Colgate-Palmolive Company (CL) Presents at Consumer Analyst Group of New York Conference (Transcript)

Colgate-Palmolive Company (NYSE:CL) Presents at Consumer Analyst Group of New York Conference February 23, 2024 8:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Noel Wallace – Chairman, President and CEO

Diana Schildhouse – Chief Analytics & Insights Officer

Conference Call Participants

Bryan Spillane – Bank of America

Dara Mohsenian – Morgan Stanley

Chris Carey – Wells Fargo

Andrea Teixeira – JPMorgan

Peter Grom – UBS

Unidentified Company Representative

So, with that, joining us today from Colgate, our Chairman and CEO, Noel Wallace; Chief Analytics and Insights Officer, Diana Schildhouse. And Noel has made CAGNY history here. Five years ago, he laid out a strategy to reaccelerate growth driven by investments in marketing, innovation, digital capabilities, filling white space. And they exited 2023 showing some momentum. So, I guess it’s working.

So, I’ll turn it over to Noel to tell us more.

[Video Presentation]

Noel Wallace

Great. Well, good morning, everyone. We thought we wanted to begin the presentation with really reinstating our purpose as a company, which is an innovative growth company that’s truly reimagining a healthier future for all people, pets, and their planet. And I think those two spots do a wonderful job in capturing what we’re dealing with around the world.

Cavities continues to be the number one disease in the world and we’re well-positioned to help combat that and provide better health outcomes and ultimately, improve education at the same time.

And obviously, with the incredibly — incredible growth of skin cancer around the world, our ability to take the number one brand recommended by dermatologists and push that with a partnership with Andy Cohen has been terrific. So, a reminder, our Safe Harbor statement.

As we’ve done over the last four years, it’s always a prideful moment for me to showcase some of our executive talent around Colgate and truly bring to life some of the capabilities that we’re scaling across the organization.

And I’ve got Diana Schildhouse with me today, who is our Chief Digital — excuse me, Chief Analytics and Insights Officer for the company, and she’s going to talk how we’re scaling some of those capabilities around the organization.

So, a couple of things to level set us all. I will quickly recap; 2023, and then I’ll get into our 2024 outlook, but the subsequent part of the presentation will be to talk about our strategy and how we’re confident in our ability to continue to drive growth for the organization.

Starting with 2023, you saw obviously strong growth at the top line, 8.5% organic sales growth, 8.5% top line dollar sales growth. Growth across all of our divisions and all of our categories, which is again the quality of growth that we were looking for.

Importantly, we saw an inflection of volume in the back half of the year, and we exited the year with positive volume growth ex the impact of private label that we brought into the business.

Last year, importantly, the leverage in the middle of the P&L was an important aspect of what we were looking to attain as we went through the year. You see that we had growth in gross profit, both dollars and margins, operating profit and percentage in dollars as well. That allowed us to reinvest behind the business and grow our advertising up double-digit. And despite the double-digit increase in advertising we continue to draw — excuse me, to drive consistent earnings growth at the bottom-line.

Importantly, working capital has been an area of focus with increased earnings and lower working capital. We drove free cash flow up 63% on the year, which is again our ability to return money to shareholders, which was terrific in terms of our performance in that area. And you’ll see, as I’ll get into the presentation, how we’re driving market share consistently across the globe.

We expect another strong year in 2024. Net sales up 1% to 4% with a low-single-digit impact from foreign exchange. Importantly, balanced growth will enter into organic sales this year with both volume and pricing growth.

Gross profit margins will be up, as we said on the call. We continue to expect advertising to be up on the year — advertising will be up on the year, which is again a big catalyst for our growth that we’ve seen over the last couple of years.

Base business EPS to be up mid- to high single-digits. And again, important to get that free cash flow continuing to grow so we can continue to reinvest behind the business and return funding to our shareholders.

So, five key things in terms of our measure a very consistent with what I outlined five years ago, and very consistent in terms of how we’re deploying it across the organization.

Executing the right strategy, we believe, to drive growth in a very volatile and competitive environment. The scaling of our capabilities across the organization. We’re delivering productivity and efficiencies throughout the P&L in order to get that leverage.

Reaccelerating cash flow and investment and driving shareholder value through consistent and compounded earnings per share growth, and importantly, making sure that we continue to drive a healthier future for all people, their pets, and our planet.

So, let me begin with our strategy and how it’s working. We talked about the importance of a growth mindset five years ago, and how we want to consistently drive organic growth across all of our categories and all of our divisions.

And you’ve seen that consistently over the last 20 quarters where we’ve delivered 3% to 5% organic growth or better in every single quarter. Part of that is the composition of our categories. Everyday use categories, low private label penetration, high brand loyalty and emotional engagement in the categories in which we compete.

And you see the fact that we’ve added almost $1.5 billion of incremental sales over the last couple of years from $15.7 billion back in 2019, up to $19.45 billion, so almost $4 billion of incremental sales, so consistent good top line growth.

Importantly, the advantage that we have is the great composition of our business around the world. We compete in 200 markets around the world. We’ve got a good composition of both developing and emerging. While developing can be quite volatile, we’ve got years of experience dealing with the volatility of emerging markets and that continues to be a key driver of our growth.

We said five years ago that we needed to get back to basics. We needed to get back to the core products that we have that represent a significant part of our business. We need to get back to our heritage of bringing great science-based products to the market, and make sure that we continue to premiumize our portfolio.

So, let me start with how we’re looking at science to drive innovation and to drive growth across our portfolio. MaxFresh, a big core business for us around the world, particularly a big business in India. We developed new technology that significantly enhanced fresh breath.

Fresh breath continues to be the number one reason consumers buy a toothpaste product, and we’re going to deliver great science-based product in that market to drive incremental growth, not only against the multinationals in that market, but importantly, some of the local brands.

Total, a big part of our core business. We’re very excited about the launch of Plaque Release. Again, scientific breakthrough in terms of our ability to remove plaque, one of the leading causes of oral health disease, and we’re launching that around the world as we speak.

Premiumization. We talked about really flexing our portfolio a couple of years ago, taking some of the premium brands that we have in other markets. In this case, the OMX brand out of Europe and launching that in key markets across the world. This has been a real incremental growth for us. as we penetrated new channels that we historically were not very strong in, and our ability to bring science-based technology into the market.

You can see here in Brazil with the launch of Elmex, the category — we grew the category 18%, and that was driven by a 64% growth of Elmex and now one of the fastest-growing brands in the pharmacy channel in Brazil.

Probiotics, an important insight that we’re going to see across both oral care, personal care and skin care, an interesting insight that our scientists have developed in terms of our ability to really play into — how do we create better bacteria in the mouth, better bacteria in the skin in order to create better efficacy of our products. This is the launch of prebiotic in China.

Lot of gum issues around the world. Consumers first reason to help their gum problems is to go to a softer toothbrush. We developed this incredible technology and a new gum care expert product. 6,000 bristles has an incredible cushion clean with a unique AFT technology, again, very clinically driven and very scientific-based in terms of how we’re going to improve gum health and consumers all over the world.

Great partnerships as well, a segment that we didn’t compete in four or five years ago, our partnership with Philips, a leading, obviously, brand in the electric toothbrush segment. We’ve launched with a partnership in Latin America, achieved number one in the category in Mexico, and growing very, very quickly in Brazil as well.

So, again, great partnerships, really partnering with leading brands in the segment and a leading Colgate brand that people are very familiar with. The important on this one is that we’re growing category dollars quite significantly, and that, which means more people coming into the category.

Likewise, in Brazil, we have a leading share in mouthwash. We’ve obviously continued to bring new technology into the segment of mouthwash, which have been a little bit sleepy. But this is our core brand relaunch of Plax with better odor elimination in the formulation, which has been terrific in that market.

Closer to home here in Hello, one of the fastest-growing toothpaste in the market, an acquisition we made a few years back, is doing wonderful in the market, one of the best velocity SKUs that we have today and some of the key retailers will be launching this quarter a new vitamin C innovation that provides whitening benefits in the category, and we’re very excited about how that brings incremental users into our franchise.

We all need a little bit of this, tightening our skin and getting rid of those wrinkles. This is a very, very superior clinically-driven PCA product that you see here on the screen, the Max Age Renewal serum. Very premium priced recommend through dermatologists and estheticians. And obviously, we think we’re going to see good results from this as we bring the anti-aging into the portfolio of PCA.

Sanex, a big brand. We don’t talk a lot about here, but a big brand in Europe for us, needing to make sure that we revitalize that business. We’ve again gotten into the aerospace of prebiotics and we think we’ve got some great innovation coming in the next couple of months to bring incremental uses into the category as well.

Big innovation, the first of its kind in France, a leading brand in the fabric softener category is Soupline. We’re going to be launching a unit dose in a market, a solid unit dose, which you see provides 72% less plastic and you get the same amount of softness and the same amount of fragrance delivery through the product. So, I think a terrific innovation to drive incremental category dollars, which we see in the first three or four months of that launch already.

Fabuloso, one — a brand we don’t talk a lot about, launched about 20 years ago here in the U.S., but a very, very big brand in Latin America, one of the leading cleaning products here in the U.S. now. We’re continuing to concentrate that whole line, which obviously provides enhanced benefits to us and enhance benefits to the consumer through improved efficacy and improved fragrance.

Really need innovation here. For those of you with dogs, you know that fur can be a real problem on your clothing. We’ve launched a new unique for pet parents to repel pet hair. So, obviously, a good breakthrough, and we’re seeing great trial and repeat on that as we launch that across the U.S. market.

And finishing off with another type of innovation, which is how we’ve used our capital to really drive capacity and flexibility to enter new growth segments across the markets in which we compete.

This is all the wet products coming out of our Tonganoxie plant, which is our most sophisticated plant in the world here in Kansas, and it’s allowing us to really penetrate the wet segment with a whole assortment of different types of products in the wet segment that we historically didn’t have in the past. This is also going to allow us to increase shelf space and obviously compete in segments that are rapidly growing around the world.

So, that’s the innovation. I think a whole relook at how we were innovating across the market, making sure that we were not only focused on the big core businesses, but getting more into the breakthrough in the transformational area.

And then we needed to figure out how we were going to take these in some of our categories and really drive them with endorsements through the profession in order to create the premium nature of our products and the stickiness that we really needed.

And for us, it really starts with the profession in many of our categories. A great example is oral care and whitening. You can see here Chair to Sink strategy, where we initially went very aggressively into the consumer side of the business with a whole array of different superior whitening products that we sell to retailers.

We then went into the direct-to-consumer area with out-of-home, with our whitening pens. And then importantly, we’re now going into the professional segment with some high efficacy products that will be sold through the profession. You can see the wide range of pricing that we have across those three segments.

And that’s driving market share for us. We’ve got great, great incremental growth on the whitening. This is the whitening share that you see here over the last three years, and you’re seeing that consistently around the world as we standardize our approach to growing whitening across all of our core markets. These are the top eight markets in front of you.

Importantly, it’s not only taking the efficacy and the science to the consumer. We need to make sure that we’re showing up in the importance of our products and conferences around the world.

And I thought I’d showcase a Hill’s example, I just got back from Orlando a couple of months ago, where we had one of the largest pet conference meetings in the world, 27,000 vet health professionals attended this conference, a great opportunity for us to showcase our science and our clinical superiority in the area of nutrition. And I had the Hill senior team as well as stand with me.

Great to see our brands show up and great to see the incredible passion that the vet health professionals have towards the brand and the superiority that we continue to deliver in that segment.

We talked about onc care as a product for pets that are suffering from cancer. Unfortunately, when pets suffer from cancer and the type of prescription drugs that are prescribed really lessens their appetite. We need to find ways to keep the nutrition at the optimal levels in order to have those drugs take their — take the most impact in terms of benefits.

We see this through onc care and a really a great story in terms of how we’re seeing that drive incremental purchase in the category as well as incremental credibility with the profession.

You remember the story last year, I hope, on Dave [indiscernible], our Head of R&D, at Hills and his dog who suffered from cancer. In fact, we used Arlo here as one of the initial trial dogs in our cancer — in the cancer product. And I’m happy to report that nine years later, he continues to be a very healthy and vibrant dog and certainly onc care helped him deal with some of the cancer issues that he was suffering in terms of increasing his appetite and nutrition.

Elta, I started off with that purposely because it’s a very important product. We have the number one brand recommended by dermatologists. That continues to be a core strategy for us to build the awareness of this product and drive trial and repeat across the market. We continue to be very focused on opening up new doors and getting that endorsement strengthened even more.

Okay. So, that’s the innovation, that’s professional endorsement, and then the next big thing is obviously the communication of this great science and getting the broad-based awareness and the trial out of our products around the world.

Start with advertising, and we said four years ago that we were going to stay consistent to our strategy of deploying more advertising around the market to drive consistent top line growth. You see the increase 10% to sales, and we anticipate that we’ll continue to increase that both on the dollar and a percent basis in 2024.

That has driven consistent market share performance for the brand, which is terrific. This is our global market share on toothpaste. But market share is only one dimension of looking at the health of our brands.

As we’ve talked about before, it’s really about household penetration, which includes all channels. And as you know, as we’ve talked about before, Colgate continues to be the number one brand, most penetrated brand in the world of all CPG products, so a position that we’re very, very proud of, and a position that we want to continue to grow.

We’re not only strong in Oral Care, we obviously have strength across the balance of our categories. As you see here, we have a number one and number two position across many of the categories in which we compete, and that gives us a great position to talk to the retailers in terms of driving incremental category dollars across their businesses.

At the end, it really comes down to best-in-class marketing. You’ve got great science, great endorsement from the profession, and then we’ve got to deliver it through great, best-in-class marketing.

And ultimately, we’re really focused on getting the execution of our strategy implemented in store in a very, very different way. And I think during COVID, we really lost a little bit of that edge that we had historically in store. And this has really been a competitive advantage for Colgate is an area that we’ve really stepped up our focus to ensure that we get the execution in store and you can see some of the terrific work that we’re doing around the world.

So, what I want to leave you there in terms of the basic tenets of our strategy is that we’re very confident and the consistency of performance that we’re delivering in the marketplace.

We’re confident in the fact that our ability to continue to drive balanced growth across both pricing and volume and ultimately, deliver a product that satisfies the consumer and drives ultimate market share for the business.

I’ve talked about over the last four years, it is not only about getting the growth mindset back in the company, what’s important is that we’re building capabilities both short-term and long-term.

Last three years, we’ve talked a lot about the capabilities that we’re building. And I’m really happy today to talk about we’re not just building those capabilities anymore, we’re truly scaling them, and we’re seeing the benefits of those capabilities coming through the P&L and the performance of the company.

So, let’s talk a little bit about scaling those capabilities as we focused on the new ones that we relined to be choiceful of. We’ll talk about one of those in each in turn, and we needed to ensure we have the people, the processes, and the incentives across the company to build those capabilities. And as I mentioned earlier, we’re really pleased that we’re in a position where we’re truly scaling them.

As you remember, we had Pat Verduin come in and talk about innovation four years ago now? Three, four years ago. Four years ago. We then had Brigitte King come and talk about our digital transformation. You remember Eve [ph] came and talked about our marketing transformation, and I’m pleased to have Diana with us today to talk about how we’re transforming data and analytics and scaling net around the world.

So, talk a little bit about innovation transformation. A big refocus for the company. We really needed to ensure that we stepped up our innovation, move away from the close-in line extensions to driving real people insight-based innovation that was going to drive incremental value to the categories and to our business.

And we did new incentives across the organization. We provided new training across the organization. We structured the organization in a very different way to ensure that we were getting the focus on innovation, and that has certainly paid out for us.

Then it was the communication of digital. We needed to transform the company to become a digital-first organization. And Brigitte and her team, we hired a significant amount of talent from the outside to help upgrade how we were thinking about it, providing the training and the processes across the organization as well.

And you see some of the soundbites there that we’ve really upped our game in the digital space, and we continue to find opportunities to drive increased ROI with the spending that we have in the marketplace.

That’s helped us drive our off-line growth as well. This is our e-commerce year-after-year consistent growth there as a percentage of our total sales now up to about 15%. And I think, again, an attribute to the — testament to the fact that we really drove a consistency of purpose on digital and what we wanted to accomplish and now really moving that into an omnichannel environment and the benefits that we’re seeing both across brick-and-mortar and our off-line business — our online business, excuse me.

Marketing was the third, and Eve [ph] talked about that in terms of how we’re thinking about marketing, training our people to get back to the core of what we really do, which is creating great persuasive content in the markets, targeting that as we need to across the market and ensuring that we get the return on investment from all the spend that we’re putting into the categories in which we compete.

So, with that, let me turn it over to Diana. She’s going to take you through our data and analytics transformation and how we’re scaling now around the world. Diana?

Diana Schildhouse

Thank you, Noel. Good morning, everyone. So, it may go without saying, but the last five years have seen both an explosion of data of all types as well as advancements in computing power and technology. This combination has meant that mastering data and analytics has become a driver of growth for the companies that have leaned in here.

And I was confident about the opportunity that we had at Colgate when I joined in 2021. We have a proven track record of investing in and building strategic capabilities.

Colgate brand is in more homes than any other. So, there was opportunity to drive scale at a truly global level, and Noel and the rest of the team believed in the power of what data and analytics could do.

Analytics has evolved significantly from what it used to represent to what it is today. It’s gone from simple modeling in Excel spreadsheets of manually pulled scanner data to today where we’re bringing together many different data sources in a far more automated fashion, and applying far more advanced techniques like AI, machine learning and predictive and prescriptive analytics. It’s action-oriented, it’s forward-looking, and it’s transformed into a driver of tangible business value.

And at Colgate, we’ve been accelerating in terms of building this capability. Two years ago, we participated in BCG’s Data & Analytics Benchmarking Survey, and we just retook it again a couple of months ago to track and measure our progress.

And we have found that over the last two years, Colgate has advanced more quickly than our CPG peers in building this capability. Specifically, our scores in areas like our use of AI and advanced analytics, our use case execution, as well as the extent to which we’ve driven change management and build to data culture have all seen significant jumps.

How did we do it? How have we advanced so quickly in building this capability in just a couple of years? It started with creating a clear enterprise-wide analytics strategy with a few key elements.

The first is focus. Our approach is not tech-first or tech for tech’s sake. It is tied to specific business questions that we’re trying to answer and priority use cases where we knew we could add the most impact.

Scale. Our solutions are built with global scalability in mind. They’re flexible, they’re adaptable, and they’ve been tested across different market architypes, whether we’re analyzing Bodegas in Latin America or hypermarkets in APAC.

And finally, impact. We’ve embedded the discipline of measuring the value that this analytics provides to the business, both in terms of top line growth as well as efficiencies.

I’ll walk you through two of our priority analytics use cases, RGM or revenue growth management analytics as well as media analytics to give you a sense of how it’s come to life.

So, starting with RGM. We have built a full stack application in-house with our own proprietary algorithms, and we’ve scaled it to our top 30 markets globally. We’ve built predictive price elasticity and scenario planning as well as promotion and assortment optimization capabilities.

It gives our teams a quick view into what’s working and what’s not so that they can be much more precise and surgical about actions that they’re taking at a SKU level and a tactic level.

And we’ve heard from our teams on the ground just how much value they’re seeing out of this analytics both in terms of servicing revenue opportunities, but also time saved that can be spent on actually actioning the analytics and reacting more quickly to changes in the market rather than spending time on data preparation visualization.

You can see here a few examples of how these analytics have come to life across three of our priority markets recently, Brazil, Mexico, and the U.S., where these analytics have identified opportunities around pricing as well as driving premiumization and trade up.

Media is another priority analytics use case for us and a space that is constantly changing. So, it’s one in which we are applying next-generation approaches to make sure that we are keeping up with that pace of change. It spans tools like marketing mix modeling, but also includes retail media analytics, e-commerce, CRM, and first-party data analytics, as well as Clean Rooms.

And we’re focusing on scale here as well. So, we’ve scaled our media analytics across markets that represent more than 85% of our sales globally. It’s helping our teams understand what — how to set the optimal spend level, how to optimize within channels and levers, and how to reach our consumers with the right message at the right time with personalized content and precision targeting.

And we have great proof points here. We’ve seen consistent double-digit ROI improvement over the last few years, both when we look at overall media ROIs as well as when we break it down by digital ROIs and traditional media ROIs. We’re driving increased effectiveness and efficiency at the same time that we’re increasing our advertising spend.

Driving value from analytics is not possible without clean quality data, which is why transforming our data foundation has been a key pillar of our analytics strategy, and one that we continue to invest in and focus on. We’ve also unlocked new growth opportunities through retailer data partnerships with one example being the Clean Room that our Hill’s team has built with a key specialty retail partner.

Clean Rooms allow us to bring together our first-party data, the retailer’s first-party data, as well as additional third-party data, all in a safe and privacy compliant way that enables joint value creation with our retail partners. Here, it’s allowed our Hill’s team to reach new audiences with personalized content and precision targeting as well as to drive increased ROIs and household penetration.

We can’t talk about data and analytics transformation without talking about AI. And traditional AI or machine learning is exactly what has been powering the examples that I’ve shown. Our models and algorithms are able to run thousands of equations simultaneously. So, it’s work that just simply wasn’t humanly possible before.

Generative AI, on the other hand, opens up an entirely new set of opportunities for us. And we have active initiatives underway in key strategic areas leveraging generative AI. And it’s all the work that we’ve done, bringing in the right talent and upscaling the organization in the last few years that’s prepared us to respond as new technologies like gen AI emerge.

Driving a transformation of this type is not just about tech. It’s about people. It’s about creating a culture where data is seen as part of everyone’s job, not just the analytics team.

One of the ways that we’ve built this culture at Colgate is through learning and upscaling. We partnered with our HR learning team to create a bespoke Data Literacy & Analytics Academy, with over 14,000 employees taking assessment, taking curated courses that were tailored to their function and role and earning badges, including Noel himself.

Our people have embraced the opportunity to learn and upscale in this important area, and we were proud to be recognized with the Brandon Hall Gold Award for this program.

So, we’ve made significant progress in building this capability. But everyone who’s read an article or two lately about gen AI knows that the data and analytics space does not stand still. So, we’ll continue to evolve and iterate on bringing next-generation approaches to bear and are leveraging and integrating AI in more areas across our business.

Ultimately, it’s the work that we’ve done in the past two years to build the strategic capability that positions us well now to be agile and continue driving the transformation.

I’ll hand back to Noel.

Noel Wallace

Thank you, Diana. What you didn’t tell you is how humbled I was when I took that test realizing that I absolutely knew nothing about analytics and data. I had a great idea of how important it was to the company, but certainly, getting that education across the company has been fundamental to us.

Okay. So, we opened up by talking about making sure that we were deploying strategies to drive consistent top line growth for the organization. And that’s really about our growth mindset that we’ve talked about for the last four years.

Then importantly, we needed to figure out how — once we had that strong top line growth that we felt was very durable, how do we get the leverage back into the P&L through our productivity and efficiency programs, and that’s what I want to talk about now.

Our funding to growth has always been a unique skill for the Colgate organization, our ability to do it year-after-year drive funding opportunities to drive incremental margin and ultimately, fund our advertising.

And you can see after a significant year of inflation in 2022, we really ramped up our funding and growth efforts in 2023 and delivered a record performance for the business. We anticipate this will normalize as we move forward, particularly as we see costs start to be more benign in the current environment.

And that has got us back to the leverage that we needed in terms of the gross margin in the P&L, driving consistent margin growth through the last couple of years, again, through the aggressive pricing that we’ve taken, the premiumization of our portfolio through new innovation, and obviously, some of the funding the growth that I just talked about. And we — as we talked about on the 2024 guidance, or the 2024 outlook, we will continue to see gross margin expansion in 2024.

Our productivity initiative, again, timely back in 2022 before we saw a lot of the cost inflation coming through the market in terms of our own packing materials. We needed to get the middle of the P&L more focused on getting cost out.

We put a program together to deliver $90 million to $110 million of incremental savings for the business, and we’re well on track to deliver that, which will — that program will finish up in 2024.

And you can see the leverage that we put back into the P&L. And this is really important for the company, really important for us in order to give us a lot more flexibility in terms of how we were going to deliver growth in obviously a very volatile environment. We continue to reduce our overheads as an area of opportunity to make sure we’re operating far more efficiently and getting the cost out of the system.

Okay. Let me move on to that. So, we’ve driven the top line, more leverage in the P&L, which is driving more earnings growth, that earnings growth with improved outlook on working capital. We really wanted to improve our free cash flow in order to make sure that we are driving shareholder value, both short-term and long-term for the business. That was our Tonganoxie plant that I referred to upfront, our new state-of-the-art facility in Kansas, which is producing all of our wet food now.

So, you can see some of the capital expenditures that we put — by putting that leverage in the P&L, getting the income up. It has allowed us to fund important needed capacity investments around the world, which drove our capital expenditures up in 2022. We saw it come down slightly in 2023, and we’ll see more or less the same level of decrease in 2024. But again, great that we’ve got the cash flow in place to continue to invest behind the business and ultimately drive shareholder returns, as I’ll talk to in just a moment.

Improved free cash flow. So, this was again a big focus. As you’ve heard from Stan a couple of times. He walks around the company with growth margin cash. That’s his focus, and obviously, working with the organization to get the working capital back to where we’d like to.

Once we had the earnings growth combined with better working capital, you can see the incredible power that we have to drive free cash flow through the income statement and ultimately up 63% in 2023.

And again, that’s allowed us to return money to our shareholders, something that we’re very proud of. 61 consecutive years of dividend increases, 129 years — consecutive years of paying a dividend. And together with shareholder repurchases, we’ve paid back $28 billion to our shareholders, which, again, something we’re very, very proud of.

Okay. So, we’ve talked about all the growth aspects of the business, and then we needed to really figure out the importance of sustainability and social impact in the markets where we compete, but doing it in a way that we felt was obviously not only improving our environmental footprint and the social impact of our strategies, but driving growth for the organization at the same time.

I talked about our purpose. I started with that. So, we are Colgate, carrying, innovative growth company that’s reimagining in everything that we do a way to create a healthier future for people, pets, and their planet. And this really embraces everything that we do at Colgate to ensure that we’re bringing a benefit both to our shareholders, to the consumers, and to the markets in which we compete.

Our sustainability and social impact is really in three key areas. One, creating social impact in the markets where we operate, to drive growth for the business, and to improve oral health outcomes and other health outcomes in the market.

Helping millions of home. I mentioned earlier upfront. We’re the most penetrated brand in the world. We had this incredible opportunity to speak from that pedestal and talk to consumers about improving oral health, and ultimately, presuming our environment and hitting our environmental objectives for 2025.

No better way to talk about our social impact program than in our Bright Smiles and Bright Future program, where we’ve demonstrated our ability to educate the importance of oral health all over the world, particularly to lower socioeconomic areas. We’ve hit 1.7 billion students in that program in our way to 2 billion students by 2025 or 2026.

Likewise, on the Hill’s side, we’ve — our Food, Shelter, Love program, where we’ve helped 14 million pets get adopted, ultimately, going home with a bag of Science Diet, but again, an important area to continue to improve pet ownership and getting people started off with the best nutrition they can find.

Colgate Total, you remember back in 2019, we took an initiative to launch the first recyclable toothpaste tube in the category. We then shared that technology across the world. And we’re proud that we now have converted 60% of our toothpaste SKUs around the world to the recyclable tube. And in the U.S. — here in the U.S., we’re up to 90% of our tubes across this market.

Importantly, we’re working with recyclable centers all around the world to improve the scalability of this initiative and get the awareness out there that you should recycle your toothpaste tube.

Another very important initiative in our race to net zero carbon by 2024. We’ve signed a Virtual Power Purchase Agreement in the area of solar. And what that’s going to allow us to do when completed to produce equivalent to 100% of our U.S.-based operational efficiency needs through that program. So, again, a terrific way to improve upon the sustainability impact of our business.

Another area that we’re deeply proud of is Colgate has more zero waste plants than any other CPG in the world, and this has been a concerted effort over the last three years to ensure that we’re manufacturing in the most efficient way possible and doing what’s right for the environment long-term.

So, in summary, well-positioned to continue to drive growth in 2024 and beyond. A lot of changes that we’ve implemented. We’ve learned a lot over the last three years in terms of what’s worked, what hasn’t, and ultimately, that’s creating durable top line growth, getting the leverage back in the P&L, and driving consistent performance from there.

We know we need to drive balanced sales growth. We will get back to that in 2024. We talked about that in the 2024 outlook. I talked about the importance of not only building the capabilities over the last couple of years, but scaling those in ways to drive efficiency and leverage and productivity across the organization and hopefully driving more market share for the business.

We know and we’re very focused on driving consistent compounded earnings share growth. That is what it’s all about for us. That’s across all categories and all divisions around the world that contribute towards that up and down the income statement in order to get the leverage that we know and ultimately finding ways to drive free cash flow, which we’re very confident we’ll be able to continue to do to return money to our shareholders and invest back behind our business.

So, with that, I’ll turn it over to the Q&A.

A – Unidentified Company Representative

Let’s go with Bryan.

Q – Bryan Spillane

Thanks. Bryan Spillane from Bank of America. Diana, thank you for the presentation. My question is you talked about building proprietary database systems. I’m not exactly sure what the right word is. But how flexible are they to change maintenance. And I say that in the context of when relational databases hit the market years ago, people — a lot of companies took the off-the-shelf solutions, customized that had a lot of difficulty maintaining them, changing the way even change. So, just as things are moving so quickly. Just how fast can tools to sort of adapt?

A – Diana Schildhouse

On the analytics side, the need for adaptation and change is exactly why we chose to build those tools in-house. So, when we’ve looked at wanting to, of course, focus on scalability, we were able to — more able to adjust to the different market dynamics and dimensions if we’ve built those algorithms and codes in-house.

We still have partners that we work with in terms of data platforms. But in terms of the actual analytical models and the algorithms, we found that for our most important areas, building those in-house with our own team of experts gives us that flexibility to be able to scale more easily than an off-the-shelf solution.

A – Noel Wallace

I would simply add to that, that recognizing the importance of that, we didn’t have the skill set inside the organization. And while Diana talked about the training programs that we’ve implemented across the organization, we brought in close to about 150, 160 people across the last couple of years to truly elevate our capabilities, data scientists, data engineers to ensure that we’re well equipped to position ourselves to scale and drive that efficiency moving forward.

We will have some in-house developed tools to be sure, but we’re certainly working with some of our key partners around the world to ensure that we get products that perhaps can drive more scalability.

The key is scale. What we don’t want to do is be putting places that are unique to certain markets. And Diana and the team have been very deliberate working with our IT folks and our tech stacks to ensure that what we do, we can then roll out across the world because otherwise, we’ll never get the efficiencies.

A – Unidentified Company Representative

Dara?

Q – Dara Mohsenian

Diana, can you talk about how you’re bringing AI and tech in general to your innovation process and driving improvements there?

And Noel you mentioned the strong performance in market share in pace around the world. International, you’ve had a lot of success in the last couple of years. Can you talk about sustainability of that? But North America has lagged a bit, so maybe you can give us a review on how you drive improvements there?

A – Diana Schildhouse

Start with innovation? Yes, so, innovation is another critical use case for us in terms of the application of AI. So, in terms of traditional AI and machine learning, we’ve already built tools and solutions that help us to predict consumer behavior and ingredients that might be trending for example, that can be used in our innovations.

Generative AI is also another big opportunity for us in innovation. So, I mentioned that we have some active initiatives underway there. We see that as a tool that can help our teams to move much more quickly through the innovation process.

What we’re building right now, again, internally, will allow us to produce concepts that are based on our own proprietary consumer insights as well as any additional insights and just move through that process much more rapidly and then test them with digital consumer twins.

So, it speeds up the entire process of conceptualizing new innovation and bringing it to market. So, that’s an area where we’re focusing right now for gen AI specifically for innovation.

A – Noel Wallace

The other part I’d add on innovation is at the R&D side. We’re obviously looking at the wealth and plethora of history that we have on clinical trials, and making sure that we understand the composition of those formulas and the compounds that we’ve used in order to be — to get the predictability of the outcome more accurate moving forward, which will lessen the time it takes in R&D, likewise, to ultimately getting new products to the market.

So, Dara on your second question, the durability of our international share of growth and then a question on North America is that North America scanner data there? So, durability of our business. Obviously, a lot of the strategies that we have put in place are meant to create that durability. And I think you’ve seen that in terms of the top line performance.

We needed to get the sales growth in the P&L. Ultimately, the sales growth would drive, obviously, the share growth and the penetration. We reoriented the organization a lot more around brand penetration across the company because ultimately, we think that is the best barometer to determine, are we getting our products into more homes. Not necessarily is it moving out of the storage fast because a lot of the Nielsen data that we have around the world does not obviously encompass the full market. So, BAM penetration is tremendously important. We see the growth of that.

The durability is going to come from the innovation strategies that I talked about. Ultimately, our ability to continue to drive pricing in markets, our ability to continue to maximize the effectiveness of our advertising spending that you saw. So, I think the durability is there.

We feel really good about the strategies. For instance, I talked about Elmex using the wealth of our portfolio around the world to go after certain markets where we’ve got very low shares in the pharmacy class of trade, deploying more of our share growth in e-commerce, which is growing very rapidly, particularly in Asia, where our shares are under-indexed in that base. So, there’s a lot of upside potential to drive that durability. Hill’s, likewise, our penetration is very low in the category.

On the U.S., a very challenging market for us. We’ve talked about that historically. And we see the business starting to inflect positively. The important part of the strategy over the last two years in North America get the middle of the P&L fixed so we can reinvest behind the business.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’ve got strong brands. We needed to get the investment posture back into the U.S. P&L in order to make sure that we’re driving brand awareness and share growth, get the innovation coming in the market, which is starting to fuel that growth.

So, we feel good about where we are. But the U.S. is still a work in process, and we’ll continue to focus on that important market, but we feel we’ve got a much better position to grow that business as we move forward, given where the middle of the P&L is and some of the share growth that we’ve seen recently in some of those business.

A – Unidentified Company Representative

Dara, if I can just add one point on that, on the market share piece. Latin America, right? So, Latin America is our largest division in terms of sales and profits. And we got 75% market share.

So, the momentum we have in Latin America, you drive that market, you gain share in those markets. It’s going to grow faster and also the lack of negative currency impact outside of Argentina, the currencies have been much more stable, that’s a big — that’s really benefiting that global market share number because the true strength of the Latin American business really gets played out in the global share. Chris?

Q – Chris Carey

Chris Carey, Wells Fargo. So, Diana, you talked about a partnership with a specialty retailer for this Clean Room. I’m not exactly sure what that is, but it sounds interesting and exciting.

So, — but it’s around precise — you’re targeting. So, I wonder how that came about? Was that retailer-driven? Was that from your end? I guess the reason I ask is, obviously, it’s a channel that’s been under pressure. Hill’s talks about having a very long runway for penetration despite maybe some of the category dynamics in pet foods. So, maybe just any more context on how they came about, and how you think that might differentiate your product to gain market share in that channel?

A – Diana Schildhouse

Sure. I can speak about how it came about and then, Noel, if you want to add any more on Hills. So, there are different types of Clean Rooms. Some are retailer-driven. This one actually was proactively initiated by our Hill’s team with the specialty retail partner.

So, it’s — it allowed us — it allowed the team to build it in a more sort of custom way that enabled us to work together with them to share this data. A Clean Room is just sort of a mechanism for sharing first-party data in an anonymized way that allows you to do media targeting and other capabilities. So, this was proactively — we have proactively approached the retailer to create this one.

A – Noel Wallace

We have felt historically that partnering with our retailers in order to create trust and credibility in terms of our ability to access their data and use that to drive category growth is very, very important to us.

So, take Luminate data with Walmart as an example. I was just down with some of the senior team at Walmart, and they talked about Colgate being best-in-class and utilizing take Luminate data to drive incremental category growth.

And these Clean Rooms really open up a huge opportunity to create personalized data from the retailer and from us and create very specific content developed execution in order to drive incremental velocity in their stores.

A – Unidentified Company Representative

Andrea?

Q – Andrea Teixeira

Andrea Teixeira, JPMorgan. So, I wanted to go back, Diana, to what you said about AI, now in more kind of looking into the professionals because I saw in the presentation, you focus all of your focus more on the dermatology side, also potentially more into the vet.

So, can you comment on how your putting that or that’s more of a second derivative of that progress. You were focusing more on the final consumer and then with the customer if you are being able to now engage with the healthcare professionals.

And then if I can borrow the comment on share to talk about the trends in Hill’s?

A – Diana Schildhouse

Yes, the initial focus was first on RGM, revenue growth management, analytics and media. As I mentioned, when we set the strategy, we wanted to be very focused on out a complete use case, sort of from beginning to end and showing that value from it.

So, the initial focus was there, however, we are applying AI and advanced analytics for the profession as well. Some examples of work that’s underway is AI tools that are helping our sales teams understand the best route to visit, for example, vets on and how to — what products to discuss with them. So, there’s a lot of capabilities and potential there as well that we see for the profession.

A – Noel Wallace

Your second question was on Hill’s share?

Q – Andrea Teixeira

[indiscernible]

A – Noel Wallace

Right, we don’t publish global shares and it’s tough to obviously read them. But obviously, in the U.S., as we’ve discussed many times, we continue to drive incremental share growth cost almost consistently across all channels.

Our share continues to be low relative to where we think it can be given the low brand awareness that we have in the category and the low penetration that we have in the category. So, that’s what’s so exciting about the business opportunities that we see on the Hill’s business, our ability to continue to drive incremental share through brand penetration and obviously, continue to expand the presence of the brand in segments that we’re not currently competing in very aggressively like vet.

So, the advertising has been fundamental in driving that and why we’ve allocated such an incremental amount of money into the Hill’s business because we really feel good about the business model that we have, both in terms of driving vet endorsements, translating that to premiumization of the category, and then driving incremental share in the categories and the segments in which we compete.

Q – Peter Grom

Yes. Peter Grom from UBS. So, I wanted to follow-up on Latin America. John, to your point, the momentum there is very strong. Can you maybe just speak to the sustainability of that momentum. You outlined a lot of innovation in Brazil this morning. So, just looking at your head, I’d be curious to get your thoughts on how you see category growth evolving, but also specifically your ability to continue to outperform?

A – Noel Wallace

Yes. It’s particularly exciting about Latin America as we were first to really lead with pricing in those categories when we saw the significant inflationary environments that we were dealing with. And as we talked about on the fourth quarter call, we have seen volume come back into the categories, and we’ve seen consistent volume come back into our business.

And that’s been coupled with, obviously, the innovation that we put into the market, the acceleration of the advertising that we have in the P&L in that business. and obviously, our ability to continue to drive strength-to-strength with the great shares that we have there.

So, we feel very good about the durability. We’ve been in these markets for 80 to 90 years. incredibly experienced teams on the ground that know how to deal with the volatility, but know how to execute extraordinarily well in terms of the current environment.

And some of the strategies that we’re deploying around premiumization have always played — will play very, very favorably in Latin America as we see some of the vitality of those categories come back. And those really are — it puts us in a position to not only drive both premiumization, but to drive continued volume growth as we look at opportunities to drive consumption — per capita consumption.

Question-and-Answer Session

End of Q&A

Okay. With that, we’re going to — we’re out of time. So, we’ll move to the breakout, and again, thanks Colgate for breakfast and the presentation.