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Time Magazine
6 days ago
- Business
- Time Magazine
TIME100 Most Influential Companies 2025: Procter & Gamble
Among consumer goods companies, P&G's recipe for success is steadiness. Instead of striving for disruption, P&G sharpens execution, strengthening its core brands by introducing more convenient Swaddlers 360 diapers for Pampers in May 2024 and partnering with Marvel's Deadpool franchise to promote Old Spice around the new movie's release in July. The maker of Crest, Tide and other staples of daily living has paid a quarterly dividend to shareholders for 135 consecutive years, and raised the amount annually for 69 consecutive years—a rare achievement that highlights P&G's strategic foresight and ability to weather economic challenges. The strategy has led P&G to pull ahead of arch-rival Unilever, more than doubling its stock price over the past decade. From January to December 2024, P&G share prices saw a 17% spike as it invested in digital marketing in China and shored up its supply chain. In June 2025, however, the company announced it will cut 7,000 jobs over the next two years as it navigates what its executives call an 'unpredictable' geopolitical environment.
Mint
23-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
Colgate-Palmolive eyes H2 rebound amid urban stress, rural growth
New Delhi: Despite a 'tough" March quarter and lingering pressure on many urban consumers, Prabha Narasimhan, managing director and chief executive officer (CEO) of Colgate-Palmolive (India) Ltd, expects a rebound in consumer sentiment and spending in the latter half of the year. She cited government interventions, improved liquidity and a good start to the monsoons as key drivers for this change. 'We're hoping the uptick in consumer sentiment happens towards the back end of the year. The government has intervened, there's been a tax cut, liquidity has improved, monsoons are meant to be quite good this year—all of those should certainly help. We see two pockets of opportunity—the top 30% of urban India has no shortage of money for FMCG products; they continue to want to premiumize. Meanwhile, rural India continues to be buoyant—crops have been good and the sentiment is also positive. However, there is stress in 70% of urban India that has been slightly under pressure," Narasimhan said in an interview with Mint on Monday. Also read: Trent sticks to the long-term goal of growing 25% every year In fiscal 2025, the maker of toothbrushes and body wash reported a 6.3% increase in sales, reaching ₹5,999 crore, compared to ₹5,644 crore in the previous year. The company's profit after tax in FY25 grew by 8.5% to ₹1,437 crore, up from ₹1,324 crore in the previous year. However, the fourth quarter saw a dip in both profit and sales, with net profit down 6.5% to ₹355 crore and revenue declining 2% to ₹1,452 crore. Rural volumes grew ahead of urban for the Mumbai-headquartered company during the fiscal year. The March quarter was 'tough", she said. Analysts attributed this to greater competition and weak urban demand. Managing consumption 'Consumers respond to a feeling of confidence. If they feel a little bit of pressure, then they tend to optimize across all parts of their budget. There are some things that are sacrosanct such as medical and education [expenses]. In the case of oral care, it is management of consumption; it's not through smaller pack sizes or cheaper packs," she told Mint in an interview in the capital. The Indian fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry reported 11% year-on-year value growth in the March quarter, driven by a 5.1% volume increase and a 5.6% price hike, according to data released by NielsenIQ. Also read: Govt may relax registration rules for e-commerce players, traders unhappy Urban market growth decelerated in the March quarter, while rural markets saw an 8.4% volume increase, a slight dip from the December quarter. Other large packaged goods companies such as Procter & Gamble Hygiene and Health Care Ltd, the maker of Whisper, Vicks and Old Spice, gave similar commentary earlier this month. The company reported a steady revival in rural consumption, even as urban demand remains under pressure. The home and personal care category, where Colgate Palmolive operates, saw consumption growth of 5.7% in the March quarter, with higher demand in rural areas, NielsenIQ noted. The company competes with Dabur India and Hindustan Unilever Ltd. Oral care penetration Meanwhile, the maker of Colgate toothpaste and Palmolive body wash continues to increase the usage of oral care products in India. 'We would like to move the needle as far as urban India is concerned—to get the 80% of consumers who don't brush twice a day to brush twice a day. As far as rural India is concerned, the aim is to get the one in two consumers who don't brush daily to brush daily," she said. A decade ago, oral care penetration in India was around 85%. Today, it's close to universal. The company has also been pushing its flagship Oral Health Movement. Also read: P&G Hygiene sees rebound in rural demand, but urban stress persists As part of the same, over 4.5 million Indians screened their oral health in 700 districts. The company spent 14% of its FY25 annual sales on advertising. Narasimhan said the number will remain in the ballpark and within that range in the current fiscal, too. Meanwhile, commenting on global geopolitical volatility, Narasimhan said the company is largely insulated from supply chain disruptions. 'We are a largely 'make in India' for India company, so almost our entire production of both toothpaste and toothbrush is in India across our four plants. We are reasonably self-sufficient in that sense. We've tried very hard to localize, even to source raw materials; to that extent, one is a little bit insulated from all of this. The macro environment has become so volatile that it's just impossible to comment on and it's impossible for us to do anything other than to insulate on a more structural basis as we have done and continue to do," she added.
Daily Mail
14-06-2025
- General
- Daily Mail
QUENTIN LETTS: Let Dad know you love him (even if he does blow his nose loudly, obsesses about stacking the dishwasher in a certain way, and wears awful holiday shorts)
This Father's Day, if you have given or received a card, what does it depict? A foaming tankard? A sports car, wheel barrow, tie, rugby ball? Last week I spotted one that simply featured a packet of cigarettes. Another displayed the contents of a toolbox. Good old Dad, always tinkering in his shed with his spanner and saw, fag dangling from his lips and a can of light ale on the worktop. In this era of policed non-stereotypes, when gender-specific language can land you in the soup, it's amazing the greetings-cards trade still gets away with such things. How come it hasn't been gnawed to a submissive stump by the feminist Fawcett Society and its bristling battalions? As a 62-year-old Englishman of fogeyish tendencies I am cautious about the more mercantile aspects of Father's Day. Are they not a touch American? Are restaurants' Father's Day menus, like all that shop tat, not a little opportunistic? Part of me still suspects as much. Yet in a West that has neutered much of its masculine culture I also see certain merits. Father's Day is both a celebration of family and a reminder that Dads are different from Mums. You do not have to be opposed to gay marriage (I am not) to know that paternal affection is different from motherly love. Ideally, we need both. Father's Day, for all its commercial cheesiness, is a recognition of that. What is the role of fathers? Apart from the whiff of tobacco and Old Spice aftershave, what do fathers evoke? If that toolbox card is any guide, Dads are meant to be DIY aces, erecting shelves and hanging doors. But that has always been my wife's department. I am hopelessly impractical. My duties at home are the cooking and vacuuming. Stereotypes are not infallible. Are fathers meant to be disciplinarians? In my childhood that task usually fell to my dynamic mother. My father, a schoolmaster who taught Latin and Greek, was a more distant figure, likely to be absorbed in some volume of Virgil or Homer, or to be found beetling into Cirencester in his Sinclair C5 electric tricycle. He wore two wristwatches and was a stinging critic of decimalisation. He was not as eccentric as the 2nd Baron Redesdale, who used hounds to hunt his daughters, the Mitford sisters, but my father was certainly unusual. Although he had suffered terrible sadness, I never saw him cry. One role of fathers, back then, was to demonstrate emotional continence. Maybe that was not altogether a bad thing. Fathers can still provide emotional counterbalance. Where mothers will cluck over their chicks, spitting on hankies to wipe clean the little ones' mouths, even the most modern dads tend to be more phlegmatic. Every family needs one parent who is comparatively laid-back. When children graze a knee, mothers say 'poor diddums' while fathers will more likely grunt 'that'll teach you not to run around the place so much'. Mark Twain said: 'When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.' Fathers like to offer practical advice. Think of Shakespeare's Polonius in Hamlet, giving a long list of dos and don'ts to his son Laertes before the boy leaves Elsinore for university. Dads have been round the block. They have experienced hangovers and prangs and career setbacks. They may also, in the distant past, have been dumped by girls they fancied. When the same things happen to their children they ache for them, even if they don't always say so. You need not put everything into words. I never told my father, precisely to his face, that I loved him. He has been dead 15 years and I still think, often, of his floppy sun hats, his stubborn decency and his dry, precise voice when he read the lesson in church. I think of his crabbed bowling action in cricket, his weakness for pink ice cream, of the times his straw hat was sent flying by the wind, and the way, when we were tiny, he would blow raspberries on our tummies. I think of his sloped handwriting – to stumble across it on an old letter is to have him suddenly back in the room. And I think of the way he would lean forward at the steering wheel when overtaking other vehicles. He did that to make the car go faster. Like many of his generation he was gripped by economy. When driving to Cheltenham, on the long descent down Cleeve Hill, he would switch off the engine to save petrol. Such a man lodges in your heart, even if you do not tell him so. Our son and two daughters, now grown-up, were always encouraged to make a fuss of my wife on Mothering Sunday but we never went in much for Father's Day. When they were little the children might dart into my study early on the day and furtively slip me a home-made card before scampering away with blurted good wishes. I used to love that, even if I pretended to be unfazed. Will they mark this Father's Day? I suspect they might send me an email. It won't matter if they forget. They are fine children, and I don't need a card to tell me that. But if others wish to celebrate Father's Day, that is tremendous. Let the country cherish Dads for their quietness, their quirks and thirsts, their hobbies, terrible clothes, noisy nose-blowings, competitive lawn-mowing and their obsession with stacking the dishwasher in a certain way. Even for those terrible shorts they wear on holiday. I am pretty sure my dear Papa knew what I felt about him, for we were similar, just as my son is like me. The relay baton of life passes from generation to generation. My father used to take me to watch Gloucestershire at the Cheltenham cricket festival, where his own father had taken him in the 1930s. Decades later I took both him and my son to the same festival. He pocketed that with a quiet sigh of satisfaction. He knew, all right. On the morning of the day he died, aged 82, I slipped into the hospital not long after dawn. The nurses had lowered his bed to the floor to stop him falling out of it. I sat on the floor and, although his eyes and mouth were shut, I talked a little. Then I recited the Nunc Dimittis, the biblical canticle that starts 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.' That, perhaps, was as close as I ever came to saying, 'I love you, Daddy.' As I was about to leave, his left hand moved across his chest and gave his right shoulder a scratch. Or was he giving me an old, Roman salute of valediction? I have never been quite sure. Today I will make the same gesture in silent tribute to the man I was lucky enough to call my father.
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
When I was told ‘Your dad's had an accident' it didn't occur to me it might mean he was dead
The last letter my father ever wrote to me was written on Father's Day 40 years ago. He thanked me for the two Father's Day cards I'd sent. He underlined the two as if to emphasise either surprise or appreciation. I never got to ask which; he was killed exactly one week later in a car accident. The letter, on weightless airmail paper that is beginning to show its age in faint sepia stain, is written in astonishingly elegant hand – for a bloke and a farmer. A seam has ironed itself into a central fold which speaks to the letter being read and reread a hundred times in the intervening four decades. For a long time after Dad died, I imagined I could smell traces of him on the paper – Old Spice, tobacco, engine oil. For years afterwards I imagined being able to 'unwrite' the letter, push some cruel genie back into a bottle, erase the words Dad had written because they described what proved to be an ill-fated weekend: where he was going, why, who he'd planned to stay with. I was told of my dad's accident the day after, over the phone, while at work. It did not occur to me as the sentence 'Your dad's had an accident' was delivered that it might mean he was dead. I remember that I asked if he was okay. READ MORE 'No, I'm so sorry; he's dead.' I remember I dropped the receiver as if it were something hot. I imagine a voice kept speaking into the void – 'Hello, hello, are you there?' – as the handset dangled above the waste-paper bin into which the remainder of my lunch – egg and anchovy on brown – would be tipped after a single bite. I recall so much of that day with startling clarity, as if the cold, hard shock of it etched the day's profile more sharply into my memory. I remember the taxi ride to the station to catch the train to my aunt's to meet my mother; the worried faces of my two small cousins as they each clutched one of my aunt's hands as she stood to meet me on the platform. I recall sitting in the bay window of my aunt's kitchen waiting for Mum to arrive. I remember what Mum said as I delivered the news: 'I should have been with him.' (At home in Kenya, not heading to Ireland to see her parents.) I remember what I said. 'No Mum, then you'd both be dead.' Anthea Rowan with her parents and her brother Rob My mother chose not to tell my brother, who was in the middle of his Leaving exams. What difference would it make, we rationalised: telling him won't change anything, except perhaps the results he got, compromising his university entrance. I remember my mother sitting over a letter to him which she posted to my grandparents so that they could hand deliver the news, as if she was trying to couch this terrible finality in as many protective layers as she could. My brother would tell me years later that he was confused when our grandfather collected him after his last exam (instead of the aunt and uncle he was expecting). He remembers the headmaster being unusually warm in his farewell to this young man whose life, he must have known – my brother says now – was about to be split open. 'I remember Grandad stopping at a parking area overlooking the Blessington reservoir and that's where he told me what had happened. I went rigid and felt my legs were pushing through the bottom of the car.' My brother boarded a plane for home – and our father's funeral – the next day. He travelled via Amsterdam. He got himself a haircut during transit. On boarding his connection, he found himself in a seat next to one of our father's best friends, who asked my brother whether Dad would be meeting him at the airport. 'How do you tell a 6ft giant that one of his best friends has died unexpectedly?' How do you tell a barely 18-year-old boy that his life will never be the same again? My little sister's memories are cut-glass clear too. 'I was meant to be playing in a school match then, but the head told me I had visitors waiting for me in the car park.' Friends of our parents, who broke the news to this small just-13-year-old. 'I think I said', she remembers now, ''Thank you for telling me,' and turned to head back into school. But they bundled me into their car, men in the front, me between the ladies in the back. I remember I was given a spotted hanky to cry into.' I ask Siân Williams at Dublin-based Marino Counselling and Psychotherapy why that day is carved so deeply into the distant past where time has blurred so many more recent days since. 'When the nervous system is jolted by shock, especially without adequate emotional support or physical safety in that moment, it often encodes the event in vivid, sensory-rich detail,' she says. 'This is why so many people remember the smallest things: the room they were in, what they were wearing, what they ate just beforehand. These are known as flashbulb memories, deeply imprinted snapshots of a moment the brain registers as life-changing or threatening. 'The fact that all three of you have clear memories of that day shows how significant and defining it was.' It makes complete sense that, as a parent, you now feel hypervigilant about your children's safety. The nervous system remembers, and it does its best to guard against any repetition of past pain even if the original wound occurred decades ago — Siân Williams My siblings might share the clarity of my memories of that day, but mercifully, for they are both younger than me, not the nightmares that followed. I dreamt that Dad was alive but broken. Or I dreamt that he returned but he could not stay. Sometimes, in those dreams, I was relieved to be reunited briefly, but always freshly devastated at his forever-absence when I woke. The dreams lasted for 20 years. Williams says my dreams are significant. 'Nightmares after traumatic loss can be a manifestation of unprocessed trauma, particularly when there was no space at the time to safely grieve or make meaning of what happened. I believe that the mind often tries to complete the story it never got to witness – hence the recurring dreams of your father alive but suffering, or on the edge of returning but never quite making it.' There is obviously more risk of this when a person is told over the phone – grief can be complicated then, says Williams, and can compound the resultant trauma. I tell her that I worry our digital age means more and more people are in danger of receiving catastrophic, life-changing news impersonally or in the absence of checking they are supported before it is delivered to them. Or dreadful news seeping out before the right person has the chance to tell them. I imagine how I might have received mine had the internet been a thing back then, had news spread like the wildfire it does now: 'So soz about ur dad' crying emoji. At least my news came from a voice I recognised and loved. Anthea and her dad, Jim 'The absence of human connection, physical presence or emotional containment in those initial moments can leave a person feeling not only shocked but emotionally fragmented,' says Williams. This, she says, can impact people much later in life, 'surfacing in anxieties, anticipatory grief', or the kind of catastrophising I am vulnerable to and which I describe to her. [ Death and grief in the digital age: 'We were able to let her say goodbye through a WhatsApp video call' Opens in new window ] 'It makes complete sense that, as a parent, you now feel hypervigilant about your children's safety. The nervous system remembers, and it does its best to guard against any repetition of past pain even if the original wound occurred decades ago.' Father's Day the following year and the year after that – days of which I have no recollection – were hard but, with time, they became easier and, with more time, I could celebrate my children's wonderful father; my sister and I could celebrate the extraordinary father our brother had become. Anthea Rowan with her mother and siblings Many years later though, Father's Day presented itself with a new memory. For a long time before my mother died with dementia her memories of Dad were non-existent or fragmented; certainly the memory of his death was. 'My husband,' she would say, in an indignant tone, 'he left me, you know. He just upped and left.' I didn't always correct my mother's fictive stories. But I always corrected that one: 'He didn't, Mum; he died.' I assumed hearing that might help, until one day I asked: 'Does it help, Mum, to know he died and that he didn't leave you?' [ 'My husband recently died. We are in our early 50s. My whole future has been taken from me' Opens in new window ] She thought about my question for a bit and then said: 'I don't know. If he'd left me, you see, he might still come back.' Very, very occasionally flicking through a photograph album, his young face might swim into a mind fragmented by Alzheimer's. 'Look at Jim,' she'd smile as Dad smiled back from celluloid. 'He always made me so happy'. Anthea and her late mother. 'Her death was so different from Dad's' On the 38th anniversary of Dad's death (and I check my diary now, for it seems so implausible), and five days after Father's Day, Mum asked when my father was coming. 'Will he be here soon?' she wanted to know. For years she had not known I was her daughter, had certainly not connected her husband with me and suddenly and lucidly, there it was: her husband, her daughter in one sentence: Is your dad coming soon? Did she know, I would ask myself, when she died six day later? 'Your mother's question, 'Is your dad coming soon?' says Williams, 'though perhaps startling, is something those who walk with the dying hear often. It is believed that those who have gone before us come to meet us, guide us, and accompany us across the threshold. So, when someone near death begins speaking of departed loved ones as if they are close by, we take that as a sign.' [ 'She won't read again': I can't conceive of my whip-smart mother not being able to fathom words on a page Opens in new window ] I am not a person of faith, but this belief speaks to me. That Mum talked of dad in this context near the end was of enormous comfort; it made me think that not only was she prepared for what was coming, but she faced it with a calm that had been rare in those final weeks of dementia. Her death was so different from Dad's, a gentle parting at the end of a long life, not a brutal ripping away in the middle of one. And that is how I remember the anniversary of Dad's death – and Father's Day – now: with something approaching peace.
Mint
12-06-2025
- Business
- Mint
P&G Hygiene sees rebound in rural demand, but urban stress persists
New Delhi: Procter & Gamble Hygiene and Health Care Ltd (PGHH), the maker of Whisper, Vicks, and Old Spice, is seeing a steady revival in rural consumption, even as urban demand remains under pressure. This divergence in consumer sentiment is likely to influence near-term growth in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector, a top company executive said on Thursday. "Demand in the FMCG, industry continues to evolve. While the non-food inflation continues to stay below RBI's (Reserve Bank of India's) medium-term target of 4%, consumption trends are still shifting,' said Mrinalini Srinivasan, chief financial officer, PGHH, during the company's virtual analyst day. With a good monsoon last year and rural wages picking up, rural demand is showing signs of healthy recovery. 'Urban demand is not following the same trend. On the contrary, urban India continues to face financial challenges. While the government has announced interventions in the budget, we expect the impact of these on urban consumption to take some time,' she said. In the near term, some of the challenges are expected to continue, Srinivasan said while maintaining a "cautiously optimistic" outlook for the future. With the steady government and private investment and positive economic indicators, there surely are reasons to be optimistic, she said. "But one must keep an eye on the evolving global trade policies, which will have an impact on inflation and potentially demand,' Srinivasan added. "However, we remain confident in the dynamic and integrated nature of our strategy to help us navigate the difficulties and continue to serve and delight consumers and to drive sustained, balanced results FMCG volumes grew 4% in the 12 months ended 31 March, per researcher Kantar. For the nine months ended 31 March 2025, the company reported net sales of ₹ 3,374 crore, a 3% increase compared to the corresponding nine-month period. Profit after tax reached ₹ 636 crore, up 7% over the same period. This nine-month reporting period is a result of the company's transition to a new fiscal year calendar, from its previous 1 July to 30 June cycle. Procter & Gamble, the Indian subsidiary of the American multinational consumer goods giant, operates through various entities in India, offering a wide range of products including shampoo (Head & Shoulders), detergents (Ariel), baby care (Pampers), and home care (Ambi Pur). Its Indian operations also include two major listed companies: Gillette India (male and female grooming) and PGHH (female hygiene and healthcare). During the last fiscal year, PGHH reported "balanced" growth across both the feminine hygiene and cough and cold segments, alongside one of its strongest innovation pipelines in recent years. PGHH holds half the market share for branded women's hygiene products in India, selling sanitary napkins under the Whisper brand. "This has been possible because our focus has actually been to grow and build the category, and that's what we will continue to focus on. We cannot comment on the future launches and plans. We still have significant opportunities for growth, both on consumption and innovation in the categories we play,' she said. The company has been intensifying its cost-cutting efforts and implementing greater productivity measures, particularly in response to high raw material costs. 'Specifically last year, through our productivity interventions, PGHH achieved savings of over ₹ 93 crores. That is the fuel that allows us to reinvest in superiority across the five vectors and stay ahead of what consumers want,' said Kumar Venkatasubramanian, CEO, PGHH. Srinivasan noted that structural margins have improved significantly, despite mid-single-digit inflation in raw materials and manpower, and increased ad spends. "…we have still been able to improve our net margin by about 60 basis points, driven by our deliberate efforts on productivity across all cost buckets, as well as innovation in the premium segments to enable consumers to trade up in line with their aspirations,' she explained. The company, which also sells male grooming products under the Old Spice brand, said has expanded its distribution network by adding one million stores in the last three years.
