Unilever PLC ($ULVR)

Okay. Good morning, everybody. We move on to our next session and absolutely delighted to be able to introduce Unilever's CEO Fernando Fernandez; and Unilever CFO Srinivas Phatak for our next slot. Over to Fernando and Srini.

Thank you. Thank you, Tom. Thanks a lot. Thank you for having us. It's a real pleasure to be in Deutsche Bank conference. A lot of change in Unilever in the last few years in the last 3 to 4 years, 8 out of 10 new Board members, 9 out of 11 leadership changes in the top executive team, including myself, including Srini. Significant changes in our culture; with a clear shift into more performance, more accountability, clear incentives linked to performance; significant changes in the way we engage with our consumers, we reach them, we persuade them, significant changes in our marketing philosophy, and of course, very profound transformation in our portfolio becoming after the announcement a couple of months ago for the separation of our food business and the integration into McCormick, a pure-play HPC business. But transformation has not came at the expense of delivery. We have demonstrated that we can separate significant business like our billion ice cream business and at the same time, accelerate top line, accelerate margin expansion. And this is what we will prove again in the moment in which we separate Foods. The work is underway, is under significant progress, and Srini will mention some of that. The new HPC business is a pure play. We will be a $39 billion business in home care, personal care, beauty and wellbeing with very, very strong positions, #2 B2C company globally, #1 home care market -- home care company in emerging markets. And this is a company with superior propositions in terms of geography, footprint, category footprint, segment footprint and channel footprint. And we are doing all these changes from a position of strength. Our business has been outperforming the market in the last 3 years. This is not an HPC business that is in need of a turnaround. It has been growing more than 5% top line in the last 3 years, it has been growing volume at 2.5%. So it's a business with momentum. And what we will show in the next few minutes is what we are doing in our marketing, what we are doing with agentic, what we are doing with our science, how we are really accelerating our performance and how we will keep ourselves very disciplined when it comes to capital allocation. Srini?

Thanks, Fernando. So what I'll try and do is first touch upon some of the performance elements to this, and then we will cover the transformation, which I'll cover the parts relating to the food separation, and Fernando will actually talk us through in terms of the pure-play HPC business. So good to start with really where we started in the quarter 1 results. Actually, if you see it was a good set of numbers. We've talked about 3.8% being our underlying sales growth, driven by strong volume growth, 2.9%. We have been consistent saying that, look, it's really the underlying volume growth, which is a combination of volumes and premium mix, which is actually the differentiator in our industry and in our segments, has come through quite strongly. What's important to highlight is it's not just about a quarter. If you actually look at the 9 quarters performance, our underlying volume growth has been upwards of 2.4%. Two important data points, if I were to compare it. If I were to look at the market, give or take, has been at about 2.1%. And if I actually look at our peer group average in this sense, has been less than 1%. That actually throws up a very interesting insight. If you really see that if the peer group is 1, that means a lot of growth is actually coming in from some of the smaller indie brands. We've become a unique and a differentiated company, a large organization, which has actually been able to deliver this set of volume growth, which is well ahead of the market. We've talked about power brands, and you see that very clearly, close to 80% of our business has been growing strong and actually, we've delivered more than 4% of volume growth. So there's 80% of our business where we are putting all the incremental dollars of investment, people, R&D, BMI, and that's actually leading to significant market outperformance. This actually gives us the confidence to really then reconfirm our outlook. And that's what we have said that we look to grow this year in the range of 4% to 6% at the bottom end, but clearly, with a volume growth or UVG growth of upwards of 2%. And then we'll come to the margins. And therefore, what gives us this confidence. First and important to then say, in addition to whatever I have said, our market shares are continuing to be stable to improving. Our unmissable brand superiority scores, which is actually a composite metric of our 2021 metrics is improving sequentially. So more of our brands are actually in the right space in terms of improving their attributes, the holistic attributes, and we are actually in a stable to gaining market share perspective. Along with that, we continue to see very strong performance from emerging markets. 62% of our business has been emerging markets. We have seen actually growth upwards of 5.7% with volumes of upwards of 2.5% to 3% on a consistent basis. Our HPC business, actually, if I were to give your context, even in the quarter 1 has grown over 4.3%. So emerging markets doing well. Our HPC business doing quite strongly. Our North America business growing over 2%, continuing to outperform the market. Yes, there are inflationary pressures, and we have talked about them somewhere in the range of about $750 million to $900 million. That's actually about $350 million to $500 million higher than where we started the year. But we understand this and we get this because most of this -- half of this inflation is really in home care business and 70% of the home care business is really in emerging markets. Here, we have opportunities to play the full piano in terms of pricing in addition to what we do with formulations, what we do with operational efficiencies, that positions us well. We understand these markets. We know how -- what it really takes to price and manage well when it comes to local competition, when it comes to multinational competition. So we are actually doing it in a very sensible manner, calibrated pricing, keeping the right value equation for the consumers, pricing frequently while we manage tightly all of the levers. Is it easy? No, but we have never signed up for an easy job. So the fact of the matter is, yes, there is an inflation pressure. We believe we will handle it and handle it sensibly from a consumer perspective. And therefore, we reconfirm the view that we will actually drive a modest margin improvement for the year. Important to really touch upon some elements. I think Fernando started it well. Our transformation is starting from a position of strength. And this is not a one-off transition or a transformation. We have done a multiyear transformation. We have actually spent a long time in the last few years focusing towards an HPC business. And you saw that with the portfolio transformation, which happened in terms of ice creams and then Foods. We've also done a significant transformation when it comes to our U.S. business. So all of this actually then starts to position us well. Let me take upfront the topic related to the Foods separation, and then Fernando will touch upon the HPC company. This is clearly a strategic separation with serious value creation opportunity, right? When you really look at from an HPC perspective, we are a pure-play HPC business. 90% of the business is actually in market-leading positions 1 and 2. And this business, as I said, in the last 3 years has actually grown upwards of 5.3% with volumes of 2.5%. So it's not a story of where we start off saying HPC needs to grow into a certain trajectory. We are in a trajectory which is upwards of 5%. And the opportunity is really to sustain that and sustain that and improve the margins and the profitability. When it comes to Foods, this is actually a global flavor powerhouse. There is serious revenue potential, and I talk about it. But more importantly, if you step back, this actually gives us an opportunity to create a pure-play foods company, which is in flavors, condiments, herbs and spices. In many ways, this is actually a positive leverage for us because this is GLP insulated, if at all. Protein requires more flavor. And actually, this combination brings flavor to food, and therefore, it's actually a bit of a tailwind for us rather than a headwind, and that's very unique in a foods context in the current market. And clearly, there are synergies both from a growth perspective as well as cost. And we have given an indication. We believe that there is at least $600 million of cost synergies and growth which is going to come through across the portfolio, both in terms of U.S. markets, food services and international operations. Therefore, there are some few important questions to really address. Good to say, why McCormick? Because there is a lot more of complementarity. There is no overlap. which, again, great because we then can accelerate growth from food services, from emerging markets, GLP tailwinds and structurally well positioned. This means that strategically, while both the Foods businesses have been actually outperforming versus a relative peer set, the combination gives us an opportunity to actually take the growth trajectory to 3% to 5% and a business which starts with operating margins of 21%. More importantly, these are businesses with gross margins in the mid-40s and actually invest anywhere between 8% to 10% in terms of D&I. There isn't any other Foods pure-play business, which is close to these levels of investment. And therefore, this actually then starts to unlock the growth opportunity. And therefore, that's why we call this as a growth-led separation. Why now? Obviously, it was an inbound offer with very attractive synergies, as I've spoken about strategic rationale and valuation. And this also actually gave us an opportunity to do it with the most efficient structure. And that's why we really went about and now. Clearly, there were questions really about some of the uses of proceeds. We will get about $15.7 billion. Obviously, we'll pay down debt because there will be lower operating profits and we need to pay down the debt. There is cost of separation. We will address that and tax. We also reconfirmed with the additional monies available that we are doing a buyback and therefore, given a clear view of buyback about '26 to '29 for about $6 billion. We do believe that there could be a slightly other -- we could have more cash available to us should all these parameters work out well, and we'll deal with that in a responsible manner in due course once we reconfirm all the elements to this. And the last element is also about a pure-play HPC business. It actually gives us a lot more focus and a focused HPC business is a better business. While we take out about -- what we take out in terms of turnover is about 25%. The complexity in the business because of the SKU geography market channel comes down much higher. It's almost 1.5x that, which therefore means that it actually then starts to position us extremely well. And the last element to reconfirm is really say, listen, we don't see any dis-synergies coming from the separation. I think the example we continue to use that, listen, just because you sell more Dove, you're not likely to sell mayo. And the other important element is that 80% of the Foods business has its organization, which was end-to-end well set up and a full commercial organization. So there are aspects which we will handle well. There are stranded costs, and we'll be for an HPC company, and we are committed to handling those stranded costs and managing them. We have demonstrated it when we've done it in the case of ice creams. The last piece, important to highlight, it's a combination. Both the teams are working with dedicated workforce today. There are more than 200 people, 100 each from either side who are focused in terms of all the activities related to separation and integration. We carry a lot of experience and expertise from our perspective, having done ice creams recently, but before that having done tea and having done spreads. We are actually having 40 to 50 people out of the 100 are actually people who have had the experience of doing this from an ice creams perspective. So it's a very well-structured team. We put 2 senior leaders, very senior leaders. Andrew Foust, actually used to run the North America business, the biggest business, given that there is also establishment integration. From our side, Ritesh, who is the Head of M&A and the former CFO of HUL India business is actually leading this. And you clearly see there are 4 work streams that we are working through. Important milestones because what we want to give all of you is periodically a clear update in terms of the progress. We expect to announce the secondary listing by July. That's on track. By September, McCormick is likely to confirm the operating model, the leadership team and give better visibility to synergies, both growth and cost. And we work through the rest of the schedule in terms of the SEC filings and the shareholder word. One last comment. Because of the complementarity and very little overlap, antitrust is a timing issue, but it's not an uncertainty issue. We have a reasonable amount of confidence and we are working it well. Some of it would take time to just get through some of the markets where you need to make these filings, and that's the reason where we are really giving an indication of middle of next year, but it continues to be our endeavor to really try and do this faster and sooner and do it as well, if not better when it came to an ice cream separation. And then on that note, I'll hand over to Fernando.

It has been a long journey for Unilever to get to the portfolio we wanted. Disposal, express disposal, separation of ice cream in 2024 yet and recently, the separation of Foods and integration with McCormick. But we are now inaugurating a period of stability of our portfolio as a pure-play HPC company. And why is this important? Because the consumer needs in HPC are converging. There are massive lifestyle shifts that are fundamentally making consumer needs converging between body care, personal care, beauty and home care with wellness at its center. There are shared foundations in these categories. The R&D is fundamentally structured around surfactants, science and technology. This fundamentally lead to a common manufacturing stream and with very similar logistics. There are very clear synergies in terms of distribution. Home Care, Personal Care and Beauty are all omnichannel distribution models with an increasing role for e-commerce. And in all these categories, these are high cycle, high innovation cycle categories in which scientific proof is very, very important, in which there is a structural growth and there is a structural premiumization and in which our model of design at scale fits perfectly well. We will be a scaled HPC player, will be EUR 39 billion revenue. We will be the third largest HPC company. Volume growth of more than 2%, gross margin more than 48%, brand investment at 18%, giving us a lot of flexibility and operating margin at 19%, more than 19%. So it's a scale business. It's simpler. As Srini mentioned, we are separating 21% of our revenue, but we are separating more than 32% of the category geography sales Unilever was operating. This is a significant impact in the time senior leadership is allocating to smaller geographies or to new key strategic geographies in the company. This is a category with superior advantage categories and superior growth footprint when it comes to geographies, channels, segments in which we operate. We will have a business in practically 3 thirds, Home Care, Personal Care and Beauty. We have 38% in developed markets and 62% in emerging markets. And we continue seeing our superior presence in emerging markets as a key competitive advantage. There are superior population growth there. There is a very different situation in emerging markets to one of 15 or 20 years ago. Only 7% of the global population live today in double-digit inflation. That's a very different. Imagine the geopolitical tensions of today, what would have been the impact in Latin American currencies 10 years ago. Brazilian real, Argentinian peso are all strengthening these times. This is a very, very different situation in emerging markets, and we believe this will consolidate this advantage coming forward in the future with a much less negative currency effect that we have had in the past. We have the second largest DTC business, as I mentioned before, the #1 home care business in emerging markets. We will have 22% of our business in the United States, building a portfolio of the future that will make them travel internationally. This is where we are concentrating the allocation of capital, building a portfolio of premium brands that can travel because American culture travels and because premium successful big brands in U.S. can travel globally as we have demonstrated that already. And we have an incredible exposure to India, 16% of our revenue, where we have 55% share in health care, 80% share in facial moisturizers, 45% share in laundry, 80% share in lifestyle nutrition, 70% share in dish wash and you can count on in the country that will be the large exponential growth opportunity for the next decade. In conference like this one and in many interactions with investors in one-to-one for the last 2 years, I have been saying very, very clearly that we were targeting more than 2/3 of our business in DTC. And this is what we have achieved with this separation, 67% of our revenue in Beauty, Wellbeing and Personal Care. As I mentioned before, 38% in U.S. and India. We expect this to go to 40%, 45% in the next few years through superior organic growth in these countries above the average of the company and through all the allocation of capital to bolt-on M&A that we will do, particularly in the U.S. We have more exposure to premium. We have more exposure to e-commerce. We have a business that will have a stronger volume growth from 1.9% to 2.5%, 60 basis points more than when including foods with better gross margin, 120 basis points and with higher investment level at 18%. So it's a higher quality growth model. And very, very, very important. This is a very different Unilever to the past. For many, many years, many of you have told us how slow we were, how complex we were. Now our portfolio is concentrated in 25 power brands that are driving our outperformance. These 25 power brands represent 78% of our revenue. And in the last 3 years, they have been growing 4.2% in volume and they have been growing 7.1% in top line. And this is a combination of market-leading brands likes of Dove or Sunsilk or Dirt is Good, our OMO, or Persil, Vaseline, Rexona in which our obsession is to keep them contemporary. It's about elevating their quality and it's about premiumizing them. And who would have said that Vaseline would be growing 12% in volume for the last 3 years. It took us 153 years to get to EUR 1 billion revenue, and we have added EUR 400 million in the last 3 years. This is the fastest-growing skin care brand in the globe and it's called Vaseline, the famous petroleum jelly. And we have a very good combination with digitally native disruptive brands, the likes of Liquid I.V., OLLY, K18, Hourglass, Nutrafol. These are brands that we are building in the U.S., we are achieving critical mass in this market, and we are internationalizing. 40% of our Prestige business is already international. Our Liquid I.V., our well-being brands are starting to really expand globally. We have already OLLY making close to EUR 80 million of revenue in China. So step by step, we are internationalizing these brands. We got late into the Chinese party. We will not get late into the Indian party. We have now a portfolio of super premium brands that will travel into India at the right time when the markets develop. As Srini mentioned, this is not a turnaround story. This is a business that has been outperforming the market. It's a proven superior outperformance. We have been growing in the last 3 years. Our HPC business has been growing 5.4% versus our blended HPC average turnover weighted at 4.6%. We have been growing volume 2.5% with 0.3% to the rest of the competitors. And this difference in volume is very important because this is a metric that we care the most. Unilever has been very, very inconsistent in the past in the metrics we follow but now we are following volume growth as our #1 metric. We will defend our units. We will defend our tonnages. Last year, a competitor reduced the prices of laundry in India 17%. It took us 15 minutes to match. And our business is growing double digit in India. Our gross margin expansion has been 290 basis points in the last 3 years. Our underlying operating margin expansion of 170 basis points, significantly ahead of the sector also. And it has been broad-based. Our medium-term UVG ambition is about 2% HPC is growing 2.5% in the last 3 years. Beauty & Wellbeing and Personal Care is 3.2% U.S. and India 3.8%; our power brands, 4.2%. So there is clear performance in any single cut that you have of our HPC business. And there is importantly margin headroom. Our key competitors in the space tend to operate with 22%, 23% of operating margin. We operate with 19%. And we see 5 fundamental levers to expand our operating margin in the future. The first one, the most important is the strengthening of our brands in order to increase our relative pricing. 60% of our turnover is growing equity attributes. And this is the best way to move pricing ahead of market. You don't move pricing ahead of markets when your brands weaken or when they remain parity. But you can move relative pricing, you can move the mix up when your equities are strengthening. Volume growth is very, very important because the next unit deliver margins, deliver gross margin at more than 60%. That's the kind of marginal contribution that we have in our business. We will continue expanding our premiumization opportunities. We'll continue expanding our premiumization strategy. We have significant premiumization opportunities. A few years ago, the maximum price you could find U.S. in the U.S. was $7. Now you can find U.S. at $20. We have a significant portion of our portfolio at 2 to 2.5x the pricing that we were operating 3, 4 years ago. And this is fundamentally the consequence of strengthening our equity. And very, very importantly, we are allocating a much significant fraction of our capital expenditure to savings initiatives. 10 years ago, we were operating with around 30% of our CapEx into margin expansion initiatives. Now 55% of our CapEx goes into expanding margin. When you have 3- to 4-year payback in your CapEx, that fundamentally implies a significant expansion of your gross margin every year. And we have done significant interventions in the value chain of key materials, call it surfactants, call it fragrances, call it chemicals. All this is helping us to really leverage our position in very concentrated industries. And this is the reason why our procurement is beating market inflation for around 1% every single year. Desired scale is the mantra we follow in the company. It's about elevating the quality of our brands. It's elevating desirability of a portfolio of scale. And our marketing model is what we call SASSY brands. It's a bit of a cheesy name, but it's very simple and it aligns our troops. And to every single country I go, it's very simple to measure what we are doing. SASSY is about Science, Aesthetics, Sensorials, Said by Others and Youth spirited brands. SASSY fundamentally guide our product development strategy, more science, more clinical proof products that really make a difference, but really address in a much better way than we have done in the past with much better aesthetics, with much better sensory and said by others and youth spirited is fundamentally what guides our model of rich engagement with and persuasion of consumers. And we deploy that what we call a very strong frontline machine in which execution is improving in every single market. The 2 largest physical retailers of U.S. have awarded Unilever Supplier of the Year for 2025 in the last month. That's not by chance. That's by design. That's a significant change in our portfolio and it's a significant expansion of the capabilities in the most important market in which we operate. This is a video that basically shows what we are doing in terms of product development, our science, our aesthetics, sensorials, are coming together in some of our key products. [Presentation]

I'll have Dirt is Good as an example. It's much more difficult to wash in 15 minutes than to was in 2 hours. In 2 hours, the wash is done by the machine. In 15 minutes, it's done by your science. 15-minute wash increase science requirements, increase entry barriers. It's already a $250 million platform for us. We're investing heavily in R&D. This is a new center that we announced last week. It will be in New Haven. It's basically a Yale ecosystem. That's one of the big center for biology and chemistry development in the world. We are putting $300 million in this site that will be a key site for our innovation going forward. AI is dramatically accelerating how we are doing innovation and breakthrough innovation. We have more than 150,000 proprietary scientific documents connected in Unilever today. We have more than 25 million data that are consumer data plus lab data that we are connecting. In seconds, we can make more than 10,000 interactions, virtual experiments in our labs. And this is resulting in much more stronger claims, much stronger innovation. This is 5 years ago, 80% of the action in our labs was physical. Today, 80% of our actions in our labs are digital. Our time frame for innovation was 2 to 3 years, now it's 9 to 12 months. The time frames are changing dramatically. And this is basically resulting in what we call advantaged discovery and design. We have more than 15,000 active patents today. Our aesthetics have improved dramatically. 60% of our packaging are now showing superiority versus competition. 65% of our fragrances after the big investment we have done in in-house fragrance house has been improving our fragrance dramatically, and we have more than 65% of our fragrances today showing superior results versus competition. Our innovation is bigger. We have stronger claims. This is leading with a stronger brand equities, 60% of our revenue is growing brand equities. 80% of our products are showing product superiority in a holistic way, measured in a holistic way and the size of our innovation has doubled in the last 3 years. I want to show basically 2 examples of that. One is Dove Hair and the other is Cif Infinite Clean. For many, many years, we were challenged if a brand that was born in soap like that could travel into a higher, higher category like hair. That hair today, with the last relaunch of Intensive Repair is growing at 11%. It's a $1.2 billion turnover business. It has been growing 11% in 2025 and it's accelerating in 2026. It's already close to 20% of the revenue of total Dove. It's 20% share in India. It's growing massively in U.S. It has significant shares in all emerging markets. So this is basically an example of when you put your best science in some of your best brands, you can really elevate the brand dramatically. Cif, this is -- is a probiotic range. The secret here is that it keeps cleaning when you stop cleaning. It keeps cleaning when you stop cleaning. And you can see also aesthetics very different what you usually see in household cleaners or in home cleaners. This is when I said before that consumer needs are converging. This is an example of that. This is a home care product that looks like a personal care or a beauty product. And Cif is growing 10%. It has been declared one of the most innovative brands in all the awards that are usually done in the industry and a home care brand growing at more than 10%. And this is a home care brand that is fundamentally exposed to developed markets. This is not emerging market growth. This is European growth. This is when you basically put together best mix in a great brand. All this fundamentally supported by what I believe is a very improved frontline machine. This is what we are doing with the FIFA activation during the World Cup. So it's just -- you see here some of the example of executions in U.S., in U.K., in Brazil, in Africa, et cetera. Just huge, huge activity, 4x more creators than 1 year ago for our Personal Care business, more than 50,000 creators allocated to the FIFA activity, an immense amount of content feeding -- flooding the feeds. Every Instagram, every reels is now flooded by Unilever brands in order to make this activity unmissable in culture. In a category like deodorants in which frequency of purchase is relatively low, 3 to 4x a year. This gives us a huge opportunity. And this is fundamentally an example or this is an activity that is helping us to further develop our agentic capabilities. Agentic is all about search, proof and persuption. Market leadership doesn't give necessarily an advantage when it comes to discovery in LLMs. You have to be intentional about what you to do there to ensure that your content is discovered in AI. AI plays in favor of scientific proof, patents, claims, publishing, clinical proof, ratings. This plays in favor of big brands. And this is part of our program when it comes to LLM proof and persuasion how to convert from discovery and proof into buying is fundamentally linked to your relationship with retailers. We have now 26 brands in the U.S. using Amazon sponsored programs. They fundamentally are integral to the path to purchase of the consumers in Amazon. We have now more than 50 brands in 20 geographies in which we are tracking our presence in LLM versus competition. That can only be done by big companies with big clinical support and with big budgets. With that, Srini?

So I'll walk you through quickly our value creation model. In some ways, it's actually consistent. We have spoken about the importance of the volume growth, both from a units perspective, premiumization and value chain expansion. And clearly, what we are going after is a top third shareholder returns and hard currency returns. I think that's something which is fundamental, and we've been consistent in terms of how we have been calling that out for the past couple of -- a few quarters and years. This is actually a good summary chart in terms of how we think about it. Our approach is disciplined and our approach is focused. We continue to invest behind our brand and marketing investments. You saw the chart. We do about 18% in an HPC business, 16% in its totality, including Foods. We invest somewhere between 3%, 3.5% in CapEx. We invest close to 1.5% to 2% in R&D. So there is about 23%, 24% of our capital, which actually is going towards what we call is furthering growth. And Fernando has already spoken about the capital expenditure. Our approach to bolt-on acquisitions is extremely disciplined. We continue to spend about $1.5 billion each year. And I will talk you through a bit in terms of the bolt-on strategy and how it is working for us. We are again reconfirming that this is a portfolio destination portfolio that we want to run. There is no plan for any transformative acquisition, and we want to be absolutely unambiguous about that. We continue to give about 60% of our payouts. So we've continued to maintain a very healthy balance between dividends and share buyback. And in the last 5 years, we've actually returned more than $30 billion of capital to the shareholders, which also shows a consistency in how we deliver. I think this is an important one. What we really have is a very disciplined playbook for bolt-on acquisitions with higher thresholds in terms of returns. Clearly, we only look at anything to do with beauty and personal care. It has to be U.S. and India. It has to be premium and differentiated. And that really becomes an important priority that actually guides what we do in terms of how we think about it. Therefore, the attributes become very intuitive and logical. It has to be more science and technology, clinical, fitting with our capabilities, digitally native brands and obviously, brands which are in superior and in a fast-growing stage, that's when we actually come in and we can scale. We are not necessarily people who build from scratch. We are actually extremely good at taking brands which have come to a certain level and scaling them up, given our strength of our understanding of consumers, channels, markets and actually also the international expansion. So that in a manner starts to play out exactly what we do in terms of the bolt-ons. This is an important one and how has life changed for us. I think sometimes there are some misconceptions in terms of how our bolt-on acquisitions have been performing given what happened prior to 2019. If you really look at our track record from 2019 onwards, we've actually done 14 acquisitions. It is half of what we did in the year prior, right? So clearly, it's a lot more focused using the criteria that I described in the prior page. More importantly, 80% of our acquisitions are actually delivering on or above the business case. That, again, if you really look at the track record from an M&A perspective with any benchmarks, it's actually quite impressive. And some of them, as you are all aware, have gone multifold. And therefore, the last one actually brings it to life. We are getting the turnover to grow about 2.5x in 2.5 years. That's, again, a very unique way to thinking about it. These are not brands which are growing over a 5-year, 7-year horizon. In about, we've got from the time we have acquired, they hit a 2.5x their size and approximately average period being 2.5 years. And you've heard examples of Liquid I.V., Nutrifol and -- sorry, and OLLY. But what I want to talk to you actually is about a recent example, which is really about K18, a fantastic brand, which we actually got in early 2024. It's been growing upwards of 30%. It's driven by fantastic innovations, for example, the breakthrough science Lain molecule repair mask, which is actually the #1 hair mask in Amazon in the U.S. And it's also got many category leading-edge proprietary technologies, including the successful K18 peptide. This is, again, a great brand. This is again something we are super excited about, and we believe is actually very well poised to capture the premium hair market and actually continue to grow and actually be one of a big, big contributor for our delivery. This also gives you a bit more examples of some of the recent acquisitions that we have done. Minimalist, really playing in the face and hair segments in India, a very strong premium brand to really capture the India premium opportunity and has got potential to really go into the other Asian markets. Dr. Squatch is actually a very contemporary take to men in terms of really giving personal care benefits, again, a fast-growing business. We're quite excited. We got this in last year. And the most recent one really has been in the super green segment, which is Gruns as a brand. We are happy to confirm that yesterday, we actually completed this acquisition. This is again a business which is in a super high-growth momentum and actually addresses a very important need in terms of peoples, vitamins and supplements. So in an essence, what you really see is it's a sharper portfolio. As Fernando said, we are clearly in the space of both performing and transforming. And it's a higher quality model which is delivering. And the excitement really comes us for our ability to sustain this momentum and shape Unilever into a business which continues to deliver the top third returns. On that count, if you have any time, we can take questions or Fernando, any comments from you?

Okay. Thank you. We have a minute left. So maybe if I could just ask the perform and transform mantra that you have. It sounds like no excuses for underperformance, I wouldn't want to walk in with bad news but you are pushing the business perhaps harder than it has been before at the time of quite significant change. How are you managing that process? And does it feel like it's being pushed hard or not?

I feel Unilever has been perceived as a slow and complex for a lot of -- for a long, very long period of time. And now some people say, are you changing too fast. But we were not prepared -- neither the Board nor the leadership team was prepared to kick the can down the road and leave the issues to be sorted out later. I feel we have demonstrated with our separation of ice cream that we can make a very complex separation at the same time, accelerate our performance, both in top line and bottom line, and we will prove the same when we do it with Foods. We are very confident on that. I feel the cultural change in Unilever is profound. It's just the shift into performance and accountability is very, very significant. And we are not paid to do easy things or to do few things. Great companies perform and transform simultaneously. And some people say, are you under the risk of change fatigue? I'm not paid to be lazy and our people is not paid to be lazy. So we will do whatever has to be done to ensure we make Unilever a consistent outperformer for the years to come. I believe we have proven that in the last 3 years, and we will continue proving it.

Okay. Well, thank you very much for very clear and a good point to finish on. So Fernando and Srini, thank you very much indeed for your time.

Thank you.