Please note that this conference is being recorded. I now hand the conference over to Mr. A. Ravishankar, Vice President Finance. Thank you, and over to you, sir. Thank you, Yashashree. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the conference call of Hindustan Unilever Limited. This evening we will cover the results of March quarter and financial year ended 31st March 2024. On the call with me is Rohit Jawa, CEO and Managing Director, and Ritesh Tiwari, CFO. We will start with prepared remarks from Rohit and Ritesh, where we will cover an overview of our performance in the financial year and in March quarter and our future outlook. We expect this to take around 30 minutes, which will leave us with an hour for the Q&A session. Before we get started with the presentation, I would like to draw your attention to the Safe Harbor statement included in the presentation for good order's sake. With that, over to you, Rohit. Thank you, Ravi. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us in the call today. It's always a pleasure to interact with all of you. Let me first start with an overview of the operating context for financial year 2024. With softening prices of key commodities, especially those in Home Care and Personal Care, we passed on this benefit to consumers. Consequently, there was a nominal-to-no price growth in the year. Volume recovery remained gradual due to high levels of cumulative inflation over the past three years, coupled with a weak monsoon affecting rural demand. Urban, organized trade and premium portfolios stayed resilient and led growth for FMCG overall. Given this context, we delivered a resilient performance for the year with an underlying sales growth of 3% and an underlying volume growth of 2%. EBITDA margin was up 40 basis points year on year. We continued to focus on operational excellence and built back our gross margins, with a substantial part of this being reinvested behind brands and capabilities. Net profit crossed the milestone of INR 10,000 crore in this fiscal PAT before exceptional items, and EPS grew 4% and 2%, respectively. Moving on to our competitive performance, it's important to look at corporate market shares and MAT business winning metrics over a longer period to fully appreciate the impact of the inflation-deflation cycle on these metrics. Compared to 2021, we have improved our corporate market share by almost 200 basis points. As we have said previously, we had seen resurgence of small and regional players who had vacated the market during peak inflation. Consequently, recently, we have seen a marginal dip in our market shares. It's important to note we are holding on to almost all of the gains made in 2021 and 2022. Last quarter, we discussed how we expect our MAT business winning metric to be impacted as we lap the high base. While the metric has dipped below 60% this quarter, we are confident that it will come back towards the second half of calendar year 2024. Our business fundamentals continue to remain strong, as can be evidenced by healthy penetration gains and business with growing or stable brand power as we continue to expand our physical and mental reach. I've first spoken to you about key thrust areas for HUL in our October earnings call. A lot of what we have already been doing has strengthened our business, and we'll continue to build on it. However, it's equally critical for us to transform our business to serve the changing consumer aspirations to ensure we outperform in the years to come. Let me delve into the progress we made against each one of these thrusts during this fiscal. Our first thrust is to grow the core through unmissable brand superiority. This chart is evidence that we are a powerhouse of big-purpose brands. We have a total of 19 brands clocking over INR 1,000 crore each in annual turnover. Put together, these 19 brands account for over 80% of our turnover. Clinic Plus is now a INR 2,000 crore brand for us. Having moved up the table in the fiscal, Boost, Sunsilk, and Vaseline are the next three brands that are moving towards the INR 1,000 crore mark. Consumers are increasingly discerning and are making well-informed, holistic buying decisions. We started on our product superiority journey to provide best-in-class products and, over the years, have made very good progress in the space. With evolving consumer needs, we are now broadening the way we measure and deliver superiority. Under the framework of unmissable brand superiority, we will measure our products against six tangible and distinct drivers, namely the six P's, all of which are proven drivers of consumer preference. We have already embarked on this journey of making our brands unmissibly superior, and I will take you through two examples to bring this concept alive. Starting with Vim liquids. During the year, we have driven multiple initiatives across each of the six P's to land an unmissibly superior product in the market, from improving formulation to sharpening proposition and modifying the packaging to be more aspirational and ergonomical. Specific actions were taken to address each driver of consumer preference. The results of these actions have been promising. Vim liquid has seen a double-digit volume growth in FY 2024, with highest penetration gains in over a decade and continued market leadership. Horlicks is another example of a brand that has pivoted its actions around the six P's to deliver an unmissable superior brand. We have sharpened and fortified the proposition of taller, stronger, and sharper through precise and focused communications, packaging redesign, and promotions. We have dialed up nutrition science information at the face of the pack, providing consumers with crucial information about the product. As a result of these actions, the brand has significantly strengthened its position in the market. Penetration, market shares, and brand power have all seen improvement year on year. We have confidence that our journey from product superiority to unmissable brand superiority will take our brands from strength to strength and solidify our market leadership. Moving on to market making and premiumization. Given the context of increasing affluence and under-indexed FMCG consumption, we have a huge opportunity to build categories of the future through market making and premiumization. We are doing this through personalized communications via the right medium, innovating in new demand spaces and formats of the future, and educating consumers at scale. During the year, we've used this lever disproportionately invested in market making and premium cells. For instance, more than 75% of incremental media investment was spent on market making and premium cells. Similarly, more than 70% of our innovation turnover also came from these cells. We continue to lean in on home-to-home connects to drive trial and usage. As a result of these sustained investments in market making and premiumization, we now have a very robust portfolio that is leading growth for us. We have not only seeded categories and formats but have successfully built them to scale. The portfolio you see on the slide contributes to more than 25% of our business and has grown double digits this financial year. I had previously spoken about the job we have to do to continue transforming parts of our portfolio to on-trend demand spaces, especially in beauty and foods. Let me give you an update on the beauty segment today. We are the largest beauty company in India with a history of creating categories across skincare, haircare, and color cosmetics, making us the distant number one in these segments. In our journey of transforming our beauty business, we are focusing on, A, contemporizing our current master brands. B, investing behind identified high-growth demand spaces. And C, embedding capabilities across supply chain, market reach, media models, and thought leadership. We have led significant transformation across our key master brands, and results of a few are here for you to see. We have readvanced our brands by refreshing product, packaging, communication, and innovating them into new demand spaces and formats. The Indian beauty market is rapidly shifting with changing lifestyles, increased disposable incomes, exposure to global trends, and a growing emphasis on self-care and wellness. We've identified 6 key demand spaces, big bets, which we believe will grow disproportionately over the next few years. We have already a strong ₹2,000 crore portfolio across these big bets, and we continue to invest to scale them up. This portfolio delivered a double-digit growth this fiscal, with a circa 50% growth in e-commerce. To build and bring our vision of creating a world-class beauty company to life, we are embedding core capabilities into our processes. Let's talk about three critical capabilities. Make for Beauty. Our focus is to enhance desirability of products using superior technology, premium packaging solutions, and formats. To continue to innovate with speed, we will invest to expand our footprint of manufacturers and supply chain for smalls. Reach for Beauty. Consumer journeys have increasingly become non-linear and on digital mediums, and hence, we are pivoting our mental reach model towards more digital media and influencer marketing. Authority for Beauty. Building on our 20+ years of experience in creating India's most iconic beauty moments through the Lakmé Fashion Week, we are creating a beauty council with key opinion leaders from the fashion and the beauty industry. In January this year, we unveiled our first edition of the Beauty Collective, through which we aim to strengthen beauty partnerships with e-commerce and modern trade customers. Through these actions, we aim to build a future-fit portfolio and capabilities that will enable us to meet the evolving needs of Indian beauty consumers. Our fourth thrust of leadership in channels of the future is about brilliant execution and curating a tailored portfolio while leveraging our digital-first channel approach. In general trade, we're focusing on expanding and fortifying our distribution moat. Our effective coverage and assortment both have seen a steady rise, standing at 1.2 and 1.25 times of FY20 levels, respectively. Our e-B2B app, Shikhar, continues to be a strong point of differentiation for us, and we have successfully onboarded 1.3 million stores in Shikhar till now. We have enhanced Shikhar's functionalities to include loyalty programs, innovative marketing campaigns, and best-in-class app features. These are yielding good results for us. For instance, stores onboarded on Shikhar are growing faster than the other stores. We've elevated our execution excellence by amplifying our in-store activations and through strong partnerships with customers in modern trade and e-commerce. As a result of our focus actions, we've increased our on-shelf availability by 200 basis points in modern trade and online availability by 500 basis points in e-commerce. These strategic thrusts are underpinned by our distinctive capabilities that we continue to strengthen. Let me speak briefly on each. Winning in Many Indias is a capability that we'll continue to embed deeply across our organization, allowing us to cater to differentiated needs of Indian consumers. Our net productivity program is crucial for generating fuel for growth to invest behind our brand and capabilities. We will continue to generate efficiency across all lines of the P&L through this program. Reimagined HUL has given us a head start in our digital transformation agenda. Shikhar is a tangible example of the success of this program. We are now focusing on the digital agenda on superior consumer and customer experience with an objective to sell more, save more, and manage better. Speaking about sustainability, sustainability can future-proof the company and create new opportunities. It safeguards our operations. We risk our supply chain. It helps us attract and retain great talent and shapes our response to the most pressing and relevant global challenges we face. Going forward, we'll accelerate our sustainability agenda around four key priorities that have the biggest material impact on the business, notably climate, nature, plastics, and livelihood. By focusing our efforts and resources, we'll make ours stronger, tangible progress on these complex challenges while creating opportunities for our business. Our distinctive and meritocratic culture has helped us attract and retain the best talent in the country. During the year, we've invested in building our future-ready organization. We have separated Beauty and Personal Care into two segments, appointed a chief digital officer and a chief sustainability officer to bring greater focus and speed and execution in these areas. We've also set up a customer strategy vertical for each business unit to operationalize and execute business unit-relevant actions across channels. I am a big believer of the India story and the FMCG opportunity. Our journey of transform to outperform will take HUL through the next phase of growth by enabling us to continue serving the evolving aspiration of Indian consumers and win in the market. Now, let me hand over to Ritesh, who will cover our results in detail. Ritesh, over to you. Thank you, Rohit. Good evening, everyone. I will now walk you through our in-quarter and financial year performance in more detail and also then cover our outlook. In the quarter, demand trends remained broadly similar to what we had seen in quarter 2023. In this context, we delivered a resilient performance with underlying volume growth of 2%. Pricing remained marginally negative, leading to an underlying sales growth of 1%. Moving on to bottom-line performance, EBITDA margin remained healthy at 23.4%. I will cover EBITDA construct in more detail later in the presentation. Profit after tax before exceptional items and profit after tax declined by 3% and 6%, respectively. The difference between PAT BEI and PAT is primarily on account of lapping higher exceptional income in the base period. Let me now move to performance across our three segments. Home care and Beauty and Personal Care segments continue to see negative UPG in the quarter. Home care grew 1% with mid-single-digit volume growth. BPC USG declined by 2% with volumes remaining flat. Foods and Refreshment, on the other hand, had positive pricing and delivered mid-single-digit USG with flat volumes. We continue to see positive volume growth across most of our business. Overall, 75% of our business is growing volumes. In fact, 50% of our total business is growing volumes in mid to high single-digit. Margins in all three segments remain healthy, with home care and Foods and Refreshment at 19% and Beauty and Personal Care at 26%. I will now click down to talk about performance within each of the segments. Starting with innovations and activations in home care. Comfort Crease Ease Spray is a format innovation that refreshes your clothes on the go. It helps release wrinkles while giving your fabric a refreshing fragrance. In Surf Excel Liquid, we launched a new winning proposition of removing tough dried stains for the first time in the machine. Moving on to home care performance in the quarter, volumes in both fabric wash and household care grew in mid-single-digit. Premium portfolio continued to lead growth. On a two-year CAGR basis, home care delivered double-digit revenue growth. Let's look at key innovations in BPC. With summer rolling in, we have launched a range of sun care products catering to different consumer needs. One of these is the Invisible Sun Stick by Lakmé, a revolutionary sunscreen that is 100% invisible on all skin tones, yet effective with SPF 50+. Dove Sensitive Care range of body wash and soap, which helps repair skin's barrier, was launched. Lakmé recently launched its Multi-Slayer face sticks at Lakmé Fashion Week. Available in 2 variants, these sticks replace a multi-step makeup routine with a single product. Moving on to performance in beauty and Personal Care, it has been a story of two halves this quarter, with divergent trends in Beauty and Well-being and Personal Care. To give you more clarity on this, we have disclosed the underlying sales growth for the two segments this time. As communicated earlier, we will begin detailed financial reporting for the two segments from June quarter onwards. Beauty and Well-being delivered volume-driven mid-single-digit growth, whereas Personal Care witnessed a 10% decline. Talking about Beauty and Well-being, hair care delivered high single-digit growth driven by volumes. This was led by outperformance in premium brands, including Dove and TRESemmé. The post- wash hair treatment segment continues to gain consumer traction and clock strong growths. Volumes for skin care and color cosmetics grew at low single-digit. If we were to split the performance by price tiers, mass skin portfolio, including talc, declined on account of muted demand. However, premium skin continued to outperform, growing in double digits. Oral care delivered a broad-based double-digit growth driven by pricing. Skin cleansing has declined on the back of price cuts taken, coupled with reduction in volumes in the mass portfolio. We are not satisfied with this performance of skin cleansing. Let me share an overview of the actions we are taking to improve the business. These are focused around four key pillars of pricing, product, innovation, and channels of the future. We've adjusted pricing across relevant packs in the mass and popular segment to ensure we provide our consumers with the right price-value equation. With respect to product, we are contemporizing our brands and improving formulation in our core portfolio. We are stepping up innovation intensity in fast-growing demand spaces, especially in premium portfolio. Body wash has been clocking strong growths over the last several quarters, and we will further lean into this format. The Dove Sensitive Range and Hamam Turmeric variant are some of the other examples of recent innovations in premium space. We're also stepping up assortment in modern trade and e-commerce to ensure we win in these high-growth channels. While we expect to start seeing a change in categories' performance trajectory, it is likely to take a few quarters before the full benefit is felt. Coming to innovations and activations in Foods and Refreshment, Brooke Bond Red Label Tea has always stood for bringing people together. Our Swad Apnepan Ka campaign embodies this ethos and with the latest rendition that attempts an unstereotypical portrayal of differently abled people. Ice cream had multiple innovations landing in the market before summer season kicks in. We took our very successful partnership with Cadbury forward by launching a product which gives our consumers the best of Cadbury Crackle Chocolate and Feast. Mango Duet is a winning combination of vanilla and mango that offers a superior multi-layer experience at INR 10. Moving on to performance in F&R, tea further strengthened market leadership in this quarter with strong gains in both value and volume. Business had a muted performance year-over-year as we continued to witness consumers downgrading. Green tea and functional tea continue to perform well. Coffee delivered double-digit growth driven by pricing. Functional nutrition drinks, which include Horlicks and Boost, delivered high single-digit growth led by outperformance in the Plus range. This category continued to witness market share and penetration gains during the quarter. Foods delivered mid-single-digit growth led by soups, Food Solutions, mayonnaise, and peanut butter. Ice cream had volume-led double-digit growth. We have had exciting launches in ice creams this quarter in lieu of upcoming season, a couple of which I spoke about in the previous slide. Let me now spend a few minutes explaining the components influencing EBITDA margin. At 23.4%, EBITDA has declined 30 basis points year-on-year. Gross margin at 51.3% has improved by 350 basis points year-on-year. We continue to focus on building back our gross margin through improved price coverage, mix, and net productivity initiatives. Advertisement and promotion investments at 10.8% is up 200 basis points year-on-year. Our absolute A&P investments were almost INR 300 crore higher than last year as we continue to invest competitively behind our brands and maintain share of voice ahead of share of market. We have also stepped up our digital media investments significantly as we rework our mental reach and media models with the reshaping of our portfolio. Employee benefits and other expenses at 18% is up 120 basis points year-on-year. This includes an impact of 30 basis points on account of staggered rate increase in royalty. The rest of the increase can be attributed to investments made in future-fit capabilities and lack of price leverage. On a full-year basis, other expenses and employee benefit expenses at circa 13% and circa 5% of turnover, respectively, are in line with our long-term trends. The combination of consignment selling agreement with GSK will have an impact of 60 basis points starting this quarter. Hence, between this and increased royalty, there's an impact of 90 basis points on the EBITDA in the quarter. Moving on, a summary of our performance for this quarter. I've already taken it through most of the lines in detail, pausing for a few seconds on this slide for you to read through. Coming to financial year results, Rohit has already shared the headline performance at the beginning of the presentation. Let me quickly recap the numbers. Underlying sales growth for the year was 3%. EBITDA margins remained healthy at 23.8%, up by 40 BPS year-on-year. PAT BEI and PAT grew by 4% and 2%, respectively. Effective tax rate for the year was 26% after taking into consideration prior-period tax adjustments. Moving to segmental performance for the financial year, this year has witnessed a transition from high commodity inflation to deflation in 75% of our portfolio. In this context, we've had an underlying sales growth of 3% in home care and 2% in beauty and Personal Care led by volumes. In Foods and Refreshment, commodity prices remained inflationary during the year. Consequently, we delivered a mid-single-digit USG driven by pricing. Margins in all three segments remained healthy, with Home Care at 18%, Beauty and Personal Care at 26%, and Foods and Refreshment at 19%. Let me now talk about the progress made in rebuilding gross margin. As you are aware, we took a hit to our gross margin during the period of high inflation as we did not price to the full extent of commodity price increase. This ensured that we had the right balance between competitive growth and margins. With more benign commodity situation this year, we focused on building back gross margin through our net productivity program by bridging the price versus cost gap and improved mix. We remain focused in further stepping up gross margin as this serves as a crucial source of funds for investments behind brands and capabilities. Considering our performance in the year, the board of directors have proposed a final dividend of INR 24 per share. Along with interim dividend of INR 18 per share, the total dividend for this year is INR 42 per share, with an 8% year-on-year increase. Let me now turn to outlook. We expect FMCG demand to continue improving gradually. Forecasts of above-normal monsoons and improving macroeconomic indicators augur well. We expect our price growth to be low single-digit decline in near term. If commodity prices remain where they are, we envisage price growth to plateau in mid-term and become positive in low single-digit by the end of this financial year. In this context, our focus remains on driving competitive volume-led growth across our business. As I spoke earlier on skin cleansing, actions are underway to address performance in this segment, and we expect to see an improvement over mid-term. We will continue to generate savings through our productivity program and reinvest it behind our brands and long-term strategic capabilities while maintaining EBITDA margin at the current levels. While we expect near-term demand to recover gradually, we remain very confident of mid-to-long-term opportunity in Indian FMCG. India's booming economy, expanding affluent population, accelerating digital transformation coupled with under-indexed FMCG spends will spur premiumization and provide companies with a strong runway for growth. With our distinctive capabilities and our strategic thrust of transform to outperform, HUL is well-placed to capture this opportunity. With this, we conclude our prepared remarks, and we will now hand it back to Ravi to take Q&A. Thank you, Rohit. Thank you, Ritesh. We'll now move to the Q&A session. As always, we request you to kindly keep the questions to a maximum of two so that we get to take as many questions as possible. In case you have any further questions, please feel free to join the queue again. In addition to audio, participants also have an option to post the questions on web. If there are any unanswered, we will take them at the end. With that, I'll hand over the call back to Yashashree to manage the Q&A session for us. Thank you very much, sir. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star and one on their touch-tone telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, you may press star and two. Participants are requested to use handsets while asking a question. Ladies and gentlemen, we will wait for a moment while the question queue assembles. We'll take a first question from the line of Abneesh Roy from Nuvama. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks. My first question is on the liquids across your categories. So in dishwash liquids, you have seen double-digit volume growth. I wanted to understand in dishwash liquids, what is the salience of liquids in the overall portfolio? And if I take it parallelly to a personal wash and fabric wash, what is the salience of liquids there? Is there any learnings which you can translate from dishwash to these categories? I'm asking this because upfront, you have highlighted dishwash liquids as a big success. Related question here itself on fabric wash liquid. So we have one of your competitors come out with a ₹99 disruptive pricing. So what are your thoughts on that? And one related question here will be in terms of disruptive pricing in liquid. We have seen HUL being more of a follower. Earlier, we did see competitor launching handwash and body wash ahead of you. So is there a thought process that we can be ahead in terms of innovation in terms of liquid in body wash and handwash? How are you doing? Thank you very much for the question. I think there is some, probably first, I should try and clarify a few things because in your question, you stated some of the facts, and I just want to make sure that we get those right. Is that okay? Sure. So broadly, there is a macro-circular trend of consumers moving towards liquids across categories. Second, we have a total liquid business in home care liquids of close to and I'm talking of fabric conditioners, fabric wash, and dishwash included, well in excess of INR 3,500 crore. So that's huge. And we've been the pioneers in fabric conditioner liquids, fabric wash liquids, and dishwash liquids, which is the reason why we are where we are. So that's the first fact just to clarify that we are not followers, but we are leaders. And it's not now, but it's been at least 8-9 years of building these categories. They haven't happened overnight. Second, that insofar as specifically Vim is concerned, in dishwash, it's already 25% of the dishwash sales, which is sizable. We have a very strong share. The reason we showed that was we were very proud of what we have done there. We believe that is, of course, a huge runway of growth because consumers are upgrading to liquids, as I mentioned in the beginning, generally across categories. On body wash liquids, which is more in Personal Care space, we were again. I am not speaking from facts, but we might have. I'm very confident we were the pioneers many years ago, and we have now multi-brand portfolio on shelves. Not only this, we are market leaders in body wash liquids globally and are gaining shares handsomely in India as well. The growth rates are 50%-60% and beyond. We do see because the penetration of liquid body wash liquids is quite small, is under 200%, that there is a large runway of growth in body wash liquids. And we have a full portfolio at play and technology, which is on shelves and in the pipeline, whether it's Surf, Pears, or Lux, or Lifebuoy, which is another brand we have to play specifically in handwash. So to round up all of this, I just want to say that we have been pioneers in the liquids category in India across segments in home care and Personal Care. We've built a business short of INR 4,000 crore, which is not small by any circumstances. And yes, there is more competition now, especially in fabric wash liquids in what we'd call tier two. And speaking of tier two, now that the market's fragmenting and opening up, there are many players, not just one, which have entered the market given the market is now quite sizable, whether it's global players or local players. We do have a portfolio play as we have in many of the categories we play in. We have Rin, which is in the market and at a tier two price with a great product and an unbeatable value for the consumer. You should and will see a lot more action on the front of both Surf Excel Liquid and Rin Liquid when it comes to fabric wash. I hope it gives you a sense of sentiment and commitment and decisiveness around this space. Sure. Just one follow-up. In terms of the fabric wash, what will be the salience of liquids? And my comment on the follower was only based on the disruptive pricing, absolutely on your size, etc., liquids. And the first entry, I think clearly you have done a commendable job. So if you could give clarity on the salience in terms of fabric, what's the liquid? On fabrics, just help me with the numbers. 20%? We're in that sort of range. And don't hold me exactly to that number, but in that sort of range, but growing at 20%. So fast growth, part of our portfolio. But we still do, of course, have a larger business in bars and powders. But we're talking of a, I mean, we're talking of a massive category. And the growth is in liquids. And as you mentioned, there's also now the tier two at INR 99 or thereabouts. Other brands from other players across the industry. And we will therefore see more growth coming here because the conversion is becoming easier since cost per wash is not quite accessible for more customers. And we have a very large share in this segment. We intend to fight the hardest to keep it. Sure. Thanks. My second and last question will be on the outlook. So you mentioned that there is gradual improvement in FMCG demand in terms of outlook. And you mentioned the reasons will be essentially partly monsoon, partly improving macro. My question here is, last two years, we have also seen rural customers spend more on education, more on the medical needs because he's getting a lot of free foods, freebies, etc. So he's going for a better life for his kids in terms of better education, more on the medical, etc. Now, the issue is post-elections, very clearly, telecom charges will increase 10%-20%. That is the correct expectation. And that's, again, a big component for the lower end of rural customer. So how do you see that kind of impact? Is monsoon enough to overcome this kind of issue? Because for the lower end, 10%-20% hike in some of the cost component can be quite severe, right? You're right, Abneesh. There is clearly, as consumers are evolving their monthly consumption based on the service that came up recently. But we are a very small part of the consumption basket as FMCG. There's so many more categories there. And indeed, over the last few years, because the inflation or price increase was quite sizable, they had an impact on rural, especially as it came through COVID and inflation shocks. But I think we are seeing gradual recovery. We are hopeful of a better monsoon. And monsoon does have an impact, as we all know. It might not be the only impact, but it does have an impact on the agri-economy and therefore the rural consumption. And I think in that sense, most likely, the worst is past us. And from here onwards, we do see gradual recovery in rural consumption. Of course, as we said, the urban consumption has been more resilient, especially at the premium end. Sure. Thanks. That's all from my side. Thank you. Thanks, Abneesh. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Manoj Menon from ICICI Securities. Please go ahead. Hi, team. Just one question on both laundry and HFD, the growth, what you have delivered, and what should be the outlooks we should be thinking about. And secondly, on beauty, which I'll come after this. On laundry, in general, if you could help us understand, how do we think about the medium term? Because there seems to be a deceleration in the overall volume growth. So what I'm trying to understand is the heavy lifting for laundry growth has been delivered by premiumization. I understand the solid to liquid or powder to liquid conversion. But if you talk about the premiumization otherwise, which is happening in the powders, etc., which is an integral element to the, let's say, pushing us to double digits. That's one. Second, it's heartening to note that in HFD, there is a high single-digit growth. Again, if you could help us with the drivers of growth and the sustainability. One specific comment would be helpful. Are we back to 2019 volumes in HFD? I can pick up. Yeah. Second part was HFC or HFD? HFD, HFD, So Manoj. I think you talked about Horlicks, right? Health food drinks, actually, in general. Yeah, nutrition, functional nutrition. So I can speak to laundry first. It's a category close to my heart again, as I used to be in this for a long time. I think our business in laundry and fabric wash and conditioner is very robust. We are growing powders, continue to grow in volume. The recovery and liquids, as I mentioned before, are ahead of this because the conversion is fast there. And of course, there's more competitive heat there. Insofar as bars are concerned, they are now returning back as we've corrected prices. So some of the volume improvement will come on account of the bars going back to growth and powder sustaining and liquids continuing to go ahead. And so I think we feel confident that circularly, this category will continue to sort of clock volume growth. It's also showing quite a level of durability through all the cycles if you look back quarter to quarter. Here, the job remains that of premiumization. We have to upgrade consumers to high convenience and performance. And that's what we're doing. That's what we're doing with high-performance liquids now with Rin and with fabric conditioners and other formats that are in the pipeline. So I think that path to growth, including Surf Excel Easy Wash, upgrading rural consumers, is still the engine. It's very much vibrant and relevant. So I hope it addresses your question of the home care business. Sure. Thanks, Rohit. On nutrition, functional nutrition, I just probably request Ritesh to help. So Manoj, on functional nutrition, our business grew in high single digits. And the growth was driven both by some amount of pricing and volume growth. So it was a good mix of volume growth and price growth that drove high single-digit overall growth for our functional nutrition business. And if I just give a little more color within that, as you know, we have our Plus Range, which is high science-backed portfolio, be it protein, be it diabetes, or for that matter, Women's Horlicks. This part of the business has seen more acceleration. It's more premium, and it has seen more acceleration in terms of growth. So it's a pretty good outcome. And we have spoken in the past as well that our trajectory of building penetration has yielded results continuously. We continue to build penetration improvement for the category, for us and for the industry, number one. Number 2, we've also seen further improvement in our market share, both value and volume market share. One of the key areas we've spoken in the last call, especially, we've spoken about driving consumption in HFD because that's what had taken a beating in the high inflationary period. Milk was one of the, let me say, limiting factors which was impacting consumption. Good news is you've seen, as you know, fresh milk prices have tipped off. They're more benign now. There's no further inflation happening. Overall, commodities, which go into making HFD, have also seen some amount of deflation. All put together, the pricing and the cost element is now going to help us in terms of driving further consumption builds. We are seeing initial results of consumption builds coming in. The job of doing home-to-home and ensuring that we're able to get the product pretty well established and known to consumers, that effort continues. I'm assuming that between that effort and overall macro improving in terms of our commodity cost in the foods area, it is helping us now to start seeing the results that we always wanted to see in this space. So yeah, so that's a little bit about HFD in terms of top line. In terms of bottom line, the job of doing margin improvement has been very successful, as we've called out. And going forward, the focus singularly for us remains keep building consumption. Thank you, Ritesh. Just quickly a follow-up here. Are we back to 2018, 2019 sort of indexed volumes in the nutrition business? The volumes are back. They're growing. And as I mentioned, the key job for us is to ensure that we start keep building the consumption as penetration has improved already. So number of units have improved. We will start seeing consumption improving. And that is the focus area for us. Fair enough. Lastly, I just want to make a statement of hypothesis and just stress-test whether it's the right way of thinking. When I look at calendar year 2023, we have seen, let's say, the startup funding has declined 70%. In 1Q, the number what I saw is another 30%, etc. It does appear that it's a great enabling environment for a large company like HUL with all the capabilities to outperform in beauty. Is that the right statement or hypothesis, let's say, can I make for the next 24 months, assuming the ceteris paribus template, what we see currently in the market remains? Yeah, for the beauty segment, correct? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. See, beauty, as we mentioned as part of the prepared remarks, and if you unpack the category growth in current year, beauty has grown mid-single digit. And if I see that and if I further unpack, the premium part of the portfolio has grown in double digit. And it's a mass part of the portfolio which had declined and given the conversation we had on rural macros, etc. And we did call out one of the slides, the six big bets that we want to take in beauty segment going forward. We named them in the slides being sun care, face cleansing, moisture, serums, and stuff like that. These segments put together is INR 2,000 crore business for us, growing at strong double digit. And within that, the e-commerce of this footprint of this business is growing at 50%+. So the way we see going forward in the beauty space, two or three clear callouts. The market will keep fragmenting. The market will keep getting more premiumized. And more demand spaces, sub-demand spaces will keep opening up. Six are the ones which we have called out that we are going to lean in. And this is where you will end up seeing more amount of actions. In terms of portfolio brand, all three jobs to be done. Number one, extending the current brands into more demand spaces. So be it Pond's, getting into more serums and sun care, I'm seeing examples like that, Lakmé for that matter, or be bringing brands to capture new demand spaces. A classic example of that was Simple beauty in the clean beauty space, or for that matter, Novology. And those brands will be needed to ensure that the upcoming demand spaces we are able to address and start making business with. And third goes without saying, as we have mentioned and called out earlier as well, that we are always active in the space in terms of any inorganic opportunity that we need to do. And if at all something comes across which is the right value, we will lean into that as well. So all three elements of making our own brand, leveraging brands of Unilever, of course, leveraging technology globally, and ensuring that the demand spaces that we called out is what we keep focusing on. And we are seeing those results coming in, as I called out and quoted numbers of the current quarter on those segments. So we will go behind where there is growth in the space. Super. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rohit and Ritesh, and all the best. Thank you, Manoj. Thank you. We have a next question from the line of Arnab Mitra from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead. Yeah, hi. My first question was on the soaps business. So there has obviously been a very sharp deterioration in the performance here. And in the context that our understanding is some of your competitors are doing better, could you just take a minute to make us understand what exactly has gone wrong here in terms of value equation that you mentioned? Is it driven by competitive intensity spike, or is it that the brand equities have worsened and therefore you need to invest back? If you could just help unpack what exactly is the problem here and how much time do you think it could take? Sure. No, absolutely. We very much would like to because first of all, so we don't take this lightly. And particularly this quarter, we've seen an inferior performance, and we have addressed it. Let me just unpack for you really the causality and really what we have done. On the whole, as you know, it's a sizable business for us. We have a strong portfolio. We have increased a level of A&P investments since middle of last year after we had space to invest as the commodity softened. We have improved the product formulations of all of our key brands, Lifebuoy, Lux, Dove, Pears, and Hamam. And the superiority levels in products are strong. I'm heartened to say that the brand power, in fact, recently, I had a reading from Kantar is strengthening. So I think at a brand level, we are moving the right direction. So the real issue of this decline in volume was essentially because price effectively is because we're lapping a price decrease base. And therefore, that is, I think, generally true for the industry. But volume, which is dipped materially this quarter, is the one that is what we are addressing. And that was largely because of the mass end of the portfolio. So Lifebuoy and Lux, especially Lifebuoy, where we saw in the past where we sell low unit price, we were off the value equation more recently in the last few quarters. And we've addressed that quite quickly this quarter. And now the new price stock is in the market. And we are seeing early signals. And we expect that to come back in the next quarter or two because we've seen the same happening with NSD bars. In this case, I think we took a bit longer than we should have on addressing the low unit price value equation and which you have done now. Now, as we do that, let's not forget that the market is also upgrading. Our premium brands, Dove and Pears, are doing well. Basically, there, we are doubling down on innovation, on product quality, and on formats. As I mentioned previously in the call, our work on the bathing shower liquids is paying dividends. We see that becoming a sizable category like in other big categories we play in. We are investing in innovation, new benefit segments, and liquids, at the same time making sure that our mass portfolio remains very much in the sweet spot of price and quality. And we're working, of course, at the same time improving its, upgrading also the formulation in the mass segment to take it even to the next level, some proprietary technologies that we will talk [about] when it's appropriate. So we do think this is really limited to the mass end of the portfolio. And we have taken the actions that we needed to take. And it should recover back in the next quarter or two. Thanks, Rohit, for the detailed explanation. Just one thing on pricing, again, from Ritesh's comments that you expect pricing to remain negative in the near term. Now, we've seen a little bit of bounce in palm oil, crude prices. Given that you're anyways lapping a deflation year, normally, one would have expected HUL or most people in the industry to start putting in some pricing growth now. Why is that not the case this time? Is there anything different that you see in terms of pricing increases from here on? Yeah. So let me just pick up your pricing question. So year on year, the total commodity basket for home care, for Personal Care, there is deflation. So there is no case for us to take price increases. Crude at $85 is still range-bound. It goes up a little bit given various amount of elements of geopolitical which are influencing it in the short term. But as you've seen, it then recedes back to $85. CPO also, it's firm at $850. We are in season now. We'll come to know how the season pans out. And then we'll come to know what the, if at all, the trajectory of that $850 changes materially. Typically, what we don't do is we don't react to short-term variation and volatility in commodities. The moment we have a read that there is a deterministic change in direction, up or down, which is when then we start adjusting to the price so that we don't, let me say, react to short-term changes in the market. So as of now, given where the commodity prices are, it's a total deflation on the two categories. So there's no case for us to change in terms of taking price increases. The only exception of our entire portfolio is coffee, where coffee, as you know, remains firm and keeps inflating as a commodity, and which is where we have taken price increases. But have we finished the job of passing on whatever we had to pass on with all commodity deflation? The answer is yes. The last element which was left out, as Rohit called out, was in the area of mass skin cleansing, especially the low unit price point packs. Even that correction, as we speak, has happened. So I believe that where we are today, if commodity prices remain in near term, short term, we will end up seeing marginal decline in UPG. In mid-term, we should see that pricing plateaued out. The second half of financial year, we will be able to keep leveraging of an NRM and take some calculated price increases. And we expect to see a positive low single-digit price increase in the second half of this financial year. This, again, as I call out, is everything has been equal in terms of commodity market. But to your point, if at all, we do see CPO running from $850-$1,000+ or crude running $95+, of course, we do operate with a mindful level of inventories. Our supply chain is extremely resilient. And if at all, we have to react and take price increases, we will do that. And for that matter, if at all, we have to further titrate price decreases where we need to, we'll do that. So we are on the ball. These are high volatile periods. And we are closely monitoring it. Okay. Thanks so much, Rohit and Ritesh. All the best. Yeah. Thank you. Appreciate. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Avi Mehta from Macquarie. Please go ahead. Hi. Hi, team. Thanks for the opportunity. I wanted to kind of just understand the EBITDA margin given our earlier comment of targeting 23%-24% band. As a concept, what do you think is required for us to start looking at moving from the bottom end of the band towards more at the mid and the top end? Is this more a volume recovery, or is there anything else that you would want? Is this more external, internal? Would love to hear your comments on that. Yeah. No, thanks for the question, Avi. So a few things on EBITDA. Exactly as you mentioned that at 23.4 where we are, we would want to maintain at current levels in short term our EBITDA margins. Medium to long term, we have always called out that our stated mission is to do modest margin improvement. But if I just bring it back now for next some quarters, this is a level that we want to maintain the margin. Now, what are the puts and takes out here? First, within this, we want to continue driving gross margin improvement. Even in this quarter, when we delivered a 23.4% EBITDA, you saw a very strong 350 basis points gross margin improvement. A large part of that got invested into A&P. We continue to operate SOV ahead of SOM. We further invested in capabilities so that our ability to bring innovation and, for that matter, improve execution in the marketplace is installed and keeps increasing. So hence, if commodity prices remain where they are, and those are the factors which have impacted and again, remember in this quarter, when we delivered 23.4% margin, this is after taking impact of 60 BPS for the business of GSK that we used to distribute the products. And we used to end up making margin from that. And now that margin, we no longer make. So for next four quarters, you will end up seeing that 50-60 BPS impact coming in from that business which now we have discontinued. So that impact comes in. Going forward, improving mix, number one, which is what we want to see, further volume growth, number two, number three, price growth. Ultimately, there's always a pretty robust operating leverage, Avi, that works in the P&L. When you have a deflationary scenario and you don't have a price growth, you end up missing that operating leverage, which then drops into the P&L. So those are the conditions which need to be existing for us to then start going towards a higher band or, for that matter, going beyond 24, which is a trajectory of overall market recovery, which is gradual, should continue to improve, macro is looking better, number one. Number two, we should start seeing some recovery of overall pricing in the segment and hence the operating leverage coming in. And the job of continuously improving mix is already there in the mix happening.