You've got half the audience in your[communities]. All right, why don't we get started? I'm Robert Ottenstein. I do global beverages and household products with my teammates, Javier Escalante, and Greg Porter, and [JD]. We're super excited to have Colgate with us today. From Colgate, we have John Faucher, Head of Investor Relations, Executive Vice President for M&A. And with John Faucher is JP Zamorano, President of Latin America. We're going to start off big picture a little bit with John, just to kind of frame the Colgate story and update investors' big picture. John, you joined about nine years ago, I think at this point. When you kind of stand back and think about two or three major changes that have happened in the company, whether it's culture or goals, targets, whatever they may be, what comes to mind? Sure. I'll start off, and then JP has an even longer perspective. He's been with the company about 35 years. I'll ask him to sort of comment as well. I think if you think about one of the biggest changes, in my mind, it would really be in terms of how we're approaching growth and really approaching with what we used to talk a little bit more about this, but this term gets used a little bit less now, is a growth mindset, which was really about, as the category leader in many of our categories, we needed to be focused on driving category growth. The best way to gain share is to drive the category yourself. As part of that, going back to 2019, as we transitioned from Ian Cook to Noel Wallace as CEO, we focused on a couple of key things, which was, first off, we had these big core businesses that were about 60% of our business that were not growing. We saw the opportunity to really focus on turning around our big core businesses. They are big drivers of penetration, big drivers of market share. We decided to invest in those core businesses through things like Science Diet Growth Plan or what work we have done on Colgate Total. That has been a big driver of growth. We also attacked what we called faster growth adjacencies, segments of our categories that were growing faster that we were not really taking advantage of. You can think of segments like whitening or some of the indications we have on the prescription diet business for Hill's. Finally, faster growth channels and markets. We made a big push on e-commerce. We made a big push in terms of pharmacies, particularly in Latin America, that JP can talk about. It was a really more active view of growth. Now, as part of this, we needed to fund that growth. We took a look at the income statement, and we've always had maybe a maniacal focus on driving gross margin, but we really kept at that. We've been able to get gross margin back up towards peak levels, and that has allowed us to invest back in advertising. That has really been one of the biggest changes, a very consistent commitment to using advertising to drive brand health, to drive brand penetration. That has really turned into, we have taken the advertising to sales ratio from 9.1% up to 13.5%. We are supporting more of our brands in more geographies. I think that has helped us to, again, drive brand health and drive brand penetration. It has allowed us to deliver very strong organic sales growth. The key, I think from a bottom line perspective, is getting back to consistent compounded dollar-based earnings per share growth. We went through a period, and a lot of this had to do with foreign exchange, where we were not delivering that dollar-based earnings per share growth. If you look at 2025 and you look at our guidance for this year that we talked about in the first quarter call, despite some incremental impact from tariffs, despite some weaker consumer, despite some negative effects, we're still guiding to dollar-based earnings per share growth, which we think is important as we think about delivering strong TSR for our shareholders. JP, anything you would add? Yeah, I think I will add that in addition to what you mentioned, we were pretty disciplined on identifying what were the capabilities that will ensure that we continue to deliver the results we were delivering today, but more importantly, that we will be successful in the future. Areas like innovation, areas like data and analytics, areas like digital, we really were very focused on them and significantly upgraded the capabilities we had in the company. Another one, which obviously is super important, is how we evolve the culture of the company to be guided against the environment that we were facing today. We maintained some of the values. The best example is the caring value that will always stay there. We also started saying, OK, we need to take more risks. We need to be more courageous, and we need to be able to drive stronger performance in certain areas of the company. Great, great. John, two mantras of the company: consistent growth and flexibility in the middle of the P&L. This year, 2025, you have mentioned, and everybody has noticed, a little bit tougher than people thought six months or so ago. Maybe if you could start talking about where the demand pressures are, where it is a little bit weaker than you may have thought it would be, if there are additional cost pressures, and then what are the levers that you are using? How are you looking at that flexibility in the middle of the P&L to overcome some of those challenges? Sure. We put together really strong organic sales growth in the first half of last year, I mean, through all of last year, but particularly in the first half, where we delivered about 9.4% organic. While there was definite benefit from Argentina there, the underlying strength was really good. We were getting volume growth. We were getting pricing growth. The key, this is consumer staples. You're only going to grow so fast for so long. The key in that situation is, OK, understanding what's our sustainable long-term growth rate. We knew really through the back half of 2024 that 2025 was going to be a tougher year. We planned for that. That is when we started talking about having more flexibility in the P&L because we saw organic sales growth and therefore probably also net sales growth because we could see where our currency was heading in the back half of the year. We knew it was going to be a tougher year. We started talking about flexibility in the P&L to give shareholders confidence, again, that we are focused on delivering that dollar-based EPS growth. The flexibility, you mentioned the middle of the P&L. It is not just the middle. We have to think about using all the levers in the P&L. The best way to drive leverage and bottom line growth is through the top line. We remain committed to investing to drive top line growth, as JP talked about, through our capabilities, through the advertising, brand health, and penetration. We saw a relatively benign raw material environment, and that has kind of turned out to be the case. We are delivering really strong funding to growth off of another record year in 2024. We want to use the other levers in the P&L. We went into the budget process this year. Stan worked with the division presidents to come in with a more aggressive approach as we look at tackling inflation in our overheads. We are generating strong cash flow to pay down debt, lower interest, buy back stock. We work to get the tax rate down. That is a lot of different levers in the P&L before we get to the advertising. As I mentioned, we have done a lot of work building that advertising to sales ratio up. We want to keep it. We'd like to keep it going up if we can, but we know we need to do that in the context of delivering appropriate returns for our shareholders. It may fluctuate here and there when we have the opportunity. JP can talk about this. There are lots of ways for us to not just maintain the advertising, but improve the effectiveness of our advertising. That is another key factor. Do you maybe want to talk about that? Yeah, I think that a super important point is how well we have developed the analytics in the company. Obviously, today we have much better coverage of tools to measure the return on investment of the advertising that we do in each one of the markets. We use marketing mix modeling, therefore we can look into where we have efficient investment and where are areas of opportunity for us to improve over time. On the same line, which also helps the health of the P&L, today we have much better analytics on revenue growth management. We have a very good understanding of what areas of the business we can take higher risk, what areas of the business we need to be super careful, and therefore drive the top line of the company. Great, great. John, two other things that you focused on is the opportunity to premiumize the business as well as do more impactful innovation. Presumably those two are tied together. Maybe if you could talk about kind of the key innovations for 2025, when they will hit the market, so first half, second half, so we can get a sense of timing, and then an early look, if possible, in terms of the 2026 pipeline. Not going to get an early look on the 2026 pipeline. I appreciate you asking. As we look at this, again, I would go back to if you look at where we were putting our resources into play, if you go back seven years ago, 10 years ago, what have you, if you're focused less on driving the category and maybe more on driving market share, which is kind of where I think we were going back to that growth mindset question, you're probably looking at more things like line extensions. We had too many of our resources devoted towards line extensions, and we weren't really focused on driving the incrementality that we needed to truly grow the category and grow our business. Over the last several years, we have shifted our resources on innovation to more breakthrough transformational or horizon two, horizon three innovation. These may be smaller businesses that we need to incubate and build up over time. I think we have gotten better at sizing up these opportunities using the capabilities that JP talked about in terms of understanding, OK, how do we come up with more of these ideas? How do we come up with them more quickly? How do we have the patience and the resources to say, we're going to take this small business, which may not be that big or that incremental in the shorter term, and really build that up over time? I think that's a big mindset shift that we have had over the last several years to build more on that innovation. We brought in more external talent to do that. We're bringing in even more external talent to do that going forward. I think it's a real investment behind bringing the people, the processes in place. We have created different incentive structures for our businesses where they are basically compensated. More of their bonus is tied into the benefit of innovation and the incrementality of that innovation in their business. That's really driving some of the behavior and cultural changes that JP talked about. Anything you would add? No, I would say, and we have tried also to take advantage in some areas of global platforms. A good example of that is Colgate Total, where we develop a relaunch proposition that is based on a global concept, a global technology, a global, in a way, go-to-market, which obviously we can do really well. Great. That is a good segue into my next question, which hopefully kind of ties this a bit together. John, can you just talk a little bit about the rationale of bringing in Shane Grant into the company from the outside? What were the key accomplishments at Danone? What had he done at Danone that was attractive? That is part one. And then part two, why does it make sense to put Latin America and North America together under one person? I mean, I'll let JP talk about that because JP has run both North America and Latin America, and I think he'll provide good insight from that standpoint. Look, we have increased the number of people we brought in from the outside over the past 10 years or so, particularly when you look at some of the capabilities that we've talked about in terms of digital, data and analytics, AI, innovation. I think we have gotten more comfortable bringing people in from the outside. JP mentioned culture, and culture is really important at Colgate and particularly important to Noel. When you find someone who has different experiences and different capabilities, and you can get them to work effectively within what we think is one of the best cultures in the consumer staples space, it creates just a lot of power in the business model to bring in new things. I always said when I joined, one of the great things about Colgate people was they really wanted to learn. They wanted to learn to compete more effectively. As someone who came in from the outside, that's been a great experience. As far as bringing Shane in, there was a view that he's done great work in the Americas in terms of driving growth in Danone in categories that have been a little more troubled from that standpoint. He's viewed as a good growth driver. The feedback has been that he's going to be a very good cultural fit from that standpoint. I think as we look at terms of bringing the divisions together, I think there's so much great work that JP and his team do in Latin America that we think can influence the North American business. I'll let you add your thoughts on that. Yeah, I think that there is efficiencies to be had in terms of supply chain. I think that there is a great opportunity from the consumer point of view as we see the influence of the Hispanic population within the U.S. market. I think we can get better aligned in terms of the innovation that we develop in both regions. For some time, we do leverage in some of the innovation, but we are not fully integrated. I think that there are also opportunities on how we better transfer talent between the two different divisions. In general, something quite positive for the company. Great. Let's do a deep dive now on Latin America, which is truly one of the most extraordinary franchises in staples. So 80, 90, 100 years in some countries, 70, 80, 90% market shares. Can you kind of just give a brief description of the key countries, exposures, a little bit of the history, how Colgate became such a leading player in Latin America? Thank you for the comments, Robert. Latin America is the largest division for Colgate. We have two of the largest international markets, Brazil and Mexico. We also have a very strong presence in the other regions of Latin America. We have presence in Andean, Southern Cone, Central America, Greater Caribbean. We have our biggest business. Oral care is our biggest business. We also have a strong presence in personal care and home care. As you mentioned, we have a long history. A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated 100 years in Mexico. We have been in Brazil and Argentina over 90 years. We have been in Colombia, Central America over 60 years. During all these years, we have been able to build very strong brands, in many cases recognized as local brands, very strong market share positions across many categories. I think that incredible go-to-market and supply chain capabilities. All that combines with a super passionate team that have multi-country, multi-category experience. Many of our leaders in Latin America were leaders that grew up in Latin America. As in my case, we went out and worked in other divisions during our career and now have come back to Latin America to continue the cycle of development of talent and development of the business. Roughly what percentage of the business is oral care and then home and personal? Can I answer this question? Very roughly. Yeah, think about half one and split the other two in equal parts. Great. OK. We'll come back to oral care. Just so we kind of understand, you've got home and personal care. In terms of Latin America, is that a growth business, or is it just there to kind of add scale? The short answer is a grow business. As I mentioned, we have a very strong presence in oral care, but we also depend on personal care and home care. Our global brands, Colgate and Palmolive, allow us to compete quite well in categories like toothpaste, toothbrushes, mouthwash, even bar soaps. The regional brands that we have, and we have many, let me mention some of them, Sorriso, Protex, Suavitel, Fabuloso, Action, allow us to, one, compete in more categories that we will not be able to compete with the global brands. Second, be able to compete in other segments of the market in which we even compete with global brands. We can compete in multiple price tiers in the region, which is important in Latin America. We can compete in more segments of each one of the categories. A good example will be Suavitel, which is a very strong market share position in the fabric conditioners category in Mexico, Central America, Andina. Another good example will be Protex, which is a great complement of Palmolive. Protex competes in the antibacterial segment of skin cleansing, a super important segment in the region. Net net, we have a really good balance of global brands against regional brands, and all of them playing an important role in the portfolio and our business performance. It is important to note also that Suavitel and Fabuloso have great businesses in North America that exist because of the strength that they built up in their home markets, with Fabuloso being the number one portable cleaner and Suavitel having great market share within fabric softeners. Is there any opportunity for Hill's in Latin America? Is that worth? I mean, Hill's has a pretty good business in Latin America. The premium dog food segment is still relatively nascent from that standpoint. Mexico, in particular, has been a really nice growth market for Hill's. I think we will continue. We've got so many growth opportunities at Hill's across the world. I was just in Europe meeting with the European Hill's team. There's a lot of room to go. When your best market has 6%-7% market share, there's just a lot of opportunity on a great brand like Hill's. Mexico, in particular, is a good market for us. We run the business independently. We are co-located. We provide all the support that we can. More important, we provide plenty of talent to the Hill's business in the region. Let's just touch on briefly how well the consumer is doing in Mexico and Brazil. I know your business was very strong through COVID. You had a little bit of election boost and the flip side. Obviously, a lot of stress, at least psychologically, on that area. How is the Mexican consumer today? Maybe touch on what you're seeing in Brazil just in terms of consumer demand and the general marketplace and how that's evolved over the last six months. OK. As you mentioned, during COVID and during the period of significant inflation in Latin America, we saw the consumer holding up pretty well. During that time, through marketing and good innovation and execution, we were able to drive very high organic growth for several years with a good combination of volume and pricing. Most recently, and probably we will talk about 12 months or so, we saw less growth in the region. We probably connect that with the cumulative effect of inflation. We connect that with a little bit of consumer sentiment. We connect that with some of the economic news, obviously tariffs and all the communication around that topic that happened in the market. In the case of Mexico, we saw the slowdown. In the case of Mexico, as Noel mentioned, we have seen recently an improvement. I think that also is going to combine with some pricing that we have taken in both Mexico and Brazil, and much better comparisons versus last year. I would say, to summarize it, it has been slow. I think we had a first quarter that was slower than everybody was expecting, but some conditions improving over time. As we think more longer term, I like to think that we're going to go back to pre-COVID levels and having the market growing, I would say, on the higher part of our corporate guidance. Obviously, that growth being split between volume and value. And Brazil? I think Brazil more or less has followed the pattern of Mexico with a little bit of lag, but has followed the pattern of Mexico. Mexico, we saw the slowdown right after elections. It was incredibly fast. Brazil took a little bit more time. Brazil also has some tough comparisons in the first half versus the second half, tougher comparisons. I think one of the most visible or important innovations this year has been the Total relaunch. I think you started first in Latin America, or certainly one of the first markets. Can you talk a little bit about the importance of the Total brand so we get a sense of how relevant it is, what the relaunch was, what the relative price point is? Is this really going to push the premiumization agenda? How does it compare to your core toothpaste? How is it going? What sort of traction are you seeing? Thank you for the question. Colgate Total is a super important component of our portfolio. Just to give you a reference, before the relaunch, Colgate Total was about 15 percentage points of market share out of the 74% market share that we have in LatAm. It represented, or having that franchise strong, represents a tremendous opportunity for us. One, because it continues to really fit within the purpose of the company to provide better health for the population. Second, because it represents a wonderful opportunity of premiumization. So you get a reference, Colgate Total is priced between 180-220 price index versus our base business. The relaunch was a wonder of opportunity to bring new technology to the region, technology that will be aligned to the rest of the world, a new concept approach talking about prevention, new advertising, great packaging, and unprecedented levels of activation. We started with the main variant in the fourth quarter of last year. Results have been super positive. We expect that to continue during 2025. Now, great. So it's six or seven months now. Yeah. In terms of the incremental Colgate Total sales that you're getting, how much of that is trade up within your portfolio? How much of that is maybe market share gains? Is there any color that you can give us just so we can understand the incrementality? I think it's too early to be able to drive those conclusions. I can tell you that we started at 15. We are now at 16.1. It is driving about one point top line for Colgate Total market share. A portion of that is translated, depending on the market, in the total market share. What kind of competitive response has there been? This is obviously a big deal in those markets. How has the competition responded? I do not like to say none. But I do not think that at that level of premiumness and with that level of execution, we have not seen a major reaction from our competitors about that relaunch. Great. Sticking with Mexico and Brazil, just globally, there's been huge changes in route to market, particularly with e-commerce. Also, I think there's been changes in the pharmacy channel in some countries. I'd love to get a sense of what the route to market and the retail environment looks like in Mexico and Brazil, the modern retail, specialty, pharma, and then how you play that with your portfolio strength. I think you're bringing in Elmex more than in the past. How do you match your portfolio to the changes that are going on in terms of route to market and the retail environment? OK. You mentioned two retail environments, e-commerce and pharmacies. Let me step back and say, obviously, with the critical mass we have, with the market shares we have, we have excellent performance across all the retail environments. We have good market shares in direct trade, indirect trade, cash and carries, discounters. Any retail environment, we will have a very strong presence. In the case of e-commerce, it is small but rapidly growing. From the beginning, we decided that that was a retail environment where we needed to succeed and be on the leading edge, not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of providing the right level of support to our customers to develop that business. We have over-invested in terms of structure. We have a center of excellence in Mexico. We have dedicated resources in each one of the markets. We are doing really well. In the case of pharmacy, a more established retail environment in Latin America, we started to see the transformation from traditional drugstores to more nice retail environments and better shopper experience. As such, we saw a tremendous opportunity to drive our market share. There is a significant gap between the share we had in that retail environment, about 45%, and the market share we have in the total market, about 74%. Over the last five years, we have been able to increase about 500 basis points of market share in that retail environment, driving premium therapeutic conditions, which also, again, bring that opportunity to grow the top line. As you mentioned, we have done that with a combination of strategies. In some markets like Brazil and Southern Cone, we brought some of our brands from Europe, more specifically Elmex. And we focus on the pharmacy channel, those brands. We are doing quite well. In some other markets where Colgate can drive the dental recommendation and is the leader in the segments, we have used our own Colgate bundles in Latin America to be able to compete in pharmacy. Net net, good opportunity for us, good progress in terms of market share, and good prospects in terms of what we are doing in the marketplace. Robert, if I can just add something. I mentioned earlier, talking about sort of incubating and being patient and things like this. One of the things that JP has led with this Elmex push in pharmacies is we've been incredibly patient about building this business the right way, using the heritage that we learned from the way it's been built up in Europe. It's not innovation per se, because these were existing products, although Elmex does have innovation. It's almost treating it like it's innovation and taking time to build that up. Looking at sort of the macro challenges that come on Latin America, I mean, over the years, currency has been incredibly volatile. And you've gone through a huge multiple devaluations of the Brazilian real. Currencies, the fluctuations are extraordinary. Can you talk a little bit about how that impacts the business, how you manage through those type of currency changes? If perhaps we're in a period in which the dollar versus the Latin currencies is flat or maybe weakened slightly, to what extent that gives you more flexibility? Kind of the tough scenario and the hopeful one. Yeah, I would study. Listen, if you do business in Latin America, you better know how to deal with movements in currency. I think we are very fortunate to have people on the ground with plenty of experience who have gone through many crises in their careers. Given the tenure of the people that work in the company, they have done it with us. That is the first element that I will mention. Second, we are super disciplined. I think we talked about this a little bit in our previous meeting, to understand what is the transactional effect of foreign exchange into our P&L. With that, I refer to what is the dollar-based component of our cost in our raw and packaging material. As we face negative movements in currency, we immediately take pricing to be able to offset the nominal effect of those transactions. The benefit of doing that is that, one, obviously, we minimize the urge to do it all through productivity. The second one is that the pain that you feel because you're taking that pricing is the same pain or the same cost pain that others are feeling because they will have similar cost structures as you will do. Net net, something we have done always, something that in a way crisis will always allow us to get stronger, and something that we have managed really well. Are you allowed to give us a rough idea of what percentage of your COGS are dollar denominated? Not going to go there. Not going to go. OK, understood. It changes a lot by category and even by region. It is not one exact number. Obviously, over time, you want to localize. It is very difficult to do it. The one thing I would say, right, is you think about it. Given our scale advantages, we are going to have a higher gross margin than our competitors in these regions, which means that their dollar-based costs are going to be a higher percentage of sales than they are for us. That helps us from that standpoint in terms of making sure we price effectively, as JP talked about. We have such great productivity that allows us to get the gross margin. Great. Brazil has one of the highest incidences of oral care use. I mean, they really take care of their teeth in Brazil. Are there anything that you can learn from that that are applicable in other countries, just in terms of what has worked so well in Brazil in terms of oral care use? That could be then transported to other countries. Yeah, you're absolutely right. Brazil has super high per capita consumption in toothpaste. It's not only in toothpaste, but also in other categories. They take two showers per day also. Very high per capita consumption in skin cleansing. I think it has to do with the culture and the desire to look good and be healthy. I know we have a Brazilian in the room. I'm pretty sure that he will connect with that comment. I think that what we have taken from Brazil and from other markets is you have to identify what are those opportunities that will help you to drive that per capita consumption. A good example of that insight will be people normally are pretty disciplined about brushing in the mornings. Plenty of people are not so disciplined about brushing at night. Finding the key insights and key motivators to have people brush at night represents a wonderful opportunity for us to continue growing per capita in the region. Great. To wrap things up, I think you said that you were hoping or planning to deliver over time at the high end of the 3%-5% algorithm. Maybe talk a little bit about how that would work. And then just as importantly, what does that mean? What can you do on the bottom line? I mean, you already have extremely high margins already. Is there operating leverage? So if you do 5% top line, you get operating income growth of 7%. I mean, how should we think about that? I think, as I mentioned, we think categories are going to go back to pre-COVID levels. I think that we will continue to be able to deliver on the higher end of the corporation. I think we will have a better balance between volume and pricing. I think that we will remain with the opportunity to continue to drive productivity within our P&L. While margins may be high, we have a tremendous opportunity in terms of premiumization across our business. We have, as you mentioned, a critical mass that allows us to manage overheads and our investment in a much more efficient way. I do believe that we have very positive in the mid and long term of driving good growth and continue to improve profitability in Latin America. Sounds to me operating profit going ahead of sales. That's kind of what I. I mean, I think as a total company, yes, we would want to do that. We would like to do that across divisions, depending on the opportunities to invest, et cetera. Yeah. Certainly for Latin America. Great. Thank you very much, John, JP. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks, Robert. Thanks.