Thank you very much. Thank you Warren and thank you for having us in the VR conference. It's always a pleasure to be here. For me it's a privilege also to be with Priya today. She is the CEO of Hindustan Unilever as you know it's our second largest company. After the separation of foods it will be close to 17% of our revenue and a key engine of growth for the future. So most of the presentation will be Priya basically taking over our position in India and how do we believe it will be a key contributor to the performance of Unilever in the next few years. But let me kick off basically highlighting a few things about Unilever at an aggregated global level and this is a very different company to the one you used to know three years ago or so. Many things have changed. We have dramatically transformed our portfolio as you know two big moves. The separation of ice cream as an independent company the Magnum ice cream company doing very well. Also we are in the process of combining our food businesses with McCormick in what we believe it will be a combination that will generate one of the best food companies in the globe. A real global flavor powerhouse with very strong positions both across retail and food service. And in some of the categories of foods that are having tailwinds instead of headwinds coming from GLP1.
We have also made significant bolt-on acquisitions in the last few years since 2019 in particular. Our track record in bolt-on has been very very successful. The likes of Nutrafol, Liquid IV, Tatcha, Dermalogica, Olaplex etc. really contributing to make our US business much more competitive. Defining what we believe is a superior growth footprint in the US and from where we are now stretching these brands internationally. We have also changed our marketing philosophy dramatically. Our mantra internally is all about elevating our brands through what we call desire at scale. Superior science, standout aesthetics, great sensors, brands that are recommended by others, said by others because the times of big messages from corporations probably are gone and also making our brands contemporary. A brand like Vaseline you know 150 years to reach 1 billion in the last three years we have added 400 million to a brand.
Really stepping up execution what we call perfect store programs all around the globe probably the best example of that is what we have done during the world cup recently across 120 markets executing more than 150 special items, more than 50,000 content creators working for us really stepping up showing what Unilever can do now at the geographical scale that probably is a match. But fundamentally also significant change in terms of our culture, much more performance management intensity, significant change in our incentives with absolute focus in volume growth and profit growth in hard currency and all driven by significant changes in our leadership both at board and executive level. Eight out of 10 board members had changed in the last three years. Nine out of 11 top leaders in favor of the company are new to the position in the last three years including myself and Priya. So many things changing in Unilever and I feel results are moving in the right direction.
Our performance in the first half has been strong. It has been led by what will be our remaining company after the separation of foods what we call HBC personal care. We have upgraded our outlook in the first half. We delivered 4.8% USG with more than 4% in volume and when you look at our HPC business you know 6% underlying sales growth with volumes about 5%. With significant investment behind our brands we are investing around 16% of revenue in brand and marketing investments three years ago that level was 13%. So the times in which Unilever used to underinvest behind the brands to manage the bottom line are gone.
This puts us in a very good position to deliver against our commitment in the midterm guidance. We believe that this is a company that can deliver 4 to 6% consistently at the USG level with at least 2% coming from volume and we are on the right track. But the first half or the quarter two that was the quarter in which we delivered the highest volume growth in 15 years is not an outlier when you look at the performance of Unilever across the last 10 quarters we have delivered for the group 4.1% underlying sales growth with close to 3% volume and we have delivered for HPC for the remaining company 4.6% USG with 3.3% volume growth and a margin expansion of close to 200 basis points. So not an outlier in the first half. We are gaining momentum. The company is becoming more competitive. We are definitely growing ahead of markets across most of our geographies. And this is what we believe Unilever is starting to build.
We will become after separation of foods a 39 billion HPC pure play with very good balance between our three key categories. Beauty and Wellbeing will be in personal care and home care. We have a very attractive business in India and particularly beverage and foods that will continue being a strategy for us in the medium term. We are the second largest HPC company globally and we are the number one company in home care in emerging markets. So very very solid foundations leading positions and with a very interesting geographical profile. It's getting difficult to get growth in developed markets. It's true that we have been developing in US a very very good business and we have delivered 3 to 4% volume growth in the last three and a half years but it's true that the fundamental drivers of growth of the future are attached to your presence in emerging markets and we will have a reason with 62% revenue in emerging markets.
These are regions that have a better expansion to big consumption drivers, superior population growth, significant urbanization potential, expansion of female presence in the labor force, wealth expansion and a fragmentation of number of households. All these are fundamental trends that really support superior growth in emerging markets and remember also that in macroeconomic terms emerging markets are becoming much more attractive than in the past. Only 7% of the global population lives with double digit inflation like public finances in emerging markets are better than the ones in developed markets. So there are many things that suggest that the historic negative currency effect of emerging markets will be lower in the future.
We have unrivaled positions in emerging markets. We are the number one HPC company in emerging markets. So we have a scale 80% of our positions at category geography sales are in number one positions. 95% when we talk about number one and number two and in the first half of the year we delivered 6.5% underlying volume growth through a clear elevation of our brands. There are multiple growth opportunities across emerging markets I feel Priya will cover this better but we see expansion of consumption we see potential premiumization we see opportunity for building new segments new categories and we see opportunities to occupy new adjacencies in our portfolio. So these four key drivers are the ones that we are really driving across all our emerging market businesses.
And India is by far our biggest company in emerging markets and I feel when you look at the next five years it's probably the market that for fast moving consumer goods shows the only large exponential growth potential. We believe that India will have a significant expansion of the per capita consumption and when you compare in absolute terms in absolute growth it will only be behind us in terms of contribution to the fast moving consumer goods industry. We have a fabulous company there and I'm very happy for Priya to present that.
India isn't a single landscape. It's a kaleidoscope. Look through one lens, you miss the picture entirely. Turn the lens and India multiplies into millions of Indias. Beneath every India, the consumer pyramid is shifting at speed and growth is exploding across pin codes. This hyper segmentation can be overwhelming. But for HUL it is an opportunity to reshape a new India with strengths we have spent 90 years building and it all starts with the scale to reach every India from rural Bundelkhand to upscale Bandra. Nine out of 10 homes open their doors to HUL daily. That's 85 billion plus products in Indian hands every year. Scale gives us reach. Market leadership lets us invest ahead for every India. 21 brands greater than 100 million each. Undisputed market leadership and the unbreakable trust of generations. These are not mere numbers. They are unmatched cost and resource leverage.
Market leadership helps us meet current needs. Market making helps us fulfill the future needs for every India through education at scale and supply chain effectiveness. HUL has helped turn once niche luxuries into everyday habits and is now building the next ones. Market making requires consumer intimacy to understand every India. Our team spend 26,000 hours in Indian homes every year. An always on social listening helps us spot emerging shifts early. Our 800 plus scientists then turn insights into innovation. Innovations that reach the shelf, the screen and the home. We believe consumer intimacy fuels big ideas and execution excellence helps serve million Indias. Delivering 85 billion units a year needs a worldclass supply chain engineered for scale and quality. A talent pool that outlasts roles, a community of culture shapers, and a distribution network landing on 9 million store shelves. Together we make an unwavering commitment to serve every India every single day.
Tomorrow India wakes up even more complex, more dynamic, more segmented than before. To win that future, it will take scale, leadership, the courage to create new categories, the consumer intimacy, the execution machinery to serve them all. And HUL is ready to win in this new India.
Thank you Fernando and thank you Warren for having me at the Berkeley conference. So I'm Priya Nair and I'm the CEO and managing director of Hindustan Unilever which is the arm in India of Unilever. Let me just take you through some numbers of HUL. It's a $6.5 billion turnover. We are publicly listed with a market capitalization of $48 billion in India. We reach nine out of 10 households in India and in greater than 90% of our turnover we have number one position. We sell 85 billion packs in a year in the country and reach 9 million outlets. There are about 9.3 million outlets in the country and we have an EBITDA margin of 23.6% in the financial year last year.
Over a decade HUL has had significant value creation between 2015 and 2025. We grew turnover 2x, EBITDA 3x and our operating cash flow 4x for a strong performance over the last decade. What I probably want to spend the most time on is the India opportunity as Fernando mentioned and in that context I think very important to think of some facts on India. Population of 1.5 billion with a median age of about 30. So a young country. GDP poised to become the number three country in the world on GDP and underindexed significantly on FMCG spends at $63 per capita versus our neighbors as well. Very underindexed on CPG but possibly the change that is going to take place in all income distribution will drive CPG growth and consumption and I'm going to talk most about that and the change that is taking place in India. This presents the biggest opportunity for HUL.
There are five structural shifts taking place in India which are changing India. The first is the population is transforming. We have 377 million Gen Z consumers in India and these consumers are changing everything on consumption in consumer products. Whether it's the way they discover our brands, whether it's the way they buy our brands, this is changing radically. The next is more women at work. Fernando mentioned this in India the workforce participation of women have changed from 25% to 40%. And this dramatically changes how they buy our categories the convenience they seek. Think about beauty and personal care and how they want to look as they step out of their homes. A digital society 50% of the world's digital payments go through India today. So that's the shift that's taken place in terms of India. Road connectivity. The government has invested significantly in the infrastructure and roads and what that changes is when a village or a small town becomes more proximate to an urban center in the consumption.
We actually did a study for HUL of how much change this has. When a village is connected to a large town, it changes 30% delta growth for HUL. And indeed, villages are changing more electrification, more tap water. Think of the way they wash their clothes, take a bath. Every product category that we are in interfaces and changes when you have tap water in the home. So the villages are becoming more modern and of course data changes everything. It changes access for villagers who have no longer who did not have access in the past. So these are the five structural shifts taking place in the country and there are multiple growth opportunities that are emerging across segments. Small towns are growing two times faster than average towns in the country. There are new demand spaces emerging. Newer channels, quick commerce in India is 10-minute delivery. It has already become sizable. And of course, social media platforms are changing. India is Meta's largest country today already with almost 400 million consumers on Meta in the country.
And success therefore in India is winning across segments and I'm going to describe to you what Fernando shared. When you think about India the first way to look at the market is in terms of income distribution. 35% of India lives in what we call democratizers which are the household income of Africa. 60% of India is the household income of Indonesia and about 5% of India has the household income of France. Remember, we're talking about 1.5 billion people. So you're dividing 1.5 billion people across these three vectors of household income. The other way to think about how consumption takes place is where they live. So 70% of India lives in tier 4 and rural. 20% of India lives in small towns and 10% of India lives in the cities and look at where they buy as well. This changes everything of how they consume online, modern trade, large grocers and also small general trade stores. So when we look at it in this manner, that's really how we look at this 24 cell metrics in which we divide growth opportunities of India.
When I look at and I'm just going to take an example of hair care and the hair care market. If you look at the hair care market, therefore just given the population distribution of the country. If the hair care market in urban cities grows at X, the delta growth in rural it's 2x. It's just the map of where consumers live in the country and where growth will come from. In that context, this is really the four strategies that exist to unlock growth. This is still a very big opportunity in a market like India which is consumption-led growth and I'm going to talk more about it which is consumers consuming more. In the context of hair care. It's essentially the number of times that wash their hair as they start to become more affluent changes and you see more hair washing occasions. The next is premiumization moving from mass shampoos to premium shampoos to really changing value added products for value added benefits. But the biggest opportunity by far lies in market making. So when consumers become more affluent, they change from just using a shampoo. So just from hair cleansing to hair care. So they start adding masks, conditioners, serums and that's the transformation that takes place.
And online what's happening is completely new demand spaces in hair are emerging. Think hair styling, think dry shampoos. So that's really how the market evolves with completely new spaces emerging. So these are the four strategies that Fernando referenced in terms of consumption, premiumization, market making and new spaces and our opportunity and our portfolio is uniquely positioned in India to win across these four cells. So we have access packs in Clinic Plus and Sunsilk. We have the biggest premium brand in the market which is Dove shampoo. We have market making conditioners, serums and masks. And we've already launched Nexxus online and have the opportunity to bring in more of our Unilever brands like K18 into the market. So I'm going to talk you through the four pillars of our strategy and how this works in India. Our opportunity and our goal is to deliver competitive volume growth and that's really the focus of the business.
Let me start with consumption and give you some numbers on consumption. If you look at the numbers in India and this is between value seekers in the country already today and the more affluent. This is the index across each of the categories in which we play between the consumption for the value seekers and affluent. So in laundry it's X versus 1.2X. So it just shifts as consumers start to have more money. The amount of product they use starts to change. In soaps, it's 1.3x. In tea, it's 1.5x. And in hair care, in shampoos, it's 1.7x. And our market share, relative market share in each of those categories, we have 4x RMS in laundry, 2.5x the RMS in soaps, 1.2x the RMS of our nearest competitor in tea, and 3.5x the RMS of our nearest competitor in shampoo. So, we are very well placed to get a lion's share of the consumption as has happened.
Let me give you the example of laundry and how the market consumption is shifting. The biggest reason for the shift in consumption that takes place is when consumers move from hand wash to machine wash. As they move into machine wash, they use more product. We are the leaders in premium and have the largest index in premium and therefore as the market shifts the consumption that they use in each occasion of wash starts to change. We are well placed on this. As I mentioned, we have 3x the market share in premium, 1.6x in mid and x in mass. We are now the leaders also in mass and we've overtaken our nearest competitor across the tiers in which we play. Looking at the next opportunity which is premiumization. We have a tailwind in terms of our premium shares. Our premium shares at 1.3x of our mass shares. But most importantly, we own the premium equities of the market. The number one premium equities of the market whether it is Dove, Surf Excel, Horlicks, Vaseline, Vim or Red Label. These are the premium number one brands in the categories in each of their relevant categories.
I just want to give you an example from soaps. We have the two premium brands. We have 2x the share in premium versus mass. The market growth is also 2x versus mass and we are outpacing the growth in premium in the market but the best example for us is Dove. Dove is Unilever's largest brand for HUL. Dove was just a few years ago a number nine brand. So if you looked at a rank order within India of our brands, Dove was the number nine rank. Today it is already the number five rank for HUL and we are absolutely convinced it will be the number two brand for HUL. That's how fast Dove is growing. Incredible headroom for us to grow not just in soaps but in beauty and we'll talk more about that. And why is this happening? This is simply happening because of what Fernando said, which is we are making Dove more desirable and extending it to more categories. Let me show you this was Dove in 2022 and this is Dove today. I hope you all agree that it looks more desirable and in more categories.
Dove in India was essentially known as just a soap and a shampoo. It's the number one shampoo in the market. It is also the number one premium soap of the market. It has now been extended not just in hair into treatments we've just extended into body lotions into skincare so you can see how the brand grows and the opportunity that we have with Dove in the market. The same is true for Vaseline. Vaseline in India 155 year old we all know the iconic brand that is across the world known as a body lotion and a petroleum jelly. This was Vaseline in 2024. This is Vaseline today present not just in its core formats of lotions but now with Vaseline Gluta-Hya. We've entered Vaseline in face care with Vaseline Cloud Soft and of course in lips where we are iconic with a social first idea very very well known of if it's Vaseline it's verified. It talks the trust that consumer has and the social first nature of how we're building out Vaseline in India again growing double digits.
The third area I want to talk about is market making. The biggest opportunity we have as the market leaders in India is to make the markets in each of the categories in which we play and just to ground you in some numbers these are the format segment penetrations in India. Hair masks under 1% penetration in India. Sun care 2% penetration in India. Body wash liquid body washes is 2% it's essentially a soap bar market today. Dishwash liquids 7% again dishwash bars are what are used in the country. Laundry liquids 13% penetration. Face cleansing 17% penetration people essentially still using soaps to wash their faces. And underneath what you see is the index versus Indonesia on penetration to India. I said to you that 60% of India now has the household income of Indonesia so you can imagine the transformation and we are leading the market development of each of these subsegments in the country and we have a repeatable and proven playbook to do this.
This is what we've done across whether it is in terms of understanding deep understanding of consumers in the country, the formulations, the products, whether it's understanding the triggers and barriers to educating consumers of how to trade and transform and develop the market or whether it is the partnership that will take to build these new segments or the social first playbook. Mostly it's because we are investing multi-year behind this and that compounding effect of the multi-year investments is what it takes to build these new segments and make these markets. Just as an example is laundry liquids. This same transformation has already taken place in China. In China it's 3.3 times of India the size of the market and Thailand it's 2.6x the size of the market. Liquids is only 6% by volume of the total laundry market today. Huge headroom for growth and this is driven as washing machines grow in the country. Only a third of the consumers today in the country wash with washing machines. It's still a predominantly handwash market and as that shift the liquid penetration in the country will shift. We are the leaders of liquids and we are developing the liquids category in India. So that's just as an example.
So the other example I want to share is sun care. I said to you 2% is the penetration of sun care in India. Highly underpenetrated. If you look at the top 5% of India, the power spenders, there's a 21x difference in the penetration versus the average person in India. Working women, there are 200 million women stepping out to work. As they do that and this country is becoming hotter, you can imagine the need for a basic sunscreen is very high. For us, the opportunity is not just at the top end of the pyramid where we have acquired Minimalist, which is our first big acquisition in skincare. Simple is a brand, Unilever brand we're building out in India. We have Lakme, which is the market leader of sun care. But we've also created access for consumers at the bottom of the pyramid. So, and under 10 cents, we today have access which give consumers access into the sun care category. That's what you see with Lakme and Glow and Lovely sunscreen which we've just launched in the country. So with this we have a robust portfolio to win and develop the market mostly in sun care.
So that is the last growth driver that I want to share which is new spaces. We are entering decisively into select growth spaces whether this is men's deodorant, protein or ready to drink. This is an area where we selectively entering and doubling down. I'll talk to you about the first which is Minimalist was the acquisition we did 18 months ago. In 18 months it's already doubled in turnover. Huge headroom for us to grow. Whether it's in terms of the awareness buildup that we will create for Minimalist, really the synergy benefits of distribution and driving distribution more from online to offline still a large headroom for Minimalist in the country. On the next is in terms of protein, we've just entered the protein market in India, fast growing market with Horlicks which is the nutrition brand in India with a ready to go product as well as a powder. Again doubling down behind this segment in India and that's really an algorithm for growth which is competitive volume led revenue growth. We will generate the fuel to invest behind our brands and generate that fuel so that we can invest behind our brands. Our EBITDA margin guidance is between 22% to 24% and with that we will have volume profit growth. We are stepping up our capital investments from 2% to 3% both in terms of capital for growth but also for bolt-on acquisitions. So with that Fernando I hand back over to you.
