Reckitt Benckiser Group plc

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Records Q1 Trading Update. I'm delighted to have both our CEO, Nicandro Durante, and our CFO, Jeff Carr, here this morning for our Q1 call. Nicandro and Jeff will take you through some quick prepared remarks, and then both will be available to take you through any Q&As. Now, before we start, I would like to draw your attention to the usual disclaimer in respect to forward-looking statements, which are contained on page two of our R&S published this morning. Now, without any further ado, I'll hand you over to our CEO, Nicandro Taranti.

Thank you, Richard. Good morning to everyone who has dialed in and welcome to our Q1 trading update. I am pleased to report this morning we have made an excellent start to the year. Delivering group like-for-like net revenue growth of 7.9% in the quarter and further building on our momentum from 2022. I am particularly pleased with how broad-based this delivery has been across our three business units, including improving volume trends in our hygiene business, a very strong OTC performance, and the maintenance of our leading share position in our U.S. nutrition business. We highlighted in our RNS this morning a number of innovations we rolled out during the quarter, while its early days These have been well received in the market by our customers and consumers, and we have more to come in both Q2 and the second half. This is a strong start of the year. The early success of our innovations launch, an exciting pipeline we have yet to roll out, have enabled us to now target a group flag for like net revenue growth of 3% to 5% in 2022. Before I hand over to Jeff, you have seen this morning's announcement that Chris Licht has been appointed as CEO Designate of Records. I would like to congratulate him on his appointment and wish him success as the next CEO of this great company. He will become CEO Designate on the 1st of May 2023 and join the Board of Directors on the 1st of June. I will stay on up to December to ensure a smooth transition with Chris taking over as CEO by the end of 2023. Chris has been instrumental in Racket's transformation, both through his strategic role as Chief and Transformation Officer and his strong operational leadership in the significant turnaround of our health GPU over the last three years. He has a deep understanding of Racket's business and brands, and he lives our cultural values every day. I have got to know Chris well over the past few years, and he's an excellent fit to lead the racket in the next exciting phase of its journey. Jeff will now provide you with some further detail on our Q1 trading performance and full-year outlook.

Thank you, Nicandro. As you mentioned, we made an excellent start to the year with 7.9%. like-for-like net revenue growth in the quarter. As expected, this was due to the strong carryover of pricing from the second half of last year and some delayed pricing actions that we took in our U.S. nutrition business in February. Volumes showed improving trends, particularly in Europe, where we saw strong volumes in our health portfolio and improving trends in hygiene. So looking at our GBUs, high-team business grew 2% on a like-for-like basis, on a like-for-like net revenue basis, or high single digits, excluding the impact of Lysol. So specifically on Lysol, whilst it declined in the quarter due to comping the Omicron spike from last year, we did see a significant improvement in March. Now, let me just make this big announcement. This is the final quarter of COVID related normalization. We expect Lysol to be growing in Q2 and onwards, and we won't be quoting ex-Lysol numbers you'd be happy to know going forward. For the rest of the high-team portfolio, we had a very good start. Finnish had double-digit growth and improved share trends we saw in Europe behind the recent launch of our Finnish Ultimate Plus all in one innovation, delivering our best ever clean. Vanish and Harpic grew double digits, underpinned by innovation and penetration building programs. I'm pleased that we returned to growth with Airwick in Q1. During the quarter, we rolled out two innovations, Active Fresh, our first non-aerosol-based auto spray, and Airwick Vibrant, our most luxurious fragrance experience so far. net revenue growth. This was led by our OTC brands, driven by continued high instances of cold and flu, and some retailer inventory rebuilding in Europe where we'd had some issues with stopping at the end of last year. In intimate wellness, our portfolio delivered a strong mid-single-digit growth in the quarter, again with strong growth in Europe. Delta was slightly down in the quarter, impacted by some tough Omicron comps, especially in Asia, but we remain strongly on track for growth in the year. China had a slower quarter, as it's yet to fully show the benefit of reopening post-COVID lockdowns, although we did see our small cold and flu business do particularly well in the quarter in China. In nutrition, we delivered like-for-like growth of 11.9%. Our developing market portfolio delivered another consistent quarter of mid-single-digit growth behind the executional improvements we made last year. In the U.S., we maintained our market-leading share position in the non-WIC markets, showing that mothers already in the category are sticking with Enfamil, and we are seeing good signs of new mothers emerging. entering the category also sticking with Enfamil. In addition, the quarter was held by some retailer restocking due to the supply shortages that we had in the end of last year and during the whole of 2022, in fact. We know maintaining share will be difficult as we progress through the year when the competitive environment heats up, but we remain confident in our ability to maintain sustainable upside in market share versus our position prior to the supply issues. So moving on to the outlook for the year, we've made a strong start across all of our GBUs. We continue to expect more challenging competitive dynamics in our U.S. business in the future quarters. We therefore target group life-like net revenue growth of 3 to 5% in 2023. That includes the lapping of our U.S. nutrition business in 2022. On margins, there's no change to our outlook. So, Nicandro, back over to you. Thanks, Jeff.