Reckitt Benckiser Group plc (RBGPF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everybody, and welcome to what is our second live Reckitt Focus On event and today, we're focusing on emerging markets. So shortly, you will be hearing from Nitish Kapoor and the team as we take a tour of our emerging markets. But firstly, I'd just like to say thank you very much for being here. I'm Nick Ashworth. I head Investor Relations here at Reckitt. It's lovely to see so many of you here on a wet, cold afternoon in December here in London. But I know we've also got a lot of people dialing in as well. So thank you very much for joining us. I'll start with the usual disclaimers around cautionary statements. There's a couple of slides in the pack. I'm sure you will all read them in due course. As with the first event in May, we will spend a bit of time going through the presentation. [Operator Instructions]. But before that and to start the event, I will hand over to our CEO, Kris Licht. Kris?

Hello, everyone. Thank you for coming. It's great to see a full room, and thank you for joining to those of you that are online. Today, we're going to talk about emerging markets, as you know. This is the largest of our 3 geographic areas. And while it wouldn't be good form for me to pick a favorite business and certainly not in public, I can tell you that this one is exciting. I think you're going to leave today with a deeper understanding of our business, but importantly, of the growth opportunities that we see in this business going forward. You may also develop a sense of why we feel confident that we can capture this growth. You'll see our brands, you'll see our innovation, you'll see our execution. You'll see examples of our capabilities when we're at our best, and you'll get a sense of the plan we have to broaden those capabilities for even stronger results. You will also get to meet our team. Members of our team under the leadership of Nitish, our President of Emerging Markets, and you'll get a sense of the depth of our local know-how, which is very important in these businesses. And finally, you'll get a chance to interact with them and see some of these capabilities more closely. Emerging markets has obviously been around as a concept for a long time. But actually, when you travel to these markets, as I'm sure many of you have done, you realize that some of them have already emerged. Some of them are still emerging, but some are among the most advanced markets in the world. And so this is a vast set of different markets, all of which hold very significant opportunities for us. So I'm going to leave it at that and get us started. Over to you, Nitish. Thank you.

Thank you, Chris. I think you made it pretty clear that you have a favorite. I'm not sure it's going down very well with people who are listening in from everywhere else. But hopefully, we'll demonstrate to you that we are capable of that trust. Good afternoon. Welcome to our emerging markets presentation. I'm very excited to present our business to you. Along with me today will be presenting Ryan Dullea, who I think you met at the first focus on event in May, who's our Chief Category Growth Officer; and Shannon Eisenhardt CFO, who I'm sure you meet very often. Let me start by introducing myself. I've been with the company for 32 years. I know I don't look that old, but yes, I have been here for a long time. I started as a management trainee. And while I've never changed my employer, my employer has chosen to change their name many times. So it was a [ Reckitt and Colman ] when I started, [ Record Banks], [ RB ] and now Reckitt. And I was thinking, and if somebody was asking me, are you aware of what the name of the company was before this and I went and I looked it up, it was [ Reckitt and Sun ] in 1938. I missed that by just a few years. Over the course of my almost 3 decades in the company, worked in sales and in marketing in the countries, in frontline sales and marketing. I worked in marketing in the global category organization that Ryan now leads and I've had many general management roles. I've had the privilege of leading our India business, our U.S. health business, the global category health organization in the U.K. and also some experience in Europe as General Manager, Portugal and in Africa as Marketing Director for South Africa. But it's not just me who has this deep experience like Chris was referring. Across all of our emerging markets, we have very experienced leadership. The team that reports to me directly, the regional directors have an average tenure in the company of 21 years, in Emerging Markets for 14 years, and we're very lucky that we have continuity with them in their current roles for the last 4 years on average. It's not just them. The level below them, which is country leadership, so marketing director, sales director, general managers. They too, on average, have been in the company for 12 years, of which 10 have been in Emerging Markets and 3 in their current role. So I'm very proud to lead this team that knows the company that knows Emerging Markets and has had the chance to really spend some time in their own markets. Today, we're going to talk about 3 things. So there are 3 sections to our presentation. Firstly, we believe we have very strong foundations in Emerging Markets. We've not been here for a few years. We've actually been here for more than 100 years. We've built some brands that are trusted and loved everywhere in the world. I'm sure many of you would have heard of them. With those strong foundations, we have accelerated steadily over the last 10 years from mid-single-digit growth to high single-digit growth more recently. And like Chris said, we're now the largest area for Core Reckitt. So Core Reckitt, obviously, does not include Essential Home and Mead Johnson. We believe that with our foundations and the acceleration that we've seen were set for sustainable growth which is high single-digit growth that will lead to value creation. And I'm very proud of our execution, and you will see many examples of this excellence. So let me give you a short history of our time in emerging markets. We have a really nice archive in [ Hull], if any of you have ever been there, it's a little bit of a museum. So we got some of these pictures from there. So our first recorded event in emerging markets is actually in 1899, right? So even that makes me feel a little bit old. But in 1899 is the first distribution that we had for the company outside of Europe and North America. We had our first factory in Brazil, and I can see that we have a lot of people from Brazil over here, almost 100 years ago in 1933, a distribution agreement in Egypt in 1953 and another distribution agreement in Nigeria in 1965. So obviously, some of this means that we were not directly in those markets at that time, but we already had some trading relations. The thing that got me on this slide is basically, of course, you would expect a British multinational from those times to be in many commonwealth countries, but we were one of the first companies, I think, that even went to Latin America, so almost 100 years ago. Over the 100 years, these brands are all very familiar to you. We have created some brands that I really loved have tremendous stature. So Durex was launched first in emerging markets in the 1960s, as was Harpic. Vanish is a more recent brand that we started with in Latin America in the 1990s, but the brand that really defines us in most of our emerging markets is Dettol. So Dettol, which you know well. I'm sure everybody in the U.K., I hope, has had the occasion to use Dettol. If not, please make sure that you get one soon. It's been around almost 100 years and this -- every time I look at this statistic, I'm kind of surprised myself as [indiscernible]. It's used over 1 billion times a year. So there are 1 billion usage occasions for a brand like Dettol which means 2,000x every minute. So as we've been speaking, it's been used, I think, 12,000 or 13,000 times already. And it's not surprised really because this is a brand that's loved and trusted by consumers everywhere. So you see some of the bigger countries in which we operate in India, in Saudi, in China, in Hong Kong, in South Africa and in Malaysia. In all of these markets, it's either the #1 trusted health care brand or the #1 trusted germ protection pack. So we've created very, very strong brands. We are very proud of that. But in some way, we are also the pioneers of these categories in Emerging Markets. So antiseptics, the brown liquid, of course, we were the inventors and therefore, we were the first to take it to emerging markets. but also in many categories that are now of scale, like toilet cleaners, condoms, more recently, auto dish, a lot of our self-care products like [ gastro], we have been kind of the people that built these categories. And we don't just build them and just wait for maturity. Once they have the stature, we stretch them into adjacencies. So the best example that we have of that is Dettol, the brown liquid, which was originally launched in the 1930s until about 50 years ago was pretty much 100% of that business is now 1/3 of the franchise that is called Dettol because it is stretched into personal care, it's stretched into laundry and also into washing machine cleaners recently in China. Harpic, it was actually the first brand that I managed as an assistant brand manager. And I was trying to do the math, lots of currency fluctuations and size. And I calculated that 27 years ago, it was basically less than GBP 0.5 million in revenue in India. And this year, I think we're going to cross GBP 250 million. So that is the kind of scale that we have bought to many of these categories in Emerging Markets. And on Durex, of course, in China, we have a really, really large business, which is lots of it is condoms, but increasingly also lubes and toys. [ Finish], Gaviscon, these are more recent entrants. But in [ Ryan ] section, you're going to see how they've also grown very rapidly. They're converting habits, and we have very, very strong plans for them. We now reach consumers and HCP. So HCPs, health care professionals, doctors, pharmacists, key opinion leaders at really serious scale. So last year, our products were available in over 10 million stores. I know that sounds like a lot, but please wait until you come to a little presentation we have from India to tell you just how many stores they're up. We shipped 125 million orders online and we engage directly with 150,000 health care professionals. So this is last year. We now operate in 67 countries, right? So we operate means that we either have direct operations or a distributor and these are managed through 6 regions. Our largest region is Greater China. The largest country within Greater China is, of course, Mainland China, but we have Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. We have South Asia as our second largest region, the big country here is India. We have Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal. Our third largest region is Latin America. And here we have 2 scale countries. We have Brazil, we have Mexico. And increasingly, we have Colombia and the neighboring countries around it, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, that are acquiring scale. We have the Middle East, North Africa, Russia and Pakistan region, which is more or less the same size as Latin America. And then we have 2 relatively smaller regions, ASEAN 8% of our business and Africa, 6%, but we have very exciting plans to grow these, and you're going to see this as the third pillar of our growth later on. So we are very well spread out, as you can see all over the globe. So Emerging Markets, like Chris said, some are emerging. Some are kind of semi emerging and some have emerged, but this is how we manage that. But there is obviously the markets that really make the bulk of our revenue that are very, very important to us. The top 10 markets are 85% of our revenue. You can see them here. I spoke about some of them. Power brands, which I think you would have definitely seen in Ryan's presentation in May, we have 11 power brands in the company. We have 10 of them in emerging markets. They are 70% of our revenue. The only power brand that we don't have in emerging markets is Mucinex, which is mostly a U.S. brand. But we're also very, very lucky in emerging markets to have a big portfolio of strong local heroes. So very quickly to give you an example of what a local heroes that you might understand, Lemsip is a very strong brand in the U.K. for us. It is not a global power brand, but think of the stature that it enjoys here. We have many brands like this around the world that we would have inherited over decades that actually gave us the first entry into distribution and really built a path for many of our power brands to follow. So if you've traveled to these markets, you've heard of some of them, but I would just pick Mexico as my favorite country here as having all of these brands that are #1 in their health care category. So [ CECO ] in intimate wellness. [ Pact and GI ] granted in, which is the Strepsils equivalent that we have here. And again, you'll see some examples around that, and Tempra which is a children's pain relief brand. So we're really proud of these foundations. We've got trusted love brands. We have developed the categories that are now very sizable in size, and we've got some very strong established markets. And all of that has led over the last 10 years or so, to very steady acceleration from mid-single-digit growth to high single-digit growth, and like I said, we're the largest area for Core Reckitt. So over the last 10 years, from 2015 to 2019, emerging markets was growing roughly at an average of about 5%. For the next 5 years from '19 to '24 at 8%. And for the last 9 months, 9 months of this year compared to the 9 months of last year, we have strong double-digit growth at almost 14%. Like I said, we're now the largest area for Core Reckitt. We were 39% of the business 10 years ago, were 42% estimated at the end of this year. Three of our largest countries for the group are in emerging markets, China, India and Brazil, and I think 1 or 2 are kind of competing, hopefully, one of them is going to bring them -- get on to this list by the end of this year. But also our CMUs, what do we mean by our CMU. CMUs are country marketing units, which means the brands and market. Now if we manage these wells, these are the real big pillars of our business, we obviously get everything else around it, right? 7 of the top 20 are now from emerging markets. And it's not just those 7 in the top 20 but we're very proud of the fact that we're actually creating a big pipeline of these heroes coming through. So we defined GBP 50 million as a sizable scale, GBP 50 million in [ your ] sales, in terms of saying this is becoming a really serious business that needs attention. That number of brands was 11 in 2019, and now it's 23 and the really good thing about this is that, of course, you would expect to see brands from cleaning from jump protection. I spoke about the heritage of these categories. They were always there. But increasingly, we are finding brands from self-care, Finish, Intima. So this is really expanding our presence in emerging markets on the lines of the portfolio that we have everywhere else. We enjoy leadership positions on most of these brands across the regions. And this is, of course, the great innovation that our category organization delivers, but also local customization, local execution. You're going to see some examples of that and we are very we're very proud of the fact that we've sustained these positions over many years. So we've been accelerating growth. We have some really scaled countries and CMUs and we have market leadership positions. So this brings us to our plans for the future, where we really believe that this growth is sustainable. We really believe that it can be high single digit in the midterm, creating value. You will see much more of that in Shannon's presentation. And one of the reasons for that confidence is apart from the categories, the brands, the consumers that are evolving here, we have excellent execution in many of our markets, which you will see later. So broadly, why are we excited about the future in emerging markets? So no surprise to anyone. There are rising incomes, new consumption habits everywhere in emerging markets. And we believe that we more than anybody else have the right portfolio for these evolving consumer needs. So as consumers are coming into new FMCG categories, we are very well positioned with our expertise from Europe and North America. We have strong brands, as you saw, and we have the ready innovation pipeline to lift and shift very quickly from Europe and North America. So we go in and we know already what we're going to do in the next 3, 4, 5 years, right? We have that. We know that that's available. And then we have industry-leading go-to-market strength in off-line execution. So that's basically traditional trade, where we reach a lot of stores in countries like India, online where we have a fantastic business in China that's industry-leading and actually helping us scale up everywhere else in the world, too, and increasingly OTC. So roughly 1/3 of our business globally is in OTC, but in emerging markets, it's only half of that. So it's basically a big, big opportunity. But we have a region that's showing us the way, Latin America, and that is, again, excellence that we want to spread everywhere. I'm going to share some numbers with you that I don't think are going to be a surprise to anyone. By 2030, emerging markets is going to contribute to 50% of world GDP, right? So from 37%, 20 years ago to 50%. And the thing that's really most interesting for us in terms of focus is that the top 7 emerging markets are going to grow at twice the rate of the top 7 developed markets. So E7 versus G7, that's macro that affects everybody. But in our categories, to we will see an increasing share of consumption from emerging markets. So this year, emerging markets contributed to roughly 40% of all consumption in our categories. In 5 years from now, that will be 43%. And the really interesting fact about this increasing consumption is where it's coming from. So traditionally, in emerging markets, we would look to the box that you see on the left the $10,000 income -- disposable income households that are coming into these categories, we would call them middle class. The ones on the right, $25,000 that's upper middle class. This is not a luxury upper middle class that we're talking about. We're not talking about people who are buying fantastic cars and things like that. But in the context of the CPG industry, they are the ones that are moving beyond basics to the next level of consumption. And this, I'm pretty sure is one of the reasons why Chris has decided that we are his favorite is because this shift is quite rapid, right? Basically 20 years ago, the number of such upper middle-class households in North America and Europe were about 150 million more than those in emerging markets. That narrowed down to 70 million 10 years ago. And for the first time last year, we actually have more of these households in emerging markets than we have in Europe and North America combined. And I would say this is probably the single largest fact in terms of where incomes are increasing, that makes us very excited about the potential of our business. What this does, the fact that we both have these middle class households and these upper middle-class households, it gives us an opportunity to, of course, continue to grow in our mature categories but also to start introducing and growing what we call nascent categories. So some examples, the mature categories are categories that have been around for 25 or 30 years, bar soap, toilet cleaners, condoms, stain removal, that's Vanish, handwash and multipurpose cleaners. Nascent categories, our vitamins business, which was only in the U.S. until about 7 or 8 years ago, is now gaining scale. And in fact, one of the brands is bigger in China than it is in the U.S. The self-care categories sore throat, gastro, all very, very small categories a few years ago are getting substantial size. And actually, my favorite on this page is intimate hygiene, which for the longest time, brand name Intima in France was a well-respected solid brand, maybe about $15 million to $20 million, we've taken it to China. And over the last 3 or 4 years, we've made it 5x that. So the potential of taking things that work and then taking them to markets that are actually not just emerging emerged, have many new ways for us to exploit new channels is not just limited by the size of what they were in Europe. We actually believe we can make them even bigger. And like I said, we can launch these categories, but we also know that we have a ready future pipeline, right? So at some stage, 5 or 6 years later, of course, there will be more innovation required, and that's already happening for Europe and North America. But for emerging markets, this pipeline is already available. Example here, Strepsils, which we've launched into emerging markets as a sort throat remedy lozenges. In Europe, we've already extended into cough. And over the next few years, I'm sure we're going to make it successful, which means that 3 or 4 years down the line in emerging markets, we already have a ready proposition, to extend Strepsils sore throat into Strepsils cough. Another example here, I would say, we're not just limited by the brands that we have in emerging markets. We borrow technologies, new platforms from other brands. Lysol has a great air sanitizer business. This is something also that can travel very quickly into emerging markets. And as you can imagine, with this the higher-priced innovation, we are able to expand our margins. So for example, the original Dettol brown liquid, if that is basically price per mill index then our latest innovation there is 2.5x that. So this is giving us some pricing power in emerging markets. And along with the mix of self-care and intimate wellness going up, our GM is expanding, and you will see some numbers that are very, very interesting. First ever in my career at least in emerging markets that have seen this kind of expansion on gross margin, you'll see that in Shannon's presentation. So it's all very exciting. There are lots of opportunities. We have the right brands. We have the right categories, but how do we ensure that we are fully focused on doing what we have to do to get this growth? And our success model is really very, very sharp. We have 3 growth pillars, and we have 3 execution pillars. Our growth pillars are that, of course, we must continue to grow penetration, in the categories that we've been in for many, many years. I gave you the example of the fact that Harpic [ 0.5 million], [ $250 million], still growing at double digit, lots of runway, developing nascent categories, right? So finish, that is still very small, can be much, much bigger, again, you'll see in Ryan's presentation. But also, there are some countries and I think Chris has referred to this many times as the third pillar of our growth. There are many countries where we have scale. But equally, there are countries that are getting much bigger on population with lots of GDP growth where we still have a long runway for growth, and we'll speak about that. But we have all of these opportunities. We know how to grow, but what is the differentiating factor between us and anybody else is, I believe, our execution excellence in 3 areas. Off-line go-to-market excellence. This is really how we reach big number as number of stores in a vast geography. Online, how do we engage with digital shoppers. I'm sure many of you, I don't know when was the last time that you bought grocery actually by physically going into a store versus getting delivered at home. And I can tell you in some of our countries, this is really maybe 50%, 60% of all growth and then, of course, OTC excellence, right? So the 3 channels we must execute really well, off-line, online and pharmacy. And that kind of reflects our portfolio. So to speak about the first 2, how we consistently drive penetration and how we grow our categories, I'll hand over to Ryan.

Thank you, Nitish and hi to everyone in the room. It's great to see everybody again here today. Last time we were all together, we kind of talked about 3 core buckets of things as we think about growing our category growth and how we manage our portfolio. The first is the strength and quality of the portfolio we have and the power brands that we've discussed today. The second is actually our winning playbook. And the third was how we've restructured our organization in order to ensure we can win today and going into the future. Nitish talked a little bit already about that portfolio. So we're going to focus today a little bit more on how that winning playbook applies to emerging markets and then how our new operational model help enables that as well. With that, let me start with a quick reminder of what we talked last time on our winning playbook. It all starts with the consumer and having deep, rich consumer understanding. This has always been at the forefront of how we've built our businesses and grown our brands. We continue to adopt this and continue to invest in it with human interaction with generative AI, but it continues to be in the foreground of that deep consumer understanding. And you'll see that come to life on a market-by-market basis as we talk about a few examples. The second big thing is around superior innovation, bringing superior products that consumers are willing to pay a premium parts for that deliver against their needs and their desires in that marketplace. Third on this was our iconic brands. We have a fantastic portfolio, but you need to continue to invest in those brands with innovation, with marketing spend, with the right supply chain to an order you can get these to consumers where they need them most. And last but not least is the execution. I'll spend a bit of time talking about the first 3 of these in context of emerging markets and how we really use those to think about driving penetration as well as create new categories. First, let's talk about continuing penetration in our mature categories, the existing ones today. As you think about this and look at our big markets like our intimate wellness business in China, or our Dettol business in India, Middle East, ASEAN, a lot of those same general metrics of how we focus on the consumer, how we bring innovation, how we build brands is the same. But sometimes, it requires a deeper understanding and it requires habit change and changing consumers' habits in order to open up their minds to categories and penetration in a different way. Let me first share an example from Nigeria. So if you look at Sub-Saharan Africa, you actually have 150 million STIs, sexually transmitted infections annually. 60% of HIV infections in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. That's about 25 million people infected with HIV. Now we and our brands can play a meaningful role in helping societal change, but also helping build business as we look into the future. Unfortunately, there are some common miss there around using antibiotics and other activities that might prevent STIs that are just not true. So a large part of what we started was thinking about how do we communicate in a people's way to help educate help inform them about these situations. But most importantly, is making sure there's products available when and where the consumer needs them and wants them. So in Nigeria, we created a lower price point pack with a more affordable condo material that enabled us to drive significant change in our overall reach and penetration. You can see over here on the left, the number of stores. So from 2022 to 2025, with the addition of this SKU and enabled us to increase our store penetration by over 50%. That puts products more readily disposable and more readily available for consumers around the world. If you look at what that means for our brand and we think about the awareness of Durex in Nigeria, it went from 26 million households being aware of us in 2022 to actually 68 million households being aware of us by 2025. So a significant increase in the awareness of the brand. penetration for the brand also more than doubled, going from 2% in 2020 to 5% in 2025 and our overall CAGR over the course of the 10-year horizon there in the market was 33%. So significant benefit society, significant growth for our brands. It all started with a deep consumer understanding to understand how to help change habits, creating the right innovation and the right pack sizes in order to drive penetration and creating that accessibility when and where they needed it. Let's flip to a slightly different category, and we'll talk a little bit about Harpic. Now if you guys remember back to our May presentation, you'll remember Pankaj talked about the [ mega watch ] and some of the great progress we've made in [ hygiene ] and the partnerships through that on our Dettol business through hygiene and hand washing in partnerships with governments, local entities, celebrities as well. If you move over to Harpic, we've also played a significant and meaningful role in this particular business. You may look up there and see the acronym ODF and be wondering what that is. It's open defecation, open defecation. Probably not a phrase you would have thought you would have heard, but it is actually a meaningful society and health impact. When you have a situation like that, you have significant transmission of fecal pathogens, which can lead to diseases such as [ colorat,tifloid ] and other significant illnesses that can dramatically affect populations and impact overall health and well-being. If you reflect back to 2014, the simple way to think about this is there were about 60% of homes in India that didn't have a toilet in the home. That's 60% of homes didn't have an active toilet in their home. In partnership with local government, with societal engineering over there as well as our brand playing a role in how we communicate and how we talk, we've actually been able to help grow that to 99% of households today. So 99% of households now have a toilet with an access in their home. This comes through meaningful partnerships with local entities but also meaningful comps around consumer change. So let me just share with you a Harpic spot that we can take a look at. Maybe if we can play that, please? [Presentation]

Okay. So great communication of the ad helps talk about the need within the area, but also the superior benefits that our products bring and the superior cleaning our products bring. In combination with that, similar to the example we shared on our intimate wellness business in Nigeria, you need a product at an affordable price point. So having a proposition below INR 40 and ordered us to change and step change how we were thinking about penetration and reach and availability of our product in store. You see great growth, if you look at the chart on the far left from the year 2000 to the year 2012, nice steady growth. Since we've engaged in the partnership, a significant acceleration of that. So availability of our overall products is a key meaningful component. This has enabled us to step change a few things. First and foremost, let me start in the middle with penetration. Going back to 2015 to today, we've more than doubled the household penetration of the brand itself. So going from 13% up to 34% of households today. In addition to that, we've actually improved our equity on removes the toughest stain. The through driving the societal change and speaking about our products benefit to the consumers, the #1 equity driver in the category is about removing the toughest stains. We went from 69% of the population believing Harpic was the best brand at removing stains, up to 82%. This has led to a net CAGR RAV growth of 12% year-over-year for the last decade for us on Harpic. So 2 great examples of brands, how when we look at meaningful habit change, we can not only provide societal good, but also significantly grow our brands and the categories themselves to even higher levels. Let's now step in a look at something different, which is actually developing these nascent categories that Nitish talked about earlier in the set. And I'm going to share with you 2 examples, and I think you'll see some others from the different folks speaking as we go forward as well. I'm going to start first with dishwashing. Now if you rewind back to 2015, there's kind of 2 ways to think about emerging markets and automatic dishwashing detergents. If you look at the penetration across markets like Egypt, Malaysia, China, Vietnam, you'd say, look, these are markets with less than 2% penetration of households of dishwashers. If you don't have a dishwasher, you can't really have a dishwashing detergent. Or the other way to look at it is when you think about that burgeoning middle class, Nitish talked about our upper middle class that Nitish talked about of that 25,000 growing, the sheer size of the handwashing category, this represents a significant opportunity for growth. So we've been investing in these markets and with the dishwasher manufacturers to help continue to drive the overall installed base of dishwashers. And I'll talk in a slide a little bit about how we do that. But if you take a look at the chart on the far left here, you'll see over the course of the last 10 years, there's actually been 40 million dishwashers added, installed in emerging markets. That's 40 million extra households that become a category increase in size. Now the most amazing thing is you're starting to get to a tipping point now, and this growth is becoming more exponential. So the projections from folks like Euromonitor are that over the course of just the next 5 years, we'll add another 40 million dishwashers as an installed base in households. When you think about the impact this can have and the materiality of that growing middle class or upper middle class that Nitish talked about earlier, the opportunity is significant. The good thing is we've been doing this for a while, and we have a model of how to do this well. First and foremost, you can't really have an automatic dishwashing detergent business without automatic dishwashers installed in people's homes. So one of the core things we do is partner with manufacturers around the world. We're actually the #1 brand recommended by automatic dishwashing manufacturers around the globe. But the interesting thing of how we partner in these regions is slightly different than how we think about it in our developed worlds. The benefit of all of our partnerships is the first time you use your brand-new automatic dishwasher and the partnerships we have, there's [ Finish ] there for you to operate with, detergent as well as [ Renate]. That's fantastic for people who are new to a dishwasher because it establishes the brand as one they trust, but also for people who are new to automatic dishwashing and establishes the brand is the first thing that comes to people's mind. So there's an inherent benefit that we're in all these new bases that are going to be installed. But secondarily, there's an opportunity to build our equity even further as these markets develop. So what we've done in addition to partnering in the traditional ways, you'd partner with the dishwashing manufacturer of getting our products in and having good relationships and how they're developing machines and how we're developing detergents to match is how we're actively communicating with them in the different markets to both help drive penetration, but also establish the equities that we know will drive our brand now and into the future. If we can maybe play the 2 examples of the finished spots, please. [Presentation]

So you'll see a lot of similarities with some of our dishwashing advertising in our developed markets. but you'll see some unique components there. Obviously, very relevant household situations and moments as well as relevant foods for the local markets. But in addition to that, you'll see some more tie-ins around time savings, efficiencies and how that can help benefit you. So it helps both serve the need and desire of growing dishwasher penetration, but also establishing our equity as we move forward. Over the course of the last 10 years, that's driven a net revenue CAGR for us of 14%. When you start to think about this exponential growth of the household penetration of automatic dishwashers in emerging markets, we continue to see significant growth coming on to this business and being an enabler of our total growth for that overall category of household care. Let me use one last example [ turn ] and talk a bit about our self-care business. As Nitish said, this is one of the big levers we think we have a significant opportunity to grow in emerging markets. There are both material market trends as well as overall health care trends that you see coming through. First and foremost, diet and obesity. Unfortunately, we continue to see rising issues with weight and obesity in developing markets, the same as we've seen in developed markets. 43% of the population is projected to be overweight. This will lead to issues with things like mobility will lead to more gastroentero, those issues and other health concerns as well. In addition to that, we see a significant amount of urbanization, people moving into cities. So as you think about infectious disease, air quality, other things impacting and affecting overall day-to-day health. And last but not least, is an aging population. As society, health care systems continue to improve in these markets, you continue to see an older and older population coming through and projected that we'll have about 20% of this population over 65 plus. With that does come, chronic conditions and health care things that you need to make sure you're maintaining and driving against as well as you get older. The good news for us is over our time in emerging markets and some of what we've learned, we've established a very proven success model of how do we develop our brands and how do we develop these categories in these markets in order to be successful today and into the future. First and foremost, when you bridge beyond kind of typical consumer packaged goods and into health care, into self-care, the health pyramid becomes incredibly important. That's how you interact with governments, policymakers, regulators, health care professionals, key opinion leaders, all in the total pyramid before you get to the consumers. As part of this, of course, we have very robust plans about how we talk to our health care professionals, how we talk to the government policymakers, regulators about our individual products and the benefits those products provide but we also invest and partner in really great overall partnerships. I'll give you an example of one, which is our global respiratory infections partnership. This is a collection of leading medical experts, key opinion leaders, academics, microbiologists, talking about upper respiratory infection, which is obviously a big portion of us between our Mucinex businesses, our Strepsils businesses around the world. What you see as part of this is there is a large portion of our overall upper respiratory infections that are actually treated with antibiotics. Now for those of you that know the science behind that, 8 out of 10 upper respiratory infections, aren't bacterial based. So they do not need or require an antibiotic. The overuse of antibiotics leads the development of super resistant bugs, which is actually today the third leading cause of death in the globe. So as we look at this, it enables us to both partner with these organizations to step change behavior change as well as drive and establish our categories. The second piece then is consumer education, and I'm going to share with you 2 spots around us to talk it through. Can we maybe play the Gaviscon spot first, please? [Presentation]

So now within this, you'll see some very similar things if you've watched any of our Gaviscon advertising here in the U.K., but you'll also notice some unique differences. A bit more focus on the science of what causes heart burn, where is it coming from and a bit more on the mechanism of action of how we work. Also the introduction of that health care professional at the end of the spot, which is that warming reassurance that this is something health care professionals will recommend. When you marry that up with the consumers going into their local pharmacies when they do have a sore throat and speaking to their pharmacist or speaking to their general practitioner, they then have the same messaging and share the same point of view on Strepsils, which -- sorry, on Gaviscon, which drives great trial of recommendation. Let's now take a look at a second one on sore throat from our Mexican office. Now the thing I will share with you beforehand on this one is I talked about this idea of antibiotic overuse and antibiotic resistance. In some of our developing markets around the world, there is a significant over prescription of antibiotics, more so than the developed world. So really tapping into that and helping people understand this is not necessarily going to have an impact or help your current situation and condition is really critical and important and a key driver for us in our business. So if we can maybe play the Strepsils ad, please. [Presentation]

So you would have seen in that spot a slightly different approach from the broader context of our Strepsils [ mentions], but the same general end result of people looking to want to try and buy our overall brand there, which is [ granite], which is the local equivalent of Strepsils. The interesting thing you'll see on both of these brands, these are the same underlying technology platforms on Gaviscon, but you see that coming to life as [ Loftogastro ] in Brazil because we have a strong local hero there and [ Loft ]. Same thing with Strepsils. It's our same underlying platform that's enabling us to win in other markets around the world. But because we have a strong local brand in Mexico that can carry it better, it comes under the [ Grandin ] branding. Last but not least on this is once again really about that idea of making sure we're driving accessibility. And one of the key unlocks for us in OTC, considering the complexity of bringing these out and sometimes the time frame to establish is really making sure we have that model right. So if you take a look on the left-hand side of the screen up in front of you, what you'll see is our focus on mega cities. You'll hear a bit about this in a little bit around the size. And obviously, I just talked about the idea that 80% of the population will live in more urban environments. But what this enables us to do is 2 things: reach a high amount of population, but also prove out the model before we then expand geographically into other parts. So in Brazil, we actually started our Gaviscon or our [ Lofdaastro ] expansion in just Rio and Sao Paulo. This allowed us to prove out the model of what's needed for health care professionals, what's needed from a consumer investment lens in order to drive the results and the share of results we want to have in market. You can now see currently, we've expanded it out to other megacities across Brazil and are continuing to grow this business and brand then. The end result of this leads to fantastic results here and now, but also setting us up for future success. I'll start on the left-hand side. If you look at our emerging markets overall net revenue CAGR over the course of the last 5 years it has been 12% on our OTC business. You start to look at things [indiscernible] and you step in [ Lutagastro], which was launched within the last decade. [indiscernible] is currently the #1 most prescribed brand for upper for heartburn and indigestion remedies in Brazil. That is also now true in Colombia as well, too. In Colombia, comes under Gaviscon. So where we have local heroes, we play those where we don't, we use our Gaviscon brand. Move over then to [indiscernible], which we saw the ad up there for as well, once again, #1 most prescribed brand by GPs in Mexico. That is now the same thing and it's true also as we think about our Strepsils franchise, which is what the brands carried under in Brazil, and a strong #2 coming and growing in Colombia. So continuing to expand out this piece around the HCP endorsement, strong consumer comms, married up with the right distribution and infrastructure as we move through cities. Let me finish with a little bit kind of a summary and talk about how we're continuing to leverage that winning playbook in order to make sure we're investing to grow in our emerging markets. First and foremost, R&D centers around the world. I think Nitish mentioned a little bit earlier, we have an opening coming up or maybe it was neck around some of our facilities in China, but we have great R&D facilities in LATAM, Africa, India, China, ASEAN. This is making sure that we have local understanding of needs and able to translate those across and has been something that's been embedded with us for a while. In addition, with our new operating model, we have taken people that are part of our global category teams and also embedded them into markets and regions, so that they understand the local teams needs the local team's desires and what we need to do to make sure we're winning with the local consumer and can translate that back to the global organizations, developing the projects, developing the innovations that come forward. The second big piece is continuing to drive superior innovation. One of the ways that we can do this is actually looking at bringing products at the right price points and the right sizes for our consumers, whether that's through Dettol and the powder to liquid opportunity that enables us to get broader depth of distribution, still deliver the great same hygienic benefit of Dettol. Over to Strepsils, once again, getting it in the right size, the right type of packaging in order to maximize our distribution through channels. And then we talked about the [ Direct Nigeria ] story early there. So both high-quality innovation, we think about some of the trade-up examples we talked, but also the right mix of pricing and sizing as we bring things to market to enable that depth of penetration that provides access to these great products for a wider set of consumers going forward. And last but not least is this combination of our portfolio. What we really have an amazing blend of in our emerging markets, as Nitish alluded to earlier, is a very strong set of our global power brands. But we also have a host of local heroes that carry some of those power brand innovations as well as enable us to hold meaningful distribution footprints in the markets where they are. With that, I'm going to wrap up and turn it back over to Nitish to focus a bit more on the execution side of it.

Thank you, Ryan. So as you saw, we have 2 very clear pillars, penetration, category expansion. And each of those pillars have very consistent frameworks, exactly the same thing that works over and over again. The thing that really excites me the most is all of those results are double-digit CAGR over a long, long time. We come to the third growth pillar, which is scaling up the next year of countries. You know that we have many countries operating at scale. We spoke about some of them. But equally, there are many large countries, both in terms of population increase and in terms of GDP growth, where our businesses are not that large. We've focused on 6 Colombia, Nigeria, Kenya, Malaysia, Vietnam and Indonesia as the next opportunities. Our businesses here are beginning to grow but we believe that they can grow much faster. And today, we're going to showcase 2 examples from Africa and from Vietnam. Starting with Africa where over the next 5 years, there are going to be 100 million more urban consumers. So just the scale of the opportunity in terms of consumers and you saw from Ryan what urbanization does to the kind of categories in which we play, 100 million more, and they're focused mostly in 12 mega cities. So we'll see a video now from Africa, from my colleague [indiscernible] who's the SVP there. [Presentation]

So by the way, this is one of my favorite regions. I was the Marketing Director here. It's full of opportunity, and I think we're doing really well. The thing that really is very, very interesting here is that Africa is vast. It's -- as you can imagine, I think it's almost like 19 countries and there's opportunity. There are some countries, but we can't go everywhere. So we are focused in these 12 mega cities. The advantage of doing that, like Ryan mentioned, for the [ LuftaGastro ] example in Brazil, is that we can perfect it. We can know exactly what works before we go any wells, and we would have reached most of these prosperous consumers. We'll move on to Vietnam where we have a 100 million delta population in Africa in Vietnam. There's a 100 million population, but this is the fastest-growing GDP in ASEAN, consistently 8% for the last many years. So Chris and a few of us, we traveled there recently. And frankly, what we saw gave us even more confidence in our ability to make some of these markets much bigger. We're going to hear from our SVP and ASEAN, Vijay. [Presentation]

So it sounds that's very ambitious, but we have a small business. So really, in terms of 3x by 2030, it means we should just grow about 20% a year, which we're very confident of doing. And by the way, I hope you saw that there is a little bit of a competition going, somebody wants to be 2x, somebody wants to be 3x, which is very good because we want that ambition to play out. So we've spoken about our 3 growth pillars and we'll move on now to our 3 execution pillars, right? And again, we may have these brands, these categories we know how to communicate, but unless we can reach our products to consumers in the 3 channels that really make a difference to us. We're not going to win as much as we have the opportunity to. So off-line, online and OTC. We're going to start with off-line and our center of excellence, actually, I would say, our center of brilliance is in India, which has 11 million stores. So we spoke about the fact that we're available in 10 million stores. Actually, there are 11 million stores in India alone. And I know that sounds quite incredulous given that you have less than 11 million stores in all of Europe put together, but that's what it is. Off-line is still very, very important, right? So it's a country that's modernizing, it's growing a lot, but a lot of people still shop in these stores and 85% of our sales of any other FMCG company still come from here. So what do you do when you've got so much land mass to cover and so many choices to make, and we have to be precise. And the way that we win in India, as you will see, is that we have very carefully picked the right towns to serve, the right stores to target, once we are in the store, the right assortment to sell and also to make sure that once we have our product in the store, that it looks great. This is a massive difference from many, many years ago, my first week in the company when I was walking around taking orders with a paper with a paper and a pencil walking to the new post office that we had mailing the order and then the order would come maybe a week or 2 later. And I think that data and technology, as you will see in the India example is a strategic advantage in sales, and we're doing really well in exploiting that. So we're going to head to India and hear from [ Gaurav], who is one of our most experienced leaders. [Presentation]

A sense of the sheer number of stores and how complicated it can be to cover them, but how using technology, we are very precise. So actually, at the end of the day, we have an experience both for you here, [ Anurag], who is on the video, our sales director in India, will show you how exactly those handhelds work. Every one of our 5,000 people on the street selling products are using that technology every day, they have an action that comes from AI that makes their sales pitch better, their assortment better at their execution better. So please do stop by. That's probably one of the most exciting things that we have in store for you today. Let's move on to online. So India, the center of brilliance for off-line. China, as you would expect, is the center of brilliance for online. And here, store surprise that 50% of the world's e-commerce is actually in China. So we have to be very good at this if we have to win. But even within e-commerce, platforms are evolving all the time. So what you and I use every day in terms of ordering things, they already call traditional e-commerce, right? And now they're moving on to quick commerce and social commerce. And social commerce is really an area of advantage that I think we have done very well. We are world class at this, and you will see some examples. Just for perspective, tick talk, which in China's called Douyin, has 800 million monthly active users. So you would say these guys, they're probably just looking at entertainment, that's not true. 50% of them are actually buying our categories on TikTok, and they're spending 2 hours a day on that platform. With the expertise that we have, we think we are ahead of our competition when it comes to speed of innovation, we are able to launch many new categories and products much quicker. Our content is powerful. It is customized we use that content and the fact that we have these digital conversations all the time for a very fast feedback loop, and we back that with great customer service. So how data and technology drives offline. Similarly, data and technology drives online, and we're going to head to China now to hear from Arjun and Vivian, our team in China. [Presentation]

So I must say I've visited this facility more than once. And every time I go, I'm like a kid in a candy shop. It is like such incredible learning for us. My favorite quote from this is actually what Vivian said, which is what used to take us months and years now takes us weeks and days. That's the speed of being able to launch new brands to customize them, to make sure that basically your message is correct, and we can do that many times on the same day. This is the other experience booth that we have for you after the event. So the India off-line, India, China online if you like, you can see some live streaming, even though it will be 1 a.m. in China, I think we sell a lot of product even at that time. And Vivian, who was in the video marketing director in China is here to take you through that. This brings us to our last execution excellence pillar. So we've spoken about off-line trade, online channels and now OTC, right? So OTC, of course, is pharmacy. But as you're going to see, it is also a lot of preparation in terms of regulatory and medical excellence. We're going to head to Latin America which is, for us, the North Star as far as OTC is concerned, I mentioned that for the company, OTC is about 1/3 for emerging markets, it's only 14%, but Latin America is showing us the way it's already at 29%, and a lot of that is because of the work they've done over the last 10 years. We're going to hear from Alison and from Laura, our colleagues in Latin America. [Presentation]

So that long-term vision that [ Alison ] spoke about, not just Latin America, we're taking it everywhere. And this is a classical example of how we need to work with many other functions to really help grow our business, regulatory, medical is as important in terms of partnership as sales and marketing or category. So these centers of brilliance, we've got excellence, but I really think that we are setting the standards for ourselves every year to improve the one in India for offline, the one in China for online and the one in Latin America for OTC. The objective from these is to keep on raising the bar not just in terms of what we know internally, but also externally. And I'm pretty sure that some of the examples that you saw are really market-leading in all of those countries. Once we perfect it, we take it everywhere. I gave you the example of the China playbooks being rolled out in many other parts, starting with ASEAN. So this is really what gives me and my team a lot of confidence in how we're going to keep growing sustainably. We have a lot of penetration opportunity. You saw some examples from Ryan. We have a lot of new categories that we can quickly roll out. We already have an available pipeline that we can follow with. And then we've got some scalable playbooks that you saw off-line, online and OTC. This is what gives us confidence that we can keep delivering the growth that we have. But how is this growth going to lead to value creation? I'm going to hand over to Shannon, who's going to tell you more about that.

All right. Hello, everyone. Very happy to be here to talk to you about emerging markets and the key role it plays within core Reckitt. I'm going to try and bring us home just to set expectations. I think I only have like 7 or 8 slides. So then we'll get into, I'm sure, the eagerly anticipated Q&A. There are 3 key things that I want to hit within this section on value creation. The first is I'm going to talk just a tiny bit about the net revenue where Nitish gave all the examples of how we're driving this growth, but hopefully build your confidence in the sustainability of growth and the ability for us to achieve high single-digit growth in emerging markets for years to come. Second, I'm going to hit on foreign exchange a bit to help you understand how we think about FX and how our teams in market, think about managing through the implications FX has on our business. as we work really hard to make sure that emerging markets growth translates through to the bottom line in earnings. And lastly, I'm going to hit on the profitability of our emerging markets and the role that that's going to play in helping racket deliver our ambition to grow our profits ahead of our net revenue year in and year out. And so first, thinking about emerging markets net revenue growth. So we have a strong track record of delivering like-for-like growth in emerging markets. If you look at the left of the slide, you'll see that our 5-year CAGR in emerging markets starting in 2019 is high single-digit growth. We've grown at 8%. If you look at the right, what you'll see is that in 2025, clearly, that growth has accelerated. We're almost at 14% growth in 2025. And it's important to note that our net revenue growth in emerging markets in 2025 and our ambition moving forward has been really healthy growth. Roughly 50% of that growth is coming from volume growth in 2025. Now Nitish walked through a number of examples of what our teams are doing to drive growth across emerging markets. And over the past few quarters, we've consistently talked around the fact that our emerging markets growth has been broad-based growth. And so I just want to do a quick recap across those regions to remind you what's driving this broad-based growth that we're delivering across emerging markets. So you saw the video in China, where we do expect our current growth rates to moderate but we expect China to remain a strong driver of growth as we continue to roll out power brands and new categories, coupled with that strong online execution that you saw and that Vivian can demonstrate afterwards in the auditorium. In India, we have world-class execution that's delivering high single-digit growth today, and that's driven by off-line digital capabilities, which will show you some of that in the breakouts as well. In ASEAN, we have significant opportunities with household care and self-care and you saw in the video that we're already the market leader in intimate wellness in Vietnam, and we're really growing our finished business there strongly. In [indiscernible], we've seen double-digit growth coming from germ protection and intimate wellness. And we see really good growth opportunities as we look forward in that region. Africa, while we've talked about the fact that it's small today, we have strong brand heritages and favorable demographics that give us confidence that this is a strong opportunity. And as you saw in the video, we feel germ protection, intimate wellness and self-care are all big opportunities for our Africa business moving forward. And finally, in Lat Am, you heard us say, it's our OTC North Star. And as we expand growth beyond Brazil and Mexico, and you saw that rollout with Gaviscon into other countries in the video, we're confident in our growth there. The momentum that we have, the capabilities that we have with our teams on the ground in these markets and the opportunities that we see with small, high-growth markets is what gives us confidence that emerging markets will grow at a high single-digit rate moving forward. We believe this is a growth that we can achieve sustainably and consistently year in and year out. And this high single-digit growth from emerging markets will be underpinning our long-term Core Reckitt addition of growing 4% to 5% each year. And that's the guidance that we shared around 18 months ago when we said that Core Reckitt, we felt had the right portfolio to consistently deliver 4% to 5% top line growth. So I want to take a second and talk about foreign exchange. I obviously get a lot of questions regularly around how do we make sure emerging markets growth is profitable? How do we make sure it translates to the bottom line. And so we wanted to show you how we manage the impacts of FX in emerging markets. So on the left-hand side of the slide, what you'll see is the past 10-year net revenue growth CAGR at constant FX. And so for emerging markets, over the past 10 years, we've grown at a 6.5% CAGR. What we've done on the right-hand side of the page has gone back and calculated what's that growth in actual FX. And you can see it's just shy of 5.5%. And so we've had about 100 bps dilution coming from FX volatility over that 10-year period. Now our teams on the ground are really focused on the structural profitability of their businesses and maintaining the structural integrity of their country P&Ls. And they have a lot of levers that they can use to do that. They look at the sizing and the category mix of their specific portfolios within their markets to make sure that they're maximizing both the revenue and gross margin opportunity. We have an expectation that we aim to price in a very consistent way. And so as we see currency fluctuations and devaluation, our teams are looking at the brand, the strength of brand equities. They're looking at our product performance, they're keeping an eye on maintaining the appropriate consumer value equation, and they're taking consistent pricing. We actively manage our raw material sourcing as we think about what's happening with FX as well as other manufacturing decisions, and we maintain a consistent hedging policy. And all of these actions are what are allowing us to deliver the results you saw in the prior slide, where it was a relatively minimal dilution coming from foreign exchange top line delivery in emerging markets. It is important to note that we don't run our business with an expectation that within the business year or within a fiscal year that are -- that we will offset foreign exchange fluctuations, but we do have that expectation over the midterm. Lastly, I just want to talk about the profitability of emerging markets. And so what we've done on this slide is try to lay out how we're actively driving our mix towards high-margin categories. And so what you can see is that self-care and intimate wellness towards the right-hand side of that pink triangle, those are our 2 highest gross margin categories. And if you look at our results over the past 5 years and what our category mix in emerging markets looks like, what you'll see is we've shifted about 6 points of category mix into those higher gross margin categories of self-care and intimate wellness. And this is a shift that we expect to continue as we look out into the future. Now over that same time period, our emerging markets, gross margins have expanded by 300 bps and one of the big drivers of this gross margin expansion has been that active shift into higher-margin categories. And hopefully, you saw through Nitish's presentation, the fact that when we look out across the regions of emerging markets and identify where we see opportunity, you saw a lot of that was coming through in self-care and in intimate wellness. So I've talked about how premiumization and mix is driving gross margin expansion. Now I just want to briefly move down the P&L a bit. When we look at our emerging markets profitability and compare that across our peers, it's good. We have strong profitability in our emerging markets. We've talked about the opportunity I just shared with you on how we think we continue to have gross margin opportunity in emerging markets. Many of you have heard me talk about our [ Fuel for Growth ] program where we're optimizing our fixed cost structure. And that also applies to emerging markets, and we'll see benefit flow through the P&L to emerging markets from that. And our intention is that this gross margin upside as well as a portion of this fixed cost optimization is going to be used for us to continue to drive top line growth in emerging markets. We see the opportunity there. You're seeing us deliver that growth today, and we expect to be able to reinvest and continue to reinvest to drive that growth sustainably moving forward. At the same time, if you look at the profitability of our emerging markets versus our developed markets, there's a differential today that we see. And we believe that over time, that differential will start to narrow. And again, that will come from the benefits of margin expansion as well as the benefits of fixed cost optimization. But to be clear, the priority for us today is driving top line growth and reinvesting behind top line growth. And this ability to continue to narrow that gap and to drive profitability and improve profitability in emerging markets is going to be one of the levers that also helps us to deliver against our group ambition of growing Core Reckitt profits ahead of net revenue, year-end and year out. And so if I just land there with if there's 3 financial takeaways for you to have from today, the first would be, I hope you leave the room with more confidence than you might have had coming in that emerging markets can continue to deliver high single-digit growth in the years ahead. I hope that you understand our focus is on driving reinvestment and continuing to drive reinvestment to capture that top line growth opportunity that we see across emerging markets. And I hope you understand that we believe we can continue to improve the already strong profitability of our emerging markets business, and that that's going to help Core Reckitt deliver against our financial ambitions of a leveraged P&L, where we're growing our profits ahead of our net revenue. So with that, I'm going to pass back to Nitish to truly close this out.

Very quickly, just going to summarize what you've seen over the last 90 minutes because I think Nick is looking at his watch now. We believe we have very strong foundations. Our emerging markets business is not new. We've been around for many, many decades with trusted brands and with very experienced leadership that has translated into steady acceleration. You have seen that we've been consistently mid-single-digit through category development and execution excellence and we believe this is sustainable. It is sustainable at the high single-digit growth level that's value creating because we already have all of the scalable playbooks. So I hope that you would have got from this presentation that we have strong, steady, sustainable value-creating growth in emerging markets. Over to you, Nick.

Thank you very much, Nitish. I don't think I need that. So look, we are now going to move into the Q&A section of the presentation. We've got a bit of time for that before we head out to the breakout. We'll just set up the stage. And then joining on the stage will be the 3 presenters you've seen today. So it'd be Nitish, Ryan and Shannon.

We'll start with the questions in the room. And then for those listening online, as I said, there's -- hopefully, you can see the [ Ask Question ] box in the corner of the screen. If you type in questions in there, it will come to me, and I can read it out on the stage and hopefully get some answers from the panel. So with that, let's start. Right. Let's start from the room. Who wants to -- who will take us off? Guillaume, I saw your hand shoot up first. Just before [indiscernible], name and where your from will be great as well, just for everyone listening.

It's Guillaume Delmas from UBS. Couple of questions for me, please. First on the OTC opportunity in emerging markets. Clearly, LATAM is the most advanced region. Is LatAm more advanced also because of all these local heroes and many of these brands came with the Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition back in 2013. So for Asia, Africa, Middle East, is there a need to do some bolt-ons? Or you're confident in your ability to drive this OTC opportunity organically? And then the second question is what this target for emerging markets mean for mature markets, so high single-digit like-for-like. Does it mean low single digit is only what's required and expected for mature markets. And similarly, gross margin-wise, I think at the group level, Shannon, you're not expecting much of an expansion going forward. Yet for emerging markets, I think the scope is for further gross margin improvement. So a bit of a tale of two regions with mature markets maybe only expected low single-digit like-for-like flattish to decline gross margin.

So do you want to start with the?

Yes, I can start with the first one. So of course, the Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition that gave us all of those brands was a real [ impetus ] for us to start in Latin America 10 years ago. You saw some examples of regulatory preparedness, medical capabilities. But that's also a template that we've taken also increasingly to ASEAN. In ASEAN too, we are seeing very good results. So our contribution there is also in the 20s with our existing brands. We have some local brands also in other geographies. For example, in Africa, we have [ TRANZACT]. In India, we have [ moved]. And we believe that we have lots of organic opportunity. But of course, if there is an acquisition that creates value that we would basically like, we will, of course, consider it seriously.

If I can maybe just build on Nitish's point. I think in LatAm, we acquired a business, I think what that enabled us to do is acquire some capabilities I don't think it's as much the local heroes. They do help, but it's more of the defining capabilities. They've had a longer track record of running that we've implemented into other regions and markets around the world. If you take a look like Nitish has mentioned, ASEAN, Thailand is actually one of our top 5 Gaviscon markets in the entire world now. So we are able to take those general lessons learned there and applied them to other places. They started with a bigger base, and we're looking to accelerate and grow in the other places.

Shannon, guidance.

Okay. So guidance, I'll start with net revenue, then I'll hit gross margin, and let me know if I don't get there for you. Again, Core Reckitt, [ 4 to 5], we've been consistent in communicating that. I think Chris and I have also tried to be really clear. Our goal is to set guidance that we can achieve. And so we believe that 4% to 5% is what this portfolio can deliver consistently year in and year out. Obviously, you all can do the math on if emerging markets is 40% of our business. And if we are going to deliver high single-digit growth in emerging markets, you can back into what that might mean for developed markets. We haven't shared a specific range, but I think that what you've seen this year is that outsized growth has been coming from emerging markets and we got developed markets growing in the back half. We certainly believe there's lots of growth opportunity in developed markets in all 4 of these categories. And so I don't know that I would provide specific guidance for developed markets, but we're very optimistic with our ability to continue growing those as well. From a margin standpoint, what I've said is that in the near term, so the next -- I think I've sort of used 1 to 3 years, not providing guidance around expanding our gross margins. But that's primarily driven by the fact that we've also been really clear that we believe there's a lot of opportunity to spend at the upper end of our CapEx range. as we continue to be focused on investing in our supply chain, building the resiliency of our manufacturing footprint. And obviously, as that investment increases, it will come back through and have an impact on margin. I do believe when you get out sort of beyond that range, we should be expanding our gross margins because lots of those investments are going to provide productivity improvements, and we'll see those benefits ultimately flow through the bottom line. So I'm not in any way trying to guide on contracting gross margins anywhere else again, I would think of it as generally in the next few years holding. We're sort of industry-leading, sector leading in the low 60s. We're very comfortable with that, but we want to continue to make smart investments.

[indiscernible] at Barclays. I've got a couple as well. The first one, was that preempting what we're going to see outside, I'd love to hear a little bit more about the live streaming economics. How many people watch these live streams? What kind of sort of -- maybe just one is the outside, but kind of the click-through of that because it seems like that's a real differentiating reason why you're doing so well in China currently. Just trying to understand how it works in practice and how differentiated is it? Is it something that can be taken to other ASEAN countries? Or is something quite unique for China? That's the first one. And then secondly, one for Shannon. On the margins, again, you said that the emerging market margins would narrow the gap over time with developed market margins. I think the gap is about 1,000 basis points at the moment. Without sort of being specific, when you invest in places like Africa, I'd imagine that that's quite margin dilutive. Does it need to go down a little bit first because you're investing in some of these new countries before it goes up? Or does it go up, notwithstanding the investment that you're going to be making? And then just a housekeeping, you talked about high single digit in emerging markets. Can you just confirm that's also your ambition for 2026 as well?

I can go first. Yes. So actually, it was on one of the slides in my presentation. So a lot of people to answer your question, watch live stream, right? So 800 million just on that one platform, which is TikTok up. And of course, you would expect that a lot of that is content that's around entertainment, but 400 million of those people are actually buying CPG categories, right? So that's a lot of people, 400 million. It's not limited only to China. We're seeing live streaming, social commerce also getting some momentum in ASEAN. The difference is, of course, that in China, we have 1 country, we can address all of these people together. In ASEAN, we have many small countries. And therefore, what we're doing is we're consolidating our live streaming expertise in one location and then spreading it from there the other countries. So in Malaysia, we have a live streaming center, which live streams into all the other countries. The platforms are common and the content can also be quite common made with some changes in language. So China is big and ASEAN is getting bigger.

Okay. So it was -- the first question was on the profitability. Second was on emerging markets top line for '26. So profitability, you're right, it's about 1,000 bps differential. I expect that, that will narrow over time, although I've talked before around the fact that it's not in a situation where we internally have a target that says by 2035, this is what it will be. I think that for us, we continue to see a lot of opportunities to be reinvesting to drive top line growth. And so that is more the priority right now versus trying to drive a sudden improvement or narrow that gap immediately. I don't expect because I think the beauty of our emerging markets portfolio is it's so large and there are so many different regions at different stages of development that I don't think I would make an assumption that as we want to invest in Africa or in Indonesia, it means that you would see an impact on the area from a profitability standpoint. I think we have plenty of levers to be able to manage that over time. Then I think Nick would tell me, I'm not giving 2026 guidance today for top line. I've been very well trained.

Who wants to go next? Sarah.

Sarah Simon from Morgan Stanley. Can you talk a bit about quick commerce? Because obviously, that's another thing that's growing extremely fast. We have a bit of it here, but it's much bigger out in some of those markets. And what are the economics on that like?

Yes. So actually, yes, quick commerce is growing very fast. And I would say we have some very good partners across the world. So in Latin America, we work with [ Rappi, with Mercado Libre ] in India. We've got [ Zepto]. We've got [ Instamart ] in China, too, there is a big quick commerce player called [ MET]. Also in some of the smaller countries, as far as our business is concerned, in the Middle East, [ Talabat]. I would say it's more of a game changer in the countries where e-commerce has hit a block and not grow at more than -- not gone to more than 14% or 15% of the business. quick commerce is unlocking a lot more shift into online in those countries. We're growing very well in all of those countries with quick commerce partners.

[Operator Instructions]. I had a question coming from [ Carol at Kepler]. And just on this topic, you asked [indiscernible] leveraging the quick commerce boom in India. So can you talk a little bit about that specifically?

Yes. I just said. So in India, for example, our -- I mean when I was there 10, 12 years ago, e-commerce was less than 1% of our business total. It went up from 1 to about 7 or 8, and then it went to 10, it got stuck. Quick Commerce has actually enabled that to go up to about 15%. So the partners that I mentioned, [indiscernible], we work proactively with all of them. They're also great platforms for us to introduce new brands.

Edward Lewis from Rothschild & Co Redburn. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, just the competitive dynamic in emerging markets, how that's faring? If it's local players, how they're picking up their act, I guess, or just sort of the global players you see, I guess, probably more in the Europe and the U.S.? And then I guess we've had changes in the organizational level. You touched them on a bit, but it seems as though your business benefited probably more than, say, some of the other businesses from the way in which you reorganize the business. So perhaps if you could just talk about the benefits you've seen from that.

Yes. Sorry, what was the first question?

Just in terms of competition.

Competitive, yes. Yes. So yes, I mean, competition exists everywhere. And I would say that, of course, we have all the global players that you see in Europe and North America also in emerging markets. Local competition in terms of the quality of their brands, the innovation are definitely getting much better. And clearly, we have to make sure that our innovation is addressing what they might be kind of leading in terms of insights. So Ryan spoke about how we have R&D centers of excellence not just in Europe and North America, but in many of these countries to be very close to the ground in terms of what these brands are doing. Then I would say the trust of the local brands versus our brands, we've been in these countries for many, many years. We have equally strong consumer engagement, and we are able to compete very effectively. And that was --

There was another --

There was another one, actually, [indiscernible].

Organizations change.

Organization -- yes, absolutely. Apart from what Chris said about maybe us being as favorites. We have gained a lot of advantage to the new organization. For the simple reason that everything that we do is now scaled together in all of these countries instead of being divided between hygiene and health GBUs. So when we go to one of these countries and we try something new, we get the scale, we're not split. India, as an example, our direct reach combined is more than what the sum of the individual reaches were when we had the business units. And clearly, we benefit also from the fact that [indiscernible] partners with us very well in terms of recognizing what emerging market needs are. So yes.

Tom, I see your hand go next.

Tom Sykes from Deutsche Bank. Just going back to the margin differentials. Could you say something about the gross margin difference between your DM and EM business? Because it sounds like from what you're saying on CapEx, you're quite well depreciated. And obviously, if your operating margin has that much difference than potentially your pricing points were a little bit different on similar products, maybe DM versus EM? So just be quite interested in that, please. And then when you think about the degree of investment that would be required and your comments about stepping up CapEx, do you think your cash flow would grow at the same rate as your profitability in EMs? And when we look at the remuneration of your EM managers, is that in local currency or hard currency, please?

Just thinking back to what was the first question. All right. The first question was around gross margins for -- across the areas. So we actually don't disclose our gross margin rates across the 3 different areas. I think Chris has shared in the past that we've made a lot of progress on narrowing that gap where historically, there had been a pretty significant differential, but I think that's about what I would share there. Your next question was on -- was it CapEx next and cash flow? So CapEx, we want to spend at the top of the 3% to 4%. The 3% to 4% is a Core Reckitt or actually a group figure. But again, we don't break out that by area. And so we're not changing the guidance on CapEx. We've been at 3% to 4%, at least since I've been here, and I think before I came. What we are doing is emphasizing more that we want to reach towards that top end. And I don't believe that on an ongoing basis, that would have a significant impact as we think through cash flow and what that has looked like historically? And then the last one was on remuneration of emerging markets leaders.

Yes, I can answer that. So for most of the emerging markets, teams, it's in local currency, but some leaders are in hard currency.

Who wants to go next? [Operator Instructions]. Do you have one? [indiscernible].

This is [ Niko, Columbia Threadneedle]. Previously, you've spoken to channel shifts and market share trends in condoms in China and well done on that execution. But I was just wondering, is there actually more sex going on in China? What's actually happening to the overall market that's driving this -- what looks like growth because I understood actually that some segments aren't having as much sex?

Ryan, I think that's a consumer question.

We can certainly follow up with you on the specifics of the consumer habits. I don't think there's a massive increase in the number of occasions. I think we have significantly increased our share of those occasions, and it's really through delivering superior propositions. So if you think about some of our new innovations like a [ hydrolytic acid ] as a core lubricants on our [indiscernible] condoms in the market there, create a meaningfully better benefit and better experience for consumers on that front. Same thing with some of our performance-based condoms, which are all about enhancing the performance experience. So I don't believe there's a net underlying habitual increase in a number of occasions. But I do believe -- I know for sure, our share is growing within the mix of the occasions that are presented.

[indiscernible] Intelligence. Just going back to the quick commerce question, if a topic, if I may. A lot of those players are actually still quite unprofitable also if you could share some insights in terms of what's the promotional investment effort that is needed in those markets to sustain the growth, but also eventually to translate that into a better gross margin improvement over time. And then in terms of Latin America, I believe the pharmacy channel is still quite important. Just if you could shed a bit more light in terms of how Reckitt is doing in that particular channel and partners also in terms of the pricing power of your brands?

Yes. So on quick commerce, there's no significant difference in, let's say, our margins with trade. We invest when we see an opportunity to create growth and wherever we find partners that are really driving these categories, we invest more. Pharmacy is actually, you're right, very, very big in Latin America. In fact, you saw a lot of that in one of the videos in terms of how we really have expertise in that channel. Again, we have very significant partnerships. We have a big medical sales force. So in most of these countries, we will have people calling directly in the pharmacies. In Brazil, we have about 65 people. In Mexico, we have over 100 people. So yes, it's a big part of our focus in terms of sales excellence.

I think to build on what Nitish said is we talk health care professionals or HCPs, a pharmacist is a core point of entry for sure across most of our markets, and that holds true in Latin America as well that Nitish talked about, our sales force investment. And when you marry that up with this idea of kind of that mega city approach and this idea of then prove and scale, that's what's really enabled us to do this effectively and profitably while still continuing to grow our brands and our businesses in those markets.

It's [ Eddy Hargreaves from Investec Investment Management]. Just a quick one with the speed of the world and the agility that you need to satisfy customers and with the quick ordering on e-com and whatever. I imagine this has some implications for your inventory levels. Do you find that more difficult to manage? Do you need a higher safety stock than you used to have? Does it have any other implications?

I can take it. No, there is no significant inventory reduction increase that is required. In fact, there are some advantages of this model which is, for example, when we launch a new brand or a new category, we don't have to fill the pipeline, as you can imagine, with many stores and then 1 level below. We order smaller quantities. We see whether the launch is working. And if it is, then we scale up. And if it's not, then we would not have ordered the kind of inventory that normally we would have. So for the most part, actually, it's an advantage.

We have another one online then. Let's just come through from [indiscernible], BMP as of a glass half full. If you had some trade spend issues in the Middle East in early 2024, what changes, if any, were made across the broader EM business following that? And then secondly, if you had GBP 10 to invest in emerging markets, where would you put it? So do you want to start?

I can do the first one. And [indiscernible] do you want to do where would you put the money. So the question is what changes did we make coming out of the Middle East at the end of 2023? I mean, I'd say, first of all, we did a significant review of thinking through what other markets might look like a Middle East market where we have those issues to understand and go in and check to confirm that we, in fact, didn't have issues. We then obviously spent a lot of time doing a deep dive with the team in the Middle East to understand exactly what controls might have broken down or what went wrong that would have allowed that kind of issue to happen, put together a playbook of how do we address those issues specifically in the Middle East, but then how do we roll that out across not only, frankly, emerging markets, but all of our markets to make sure that we would not find ourselves in that sort of situation again and that we would have made systemic fixes to ensure that we couldn't have similar trade spend issues going forward.

GBP 10.

Well, I was hoping there would be more than GBP 10, but if there was only GBP 10, I would say that we have 3 very clear growth pillars. You saw that. So we're talking about more penetration, new categories, new geographies. I would be most excited about the new categories, right? So the new categories is really where the potential is to get many more consumers in. There's premiumization. So if it was only GBP 10, first priority would be new categories.

More from the room? Guillaume.

A couple of very quick follow-ups. Just to follow up actually on the last question. What's the split between mature categories and nascent categories in emerging markets today and how it compares to North America or Europe? And would it be fair to assume that nascent categories command higher gross margin relative to mature ones? And the second question is on the third pillar, the next 6 countries. How big are they today as a potential of core record cells? And as you're doubling down on them, which line of the P&L should be the most affected? Is it distribution cost? Is it I -- any light you can share on that would be helpful.

Yes. Actually Sharon had a slide about the nascent category. So most of the nascent categories are in intimate wellness in self-care. And to that, I would add Finish. So yes, they are definitely higher gross margin than the household care and germ protection categories. And your second question is the 6 countries. So again, we don't disclose numbers by country, but they are -- let's just say, you heard some of the numbers in terms of how they could double and triple. So they're very small, and we expect them to grow at least at 15% to 20% a year.

We'll go to [ Oren ] first and then we can go to Tom.

Yes. So a question for Nitish. Can you talk a little bit about how many people report to you or the structure below you? Because you're Head of Emerging Markets, but I noticed, for example, [ Arjun], who was Head of China, I think is now Head of North Asia and China. So it looks like the people below again expanded roles. And how does the reporting structure, how has it changed? And what does it mean in terms of the organization in terms of the organizational change of having a single head of emerging markets in terms of that being an unlock? I'd love to hear your perspective on that.

So we have 6 regions, like I said. So Greater China, North Asia is one. That's [ Arjun], who you mentioned. We have South Asia, which is India, Srilanka. That's another one of the regions. [indiscernible], you saw him in one of the videos. Then we have Latin America. We have Africa, we have Middle East, North Africa, Russia and Pakistan and what am I missing, ASEAN, right, ASEAN. So those are the 6 regions that report to me. Of course, they have countries reporting into them. The span of control for most of these people will be not more than 1 big country and maybe 2 other countries to make sure that they are managed with adequate focus. The only exception to that is ASEAN, which is quite fragmented. I think the change in the organization, frankly, is that all of these businesses have got consolidated into 1 business unit instead of 2. So in many of these countries, we would have had split ownership of the P&L between health and hygiene. And with all of that coming under one leader, obviously, things move much faster. Decisions are I think more on the basis of P&L than just allocation in BUs. So it's really working well. And actually, I'm very happy with the new organization.

I think another benefit is, I mean, you also have reporting to you functional leaders, right? So a Head of Finance, Head of Supply, Head of HR. And so if you think back to when we were run by [ GBUs], I mean, I've talked a fair amount in investor meetings around it's probably hard to believe that an emerging market issue or opportunity was ever quite top of the list for a President of Health or President of Hygiene. But now there's a leadership team that you're only focused on emerging markets. And so it's just that ability to move quickly because of that senior management focus.

Okay. Given time, I think we'll do Tom, and then we get outside to the break house.

So keep it quick. Just, I guess, share gains aren't necessarily what you're about when the markets are growing so quickly. But could you just say something about the competition and the competitive nature in the markets you're operating in? And do you expect that the [ BEI ] spend over time as a proportion of sales would have to go up as those markets mature. Obviously, there's a gross margin opportunity that goes along with that as well. But just something about the competitive intensity within the biggest markets or CMUs particularly that you're operating in, please?

I can do the -- so I would say that in our larger markets, so India, China, Brazil, Mexico, it's always been equally competitive, right? I mean there's really not been a time when we would say competition is not serious or is not innovating at the same rate as us. Some of the innovation that some of the competitiveness that we see is more at the B brand level, right, which is basically a lot of brands that get into these categories that we have created with pricing that is lower. But generally, the quality is so [ poor ] that consumers really don't prefer those brands, and that's what we are focused on, make sure that our quality remains very high. Our availability remains very high. I think Ryan had a really cool example of how pricing really helps drive much more access. So not any major change in competitive intensity.

We also have the same so the 60% target that we've shared for Core Reckitt for CMUs holding and gaining share. I mean we're shooting for that same level of excellence and growth in emerging markets as we would be in developed markets, just to your initial question.

Nick, I just wanted to add one thing. We haven't spoken a lot about our supply chain today, but there were some questions about CapEx. And obviously, when we're growing at this level, we're going to need to invest CapEx in this business too. So we're going to look to run at that high end of 3% to 4% range that Shannon talked about. There's actually a fair amount of CapEx needed to enable this growth whether it's R&D centers, which we're investing in, whether it's manufacturing sites and just capacity. So I just wanted to sort of round that out. Our Chief Supply Officer, [ Harold ] is not here today, but he would have talked about that. So that's another important element to the plan.

Well, we are out of time. We've just gone over, and we've got the breakout that we want to get to. So look, firstly, just thank you very much, Ryan. Shannon and of course, Nitish for the presentations today. I hope -- my 2 takeaways. One is that everyone leaves as excited as we are about the opportunities we see across emerging markets. They are -- there's a lot of them, and I hope you've taken that away with you. And that, that leads the confidence that we have around being able to deliver high single-digit growth across emerging markets consistently and sustainably from here. As I said, please don't dash off there's something on India, something on China, which I think, and I hope you'll find it really informative, useful and educational. So please stop by and chat to the teams on that. If you have any questions, I'll be around, the team will be around. We're available and ready to continue engaging and look, thank you very much for coming along. I hope you've enjoyed. I hope you continue to enjoy it. And happy holidays, everybody, and we'll speak to everybody soon.