on an omnichannel basis, while most legacy brand, as you can see on this slide, saw material market share declines. The work we've done over the last 4 years to reignite creative content, marketing innovation and in-store merchandising has step-changed the health of our brands. The Kantar equity studies we've completed confirmed that the equities of both Rimmel and COVERGIRL have increased by 60% in the last 4 years. As part of the next phase of strengthening our cosmetics business, we are activating a dual track product development process. We are beginning to launch fast and trendy products under our Agile Beauty program with a concept to launch time line of 6 to 8 months as maximum. We are also continuing to develop traditional innovations, which are proprietary to the company and will strengthen our competitive moat. Shifting now to nail portfolio, which accounts for 6% of our sales. We maintain a dominant #1 position in the $7 billion nail market, which continues to grow at a low single-digit level globally. This is led by our brands Sally Hansen and Risqué. Our leadership in nail is driven by 3 core markets with Sally Hansen the undisputed #1 leader in North America, Risqué #1 in Brazil and Rimmel's nail line #1 in the U.K. Through our leading position in traditional nail color and nail care, we are also beginning now to expand into adjacencies such as artificial nails. Moving now to our skin care business, which remains relatively small at 4% of sales but is a strategic priority for several reasons: first, the attractive growth of the category expected to be in the mid-single digits in the next few years; second, the higher barrier to entry anchored on proprietary ingredients and technologies; and third, favorable demographics as people live longer and turn into anti-aging and well-being solutions. We strongly believe that the path for us to win in skin care in a sustainable way is to infuse our brands with formulations that are top-notch and proprietary to the company to differentiate our brands based on efficacy. Our skin care portfolio consists of 3 different yet complementary skin care brands: Lancaster is the #1 prestige expert brand in photo aging, born and made in Monaco; Philosophy is the derm-developed solution focused brand with an emotional backbone; and Orveda is the luxury skin care brand anchored in pioneering biotech science and inspired by aesthetic medical procedures. Starting with Lancaster. We have grown like-for-like sales by a double-digit percentage CAGR between fiscal '22 and fiscal '24. Lancaster was the #1 growing skin care brand in China in calendar '24 despite the market declines, reinforcing that the brand is resonating in a very competitive market. And in Germany, following the launch of Golden Lift photo repair solution, the brand is gaining market share and is one of the fastest-growing brands on the market again. Philosophy. Ultimate Miracle Worker rejuvenating body serum was also the #1 body serum in the U.S. at the time of its launch. In addition, multi-tier influencer activations behind the brand have resulted in Philosophy's earned media value linked to influencer activity growing 540% with the brand now ranking #3 globally within its competitor set. Importantly, Philosophy grew by a double-digit percentage on Amazon, highlighting the brand's strength in the e-comm channel. Now the highly awarded Orveda brand continued to grow its distribution and its productivity in the U.S., which drove sell-out in that market to almost double. In addition to the Maison in New York City and Shanghai, we also recently opened a Maison in Paris and 2 studios, one in Bangkok and one in Singapore. Importantly, the brand's earned media value linked to influencer activity grew 680% here again year-on-year. Now within mass skin care, we have built our presence in Brazil through brands like Monange and Paixão. Our mass skin care market share in Brazil has expanded from 15% in fiscal '21 to almost 20% in fiscal '24, supported by successful launches of a face care line and a body hyaluronic acid aqua gel under Monange and a special edition lotion and body oil scented Paixão. Transitioning now to our organization and digital capabilities. Our significantly strengthened digital capabilities are visible in the results on the screen. E-comm sales in fiscal '24 grew by 20% like-for-like to a total of $1 billion, cementing e-comm as a sustainable growth engine. Importantly, our e-comm penetration reached 20% in the first half of fiscal '25 from over 15% in 2021. And as we continue overdriving this growth engine channel, we are targeting penetration expansion in line with the expectation of the beauty industry of 20% -- 25%, sorry, by 2028. Fiscal '24 prestige e-comm sales grew 18% like-for-like, contributing nearly for 1/3 of the divisional growth. Prestige e-comm penetration was 25%, up 100 basis points from last year. We are now the second player in that channel, and we gained 50 basis points of share. Fiscal '24 Consumer Beauty e-comm sales grew 30% like-for-like, contributing to over half of divisional growth. E-comm penetration in the division was 11%, up 230 basis points from last year, and we gained 70 basis points of market share in mass beauty e-commerce channels. We continue to fuel our brand through strong momentum, as you've seen it in social media, advocacy and recommendation. Coty now ranks #3 for EMV and VIT among global beauty companies. And across our brands, you can see the very strong year-on-year growth. For example, mass fragrance brand adidas global earned media value linked to influencer activity grew by 18x, while skin care brand Lancaster European EMV grew by 13x compared to last year. And importantly, as we ramp up on advocacy across our brands, our focus is on recommendation, and shall I say, durable advocacy rather than only virality, which is often short-lived. As part of our ambition to be a leader in sustainability, let me highlight a few of our progresses. In fiscal '24, we hit several key ESG milestones, further advancing our Beauty that Lasts sustainability framework. We are ahead of schedule on our 2030 Scope 1 and 2 emissions reduction target and set a new goal to reduce water withdrawal by 25% by 2030. We also expanded our gender-neutral parental leave policy to offer a minimum of 14 fully paid weeks for all employees. And importantly, a few weeks ago, CDP, a leading global platform rating companies on their management of environmental impacts, raised Coty climate score to A- from the previous score of B, putting us towards the top of thousands of disclosing companies. In sum, we've made major strides in this area in the last 4 years with more to come. Let me turn it back to Laurent to share our medium-term objective and to conclude.
Laurent Mercier
executiveThank you, Sue. The strategy and growth opportunities we have shared, coupled with our financial discipline, position Coty well to outperform the beauty market and deliver leading total shareholder returns. As discussed on our recent earnings call, we are seeing pockets of disruptions, but the majority of our business continues to see strong sellout and consumer demand. For different reasons, the U.S. mass beauty market, the China beauty market and Asia Travel Retail are seeing pressured demand, and our sales in these areas declined a little over 10% in H1 fiscal year '25. Importantly, though, these pockets combined account for only 15% of our sales. The majority of our business, or 85%, delivered 5% like-for-like sales growth with sellout even higher. There are multiple reasons our sellout -- our sell-in, sorry, is below sellout but largely tied back to either retailers managing orders and inventory to free up cash for store upgrades or retailers ordering more products from beauty players who are giving more aggressive discounts as they compensate for pressure in Asia. We also suspect there is also an element of elevated stock from last year as retailers ordered more of our products due to our exceptional sellout performance last year. We are not sitting still with a solid launch pipeline in H2 fiscal year '25 and an even stronger pipeline for fiscal year '26. In prestige, we are in the process of launching an extension to Marc Jacobs Daisy Wild and a follow-up to Cosmic Kylie Jenner. In Consumer Beauty, we are launching COVERGIRL Lash Blast Supercloud Mascara and extending adidas Vibes to more markets and have another mass fragrance to come. We are encouraged by these launches, but they are primarily extensions of our major success in fiscal year '24. In fiscal year '26, we have exciting launch and distribution initiatives planned, which we anticipate will improve sales trend even in the current complex macro and retailer backdrop holds. We will have a major launch under top prestige brand in the first half of fiscal year '26 and another major launch under another top prestige brand in the second half. And we will be expanding one of our top brands into the U.S., effectively doubling the brand's addressable market. We will continue to overdrive our mass scenting portfolio, and we will continue to expand our Consumer Beauty business into both emerging markets and new adjacencies. Last week, we shared our updated fiscal year '25 guidance, including flattish like-for-like sales, but at the same time, strong gross margin and EBITDA margin expansion and roughly double-digit underlying EPS growth. In the current uncertain beauty environment, our medium-term goal is to outperform the beauty market, which has been growing on average 3% to 4% over the past decade. We continue to target steady gross margin expansion, which together with ongoing strong brand investment should drive 20 to 30 basis points of EBITDA margin expansion. And as we activate our strong cost savings initiatives, we expect a minimum annual EBITDA growth of at least mid-single digits. Significant declines in our interest expense supported by deleveraging should translate into a double-digit EPS CAGR in the coming years, which should support strong TSR. These P&L drivers, coupled with tight management of CapEx and other cash expenses, should enable steady free cash flow expansion from around $400 million this year to over $500 million by fiscal year '28. This brings me to our capital allocation priorities. We reached a major milestone in calendar year '24 with net debt at $3.2 billion and leverage below 3x. We anticipate annual free cash flow of at least $400 million per year and steady EBITDA growth, which will result in leverage towards 2x by end of calendar year '26. And with leverage around 2x, consistent with an investment-grade profile, this should fuel real cash savings through lower cost of debt and lower interest expenses. We remain focused on divesting our Wella stake valued over $1 billion per third-party assessment and expect the net proceeds from this divestiture to be used primarily for shareholder returns, including share buybacks and a potential dividend reintroduction. Beyond these 2 capital allocation priorities, we will continue to invest in the business and will evaluate potential tuck-in M&A. But given the depressed level of our stock price, shareholder returns are a top priority. To conclude, after the last 4 successful years of reinvigorating our portfolio, significantly strengthening our financials and outperforming beauty peers, 2025 will be a pivotal year for Coty. We will host an Investor Day in New York City on June 18, roughly 4 years after our first Investor Day, where we laid out our strategy and financial ambition. This will be a great forum to share how we are adapting our strategy and our organization to capture the opportunities of today and tomorrow and how we intend to outperform the beauty market while also delivering steady margin expansion, double-digit EPS growth and strong shareholder returns. Thank you.
Unknown Analyst
analystWhy don't we take questions in the breakout? Please join me in thanking Sue and Laurent and the team at Coty for presenting today.
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