David Taylor
Chairman of the Board, President and Chief Executive Officer at Procter & Gamble
Thanks, Andre. As I said at the outset, our team has done some outstanding work over the last 18 months to manage through the challenges of the COVID crisis and make our business even stronger in the process. In our April earnings call last year, we said we would step forward into the challenge of COVID, not back. We said we would double down to serve consumers and that's exactly what our team has done.
As we continue to manage through the crisis, we'll remain focused on the three priorities that have been guiding our near-term actions and choices. First is ensuring the health and safety of our P&G colleagues around the world; second, maximizing the availability of our products to help people and their families with their cleaning, health and hygiene needs; and third priority, supporting the communities, relief agencies and people who are on the frontlines of this global pandemic.
The strategic choices outlined earlier are the foundation for balanced top and bottom-line growth and long-term value creation. Our portfolio of daily-use products, many providing cleaning, health and hygiene, benefits in categories where performance plays a significant role in brand choice. In these performance-driven categories, we've raised the bar on all aspects of superiority, product, package, brand communication, retail execution and value. Superior offerings delivered with superior execution drive market growth.
I'd like to share just a few examples. First, in our Oral Care business, superior offerings are driving market growth across forms. Last summer we launched Oral-B iO Power Brush, which offers an irresistible consumer brushing experience. The value of this superior performance is evident to the consumers even with a premium price. P&G's global value share in the Brush segment is up more than 2.5 points over the past year and the U.S. Power Brush category is up nearly 14 points since the innovation launched, with iO contributing more than half of the category growth.
We recently launched the next breakthrough in teeth whitening. Crest Whitening Emulsions create a micro-thin layer of concentrated peroxide droplets enabling consumers to move beyond occasion-based whitening to a product that can be used up to four times per day with no rinsing or brushing needed. This innovation is a leading contributor to our more than 20% organic sales growth of our Tooth Whitening business in fiscal '21 and is driving two-thirds of the U.S. Whitening category growth.
In Personal Health Care, NyQuil and DayQuil Honey launched last summer, offering a great tasting formula, while also delivering powerful relief. NyQuil Honey is the number one new item in the U.S. respiratory market and our Vicks share is up 90 basis points over the past 12 months despite the soft market due to the very weak cough-cold season. When consumers are shopping in the category, they're increasingly choosing Vicks. For some consumers, the environmental aspects of our product offering are taking on increased importance in their assessment of superiority. We are offering a superior performing product or products that are more sustainable in educating consumers on the benefits of those products with superior brand communication.
I'll switch to Fabric Care. Here, Tide and Ariel are innovating to extend their superior cleaning performance advantages, while encouraging consumers to reduce their carbon footprint. Ariels's new campaign Every Degree Makes a Difference advocates lower washing temperatures. Up to 60% of laundry's carbon footprint comes from heating the water in the washing machine. Lowering the wash temperature is the single most important thing we can do to reduce the environmental impact of laundry. To achieve our goals, we continue to innovate to ensure superior fabric cleaning performance in cold water and we utilized superior communication to educate the consumer on the benefits. This innovation has helped contribute to global Fabric Care's 120 basis points of value share growth over the past 12 months.
In our European Shave Care business, we're driving superiority across all five vectors and improving sustainability along the way. We're moving to a plastic-free packaging on our razor systems, simplifying our lineup, improving on shelf fundamentals and improving margin for our retail partners. This innovation contributed to mid-single-digit organic sales growth in our European Grooming business in fiscal '21 with market share up 1 point; good business results and good for the environment. This packaging innovation will save the equivalent of 85 million water bottles per year when it's fully launched around the world.
More important and one example is the common theme of superior innovation and execution that drives market growth. Leading category growth builds business for our retail partners and mathematically builds market share for P&G. We've made investments to strengthen the long-term health and competitiveness of our brands and we'll continue to invest to extend our margin of advantage and quality of execution, improving options for consumers around the world. The strategic need for investment to contribute to strengthen the long-term health and competitiveness of our brands, the short-term need to manage through the crisis and the ongoing need to drive balanced top and bottom-line growth, including margin expansion underscore the importance of ongoing productivity. We're driving cost savings and cash productivity in all facets of our business.
In cost of goods, we're delivering flexible formulations that can allow us to change between ingredients to lower cost or create supply chain flexibility, while ensuring no impact on consumer preference for our brands. We're optimizing plastic bottle designs to reduce the amount of plastics we use, while also lowering costs. We're improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our advertising investments, bringing some media planning work in-house to achieve greater cost efficiency, while also enabling us to place ads with greater precision based on more granular analytics to reduce waste and increase effectiveness. No area of cost is left untouched. We've given more authority and accountability to the business units to decide how to balance the need for more resources in some areas of the business with the opportunities for savings in other areas. They need to make the choices that are best for their business as they work to deliver a balanced top and bottom-line growth.
Our success in our highly competitive industry also requires agility that comes with the mindset of constructive disruption; a willingness to change, adapt and create new trends and technologies that will shape our industry for the future. In the current environment, that agility and constructive disruption mindset are even more important. Our organizational structure yields a more empowered, agile and accountable organization with little overlap or redundancy, flowing to meet new demands, seamlessly supporting each other to deliver against our priorities around the world.
These strategic choices on portfolio, superiority, productivity, constructive disruption and organizational structure and culture are not independent strategies. They reinforce and build on each other. When executed well, they grow markets, which in turn grows share, sales and profit. These strategies were delivering strong results before the crisis, have served us well during the crisis, and they will serve us well on the other end of this crisis. We're confident they remain the right strategic choices as we move through and beyond the pandemic.
We delivered strong results in fiscal '21 in a very challenging environment. While we're pleased with these results and the overall strength of our business, the external environment continues to be volatile and difficult to predict and our eyes are wide open to the many challenges we face. We compete in product categories against highly-capable multinational and local competitors. Raw material and transport freight costs have risen sharply. Increased social unrest and economic distress in many parts of the world are putting pressure on local GDP growth and the pandemic continues to create risk for consumers, retail partners and supply chains.
With these challenges, there are also opportunities as we emerge from the pandemic. The relevance of our categories in consumers' lives likely remains elevated. We will serve what will likely become a forever-altered cleaning, health and hygiene focus for consumers who use our products daily or multiple times each day. There may be a continued increased focus on home; more time at home, more meals at home with related consumption impacts. The importance of noticeably superior performance potentially grows. There is potential for increased preference for established reputable brands that solve newly-framed problems better than alternatives; potentially less experimentation; potential for a lasting shift to e-commerce, both e-tailers and omnichannel. Our experience to date makes us believe we are generally well-positioned in this environment. We're discovering lower cost ways of working with fewer resources; today's necessity giving rise to the productivity inventions of tomorrow.
New digital tools are being brought to the forefront, providing another productivity driver on the factory floor, in our labs and in our office environment. Our business exhibited strong momentum well before the crisis. We strengthened our position further during the crisis, and we believe P&G is well-positioned to serve the heightened needs and new behaviors of consumers and our retail and distributor partners post-crisis.
We have the right strategies, we have the right portfolio, we have the right organizational structure. We have a team of 100,000 employees focused on executing to delight consumers, win with customers and deliver balanced growth and value creation.
With that, I'll hand it back to Andre to outline our guidance for fiscal 2022. Andre?