L'Oréal S.A. (LOR:CA) Analyst/Investor Day Prepared Remarks Transcript

2025-12-03 15:23:26 ET

L'Oréal S.A. (LOR:CA) Analyst/Investor Day December 3, 2025 9:00 AM EST

Company Participants

David Greenberg - CEO & President of the North America Zone

Presentation

David Greenberg
CEO & President of the North America Zone ...

Timing is perfect as we've just spent the most important day yesterday in the field, really connecting with where our business happens. And I know it wasn't the perfect day because we had some really nice weather, but I could tell from the excitement of walking through the aisles of Walmart and Target and SalonCentric that you were really feeling and experiencing the U.S. market, which is so critical because this is really where we connect with our consumers.

Just to share a little bit about myself. So this is my 32nd year with the L'Oréal Group. I started some time ago. In fact, this subsidiary at the time was called Cosmair. It wasn't even yet called L'Oréal, and I'll share a little bit of the history of sales in a moment. But I started in the Consumer division. -- in marketing and spent after that 4 years in Mexico City in charge of the Consumer division in Mexico. I came back to a global role in the Professional Products division, just a couple of years after the acquisition of the Matrix brand.

From there, I took a 90-degree turn and took over as Chief Human Resources Officer for L'Oréal USA for a couple of years, moved out of that role just ahead of the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009. So timing was not so good to get back to the business, but that's what happened in those years, and you'll see a little bit of the sales history there. And then I had the great fortune to come back to the Consumer Products division as President of the Maybelline and Garnier SE brands for many years and then took over the Professional Products division for U.S. and North America.

And then just about 4 years ago, took the role as CEO of L'Oréal USA and President of L'Oréal North America. So I have quite a bit of history with the group and quite a bit of history here in this country. And I hope over the course of the next hour or so, I'll be able to share a lot of that with you so that you really get to know us.

The extraordinary thing about our subsidiary is that we have been in this country for over 70 years. And I'm not sure you all noticed when we're in Clark, New Jersey, at the R&I facility, but that Street is called L'Oréal Way, and that street has been named after our company because we've been in Clark New Jersey for so long. And folklore has it that one of the early pioneers of L'Oréal met somebody on the ship coming over from Europe who indicated that there was land available to buy in Clark, New Jersey and this individual who was French probably had never been to New Jersey, let alone Clark and somehow managed to go there and buy a plot of land and build our first factory.

And that history, which may or may not be true, but I think it is, is how things began there and you sensed, I think, because at this point, we've taken over the whole street, you saw our R&I facility. The factory has long since moved out because it's no longer an industrial area. It's much more of a residential and business area. But that history is important to us because our roots go really deep in this country. And that's given us the sense of stability and confidence to build our business from the ground up.

And I'll show you and share with you the construction of the subsidiary in America, which I think is one of the more solid foundations for future growth. Of course, we've been building our business consistently over many, many years, and I'll share that with you. And as we celebrated just a couple of years ago, our 70th anniversary, we have grown so much that, in fact, years ago, when I started, we could fit the whole company in sort of one conference center or one ballroom. We needed actually to rent the Javits Center across the way to be able to house all of our people. And we had an extraordinary celebration and recognize the contribution of so many people to the construction of this subsidiary over all this period of time. And we don't have a small number of people who've been with the group much longer than I have here in the U.S.

We celebrated some people who have been 40 years, even 50 years working for L'Oréal USA. So this is our subsidiary at a glance. We are the #1 subsidiary in the group, which I don't think surprises anyone considering the size of the market and the importance of the U.S. We represent around our zone, which is U.S. and Canada, represents around 20% of our global turnover. And importantly, and this is why I tell a little bit the story of Clark and why we started in the U.S. with a factory from the very beginning, the strategy was always to be able to source our own growth locally to rely on our own ability to support our business and our growth. And today, we produce more or less 75% of the units we sell here within our zone. And we have a fantastic footprint of our operations, facilities, our factories and distribution centers across the U.S.

We manufacture in 3 states, Kentucky, Arkansas and New Jersey across 6 factories. And we have somewhere around a dozen or so distribution centers and fulfillment centers spread across the country. Importantly, we also have a very large number of retail stores. between SalonCentric, which you experienced yesterday, Keels, ESOP. And these stores, of course, are a place where we control fully the environment, the way we connect with our customers and consumers and the brand expression. And this is the place, of course, where we can always bring to life our products and our brands in the most spectacular way.

We have over 13,000 employees across all of our facilities. You'll hear today from our Chief Human Resources Officer, about that pool of talent and how extraordinary that is and what a strength that is for the future growth of our business.

I mentioned the history of sales. So in this chart, which more or less starts just after I joined the company. So I started here in 1993, and this data goes back to 1995. I joined L'Oréal, in this country, when we were just crossing the threshold of USD 1 billion at that time. And the construction and I'd say, more than the construction, but the conquest of this market has been built in a few different ways. One is through acquisition and the second is through organic growth. And both have been critically important, and you can see above the bars, the years of the acquisition of each of these brands.

And I'm going to speak to you in a moment about the strategy behind that and the role that each of these played in the construction of the business in the U.S. But there were some pretty extraordinary thresholds. We passed the $10 billion mark 2 years ago, which was a big moment for us. And I think, signifies just the size, scale and stature of our business here in this country. We've grown every year with the exception of the 2 crises, the 2008, 2009 crisis and, of course, the global pandemic. Every other year, this subsidiary has grown and consistently, I'd say, over the long haul.

The brands that you see on the top are the brands that have been acquired in this country. Of course, we've acquired brands outside of the U.S. But the U.S. brands that have been acquired over these years is about 18 brands. And today, more or less that represents half of our sales. And that's important because to construct a business over all these years in the U.S. We knew we needed to have brands that were local, that were relevant known by U.S. consumers. We also knew that we needed to build scale. And in order to build scale, of course, we acquired some sizable businesses. We also acquired some very small businesses. And each one played an important role in how we built our growth. And this is what it looked like.

When we think back first about the makeup business. So the makeup business is an important category in the U.S. especially in the mass market. It's one of the most dynamic and fastest-growing categories, and it's driven by product innovation and creativity. At the time before the acquisition of Maybelline, we had a very small footprint, predominantly in the drug channel with the L'Oréal brand. But we knew we needed to step it up and build real scale and make up and also penetrate more deeply into the market. And this is the mass market we're talking about.

So the acquisition of Maybelline did that for us. You were in a Walmart store yesterday, at the time in the mid-'90s, we were not really present in Walmart, which was the fastest-growing retailer in America. Maybelline was a very strong brand in Walmart and much deeper roots across the Midwest and south and western part of the country much more so than we were at the time with L'Oréal Paris.

So we built our cosmetics business this way, including the acquisition of a factory that came with the Maybelline acquisition which is in North Little Rock, Arkansas, which is now one of the most, the largest, most efficient and productive and modern makeup factories that we have in the world. And this factory, of course, is helping us to continue to drive our growth. So we're able to step change our presence and make up. We added more brands after that and the mass market makeup like NYX Professional Makeup, which I'll talk about in a minute. But today, that's given us over a 33% share of the mass makeup market in the U.S. which is an extraordinary market, very dynamic market and one that really represents your ability to innovate. And of course, as you saw in our R&I facility, the ability to innovate is the core of who we are and what we do.

The second part of the conquest of the market was through the pro channel. So prior to the acquisition of Redken, around, it's debated, whether it's 1993 or 1994, but around that time. Prior to that, we had essentially 0 business in the professional channel. And as you know, our group was founded in the professional channel in France, over 100 and some-odd years ago. So it was really a point of importance for the group to be able to enter this market, but this market was very local, very fragmented. And it was difficult to gain distribution in this market because at the time, distributors were regional, small family-run companies and it was not easy to penetrate that market.

The acquisition of Redken became the moment to do that. It gave us not just a footprint in salons but it also gave us an understanding and know-how in the métier of the professional business in the U.S., which is an indirect business at the time versus the direct business, which was the European model. That was followed by Matrix in 2000. And with those 2 brands, which were at the time, the #1 and, let's say, the #3 or #4 brand in the market, we suddenly found ourselves with a very important market share in the professional business.

And as we grew those businesses over the years, it became very clear that the distribution model in the U.S., which was built on small regional distributors was not a sustainable model once you have an important market share because you rely on others to grow your business. And we knew we needed to change that and have direct connection with our customers. And you saw that in SalonCentric yesterday where we meet and greet our customers every day. And through the course of the years that followed through over a dozen acquisitions, the SalonCentric distribution network was born. And today, of course, SalonCentric, and you'll hear a lot more about it later on, is the #1 professional distribution network in the U.S. And of course, we are by far the #1 player in this channel.

The next conquest was professional skin care. At this time, we were in the skin care business, predominantly in luxury and a little bit in mass, but we didn't have a footprint in the professional arena. It became very clear that the most important connection between advanced scientific skin care and the consumer was through the doctor or through the esthetician. And there was an emerging channel called med spas at that time. which we didn't know too much about, but they were growing very fast. And we were introduced to this brand called SkinCeuticals, which was founded in Dallas, Texas. And we were inspired by the fact that they had really understood how to connect with the professional, the dermatologist, the esthetician and they knew this market of adjunctive therapy, meaning if you had a procedure in a esthetician's office or in the derm than what would be the product that go along with that. And how does the influence of the doctor influence the sales.

So SkinCeuticals was an important acquisition because it also step changed the size of our L'Oréal Dermatological Beauty division, which prior to that was really quite, quite, quite small. And that became the beginning of our adventure in professional skin care. And as you know, of course, we've acquired skin better science since then, and we've continued to grow that business, and I'll show you in a minute where that has all ended up.

The next strategic shift and move was what we call Indie makeup. So there was a moment in time in this country when makeup was big players, big brands, but all of a sudden, through the ingenuity of pioneers and entrepreneurs and some real visionaries, makeup brands began to emerge, and there was the notion of specialist companies in makeup. A few of them popped up in that era, predominantly coming from California. And we saw one of them, which was Urban Decay, and we felt that this was the perfect Indie makeup brand to add to our portfolio. That was around 2012 in the Prestige part of the market.

And then just a couple of years later, as we began to see more and more of this notion of influencers, driving the awareness and the growth of beauty and in particular, makeup we saw that the models were shifting from the mass advertising and media model to a much more advocacy-based model, and this allowed us the idea to bring NYX into the mass market portfolio and in 2015. And we learned very quickly that in fact, it was a very different business model than Maybelline or L'Oréal Paris. And today, of course, combined with our other 2 brands, we're by far the mass market and make up, thanks, also to NYX, which is today the fastest-growing makeup brand in the market.

And finally, as we understood as well, the strength and the importance of dermatological driven skin care and the importance of that connection with the physician, with the doctor and with the derm, we knew also that skin care was ready for an explosion in a much more accessible way, but also driven by the medical part of the category, and we identified the brand of CeraVe and made that acquisition as well in 2017.

And I think you know the story of CeraVe, it's one of the, I think, the more spectacular stories of how the L'Oréal Group has been able to acquire and scale a small brand into something that's now a global powerhouse and in fact, has become #1. So these 5 pillars of conquest helped us build the foundation of what is today our leadership across L'Oréal USA, but they weren't the only.

Beyond that, it was very clear as well that on the high end of the market, a lot of things were happening. Couture fashion was becoming more mainstream and more understood by more consumers. It started with ready-to-wear. But after that, of course, we all know that between celebrity and culture couture fashion became enormously desired and of course, couture beauty along with it. And through these licenses and these acquisitions from YSL, Valentino, Prada and now Miu Miu, we've been able to build a very successful and very important couture business, which has been important, especially as the economy has developed and we see the affluent consumer being really the powerhouse of growth not just in beauty, but in many cases across the U.S. economy.

And more recently, this groundswell and focus on health, well-being and this connection between beauty and holistic wellness self-care. And this, of course, was exponentially increased during the pandemic. We all know that. We watched people, think changing their beauty regimens, focusing on skin, focusing on holistic health and we identified Youth to the People, which at the time was a small brand, again, California launched brand, but the vegan brand, very much around ingredients and this notion of caring for yourself, the experience, the fragrance and how this has been put together in a health-driven positioning.

Skinbetter Science, which was also a brand that at that time in 2022 is very much connected to overall health and well-being through the physician and through the dermatologist and most recently, ESOP. And if you know the ESOP brand, it's all about experience, it's all about the holistic sense of beauty and how it makes you feel about yourself when you have these products, the fragrance experience, the packaging experience and of course, the shopping experience.

So these 7 areas built the foundation of our subsidiary and our success today. And of course, I think you know that this puts us in the #1 position in this market with 16% of the market, 2x bigger than the second. The real point is not so much being #1, which makes us feel good, but the fact that our size and scale give us permission to do a lot of things in this market. It affords us enormous resources to invest back in our business. You've seen, for example, the RNI facility yesterday, it allows us to be able to build our own future by designing our own product pipeline, it allows us enormous efficiency in supply chain. It gives us pricing power. It gives us leverage with customers, retail partners. And also, of course, it allows us much more opportunity because there's still 84% of the market that we do not have.

So we feel we're just at the beginning, even if, in fact, we are #1. But we're not just #1 in one particular sector. We're #1 across all of our divisions. Luxury, Consumer Products, Dermatological Beauty and Professional Products. Each of those, we hold the lead position although our market shares aren't necessarily the highest in the world in the luxury area where somewhere around 13%, consumer 17% or so.

L'Oréal Dermatological Beauty in what we described in the perimeter of brands that fit in that area, somewhere around 26% or so and Professional Products closer to 26%, 27%. So we have important market shares. We have lead market shares, but by no means do we feel we're at the end of the runway. In fact, more so we feel we're at the beginning. It's also a story of balance because each of our categories, in fact, which is comprised of all of our brands across all of our divisions help us have a balanced business as we see in beauty. There are times when skin care is experiencing explosive growth or maybe makeup or maybe fragrance. And in each case, we're allowed to benefit from that opportunity in many cases, even drive that opportunity.

So for us, the hair business is about 31% of our business and somewhere around 28% way to business in the market. So we're ever so slightly above the weight of the business in the market in hair. In skin care, it's 30% of our business and in the market, it's 37%. We've been very clear about our desire and our objective to grow our share of skin care, and we feel we're very well positioned to do that. And make up it's 26% of our business and 23% of the market. So pretty well aligned. But with our portfolio, it's normal that we have more we think, of course, we can go much, much, much further.

And fragrance, we're quite aligned with the market at 13%. And again, we know this is 1 of those fast-growing categories where more and more consumers are coming to the fragrance category. And of course, this is a great opportunity for us. So not only are we having a leadership position overall and a very well-balanced portfolio. But we also, thanks to our 37 brands, we also have a very important position by category, by brand.

So just to give you a sense of things, because we do like to be able to play the strength of the portfolio. It's a big part of the L'Oréal strategy. And in this country, it's critically important. So we have the #1 brand in Maybelline in makeup, the #3 brand in L'Oréal Paris, quite sure we'll probably have 1 and 2 at some point in the not-too-distant future. We also have a third brand in the top 10 with NYX Professional Makeup. So we're a leader with 34% of the market, but we also have 3 brands in the top 10 and lots and lots of headroom and opportunity to continue to grow.

In hair care, in fact, we have 3 of the top 5 between Redken, L'Oréal Paris and Garnier. If you just, for example, took e-commerce because we have a lot of strength in e-commerce, we'd have 4 of the top 5 and I think we have 6 of the top 10. So we see the strength of hair care, both premium hair care and mass hair care, and this has been an area of explosive growth for us this year as well.

In fragrance, we have 2 of the top 5, but what's astounding is YSL taking the #2 position, which happened, I think, last year. And you know the fragrance world is a competitive world with a lot of very well-known brands and to step in front of the #2 brand and become #2 ourselves with YSL was extraordinary. Valentino #5. And we have other brands following very quickly within the top 10, so in fragrance, also, we hold a lot of top market positions.

And in facial skin care, with CeraVe being #1, we also have La Roche-Posay and SkinCeuticals in the Top 5. And also in the Top 10, we have some other brands following. So even in the skin care category in facial skin care, we're very much present in the top of the market. And again, this allows us each brand to have scale. And the notion at L'Oréal that each brand builds its own destiny is very much true. And when you reach critical mass as a brand, of course, it allows you to reinvest in yourself to continue to gain market share and grow on the market.

So I'm going to shift gears for a moment and just speak overall about the U.S. beauty market and share a little bit about the market, not just in size, but sort of the factors that's driving its growth and how we see it. So we are fortunate to be in the biggest market in the world. This is BMS data, so this is sell-in data. So it's around just under $80 million or so, about 27% of the of the global beauty market growing around 5% or so. This is 2024 data.

And the second market, of course, as everyone knows, is China and so on and so forth. So we do have the privileged position of being in a very large and very robust and very dynamic market. And I think it's not shocking in a way that the U.S. is this way. I mean not only is it purchasing power because so much of the world's purchasing power lives here, but it's also a very consumer-driven market. And I think everybody knows that $7 out of every $10 within GDP of the U.S. is driven by consumer spending. And we know consumers in America like to spend, and we know as well they like to spend on beauty.

We're often asked about the growth of the market and whether this is a dynamic market and is this still a dynamic market. And the answer is very much so. It has always been a dynamic market and it still is a very dynamic market. If you look back in history, the CAGR between 2015 and 2019 was around 4%. Of course, the pandemic impacted that with a lot of store closures and everything else and it became slightly negative. Then it roared back after the pandemic for a couple of years, at around a 10% CAGR and then have since normalized around 4%, which is pretty much where it was before the pandemic.

And if you look back in history, it's really been the case for many, many years. Some years a little above, some years a little below. But by and large, it's been a market that grows consistently around this rate. And of course, as the leader in the market, we always refer to this as an offer-driven market, meaning the more you put into it, the more you'll get out. And we believe the larger we get, of course, we have the opportunity to stimulate this market as well. And there's a lot of factors that are helping this market become even more dynamic.

And of course, one of those is the explosion of social media and advocacy, which gives so many people of voice in a market that has a lot of passion and a lot of belief that this is a place that you want to be and you want to be a part of. It's also interesting to see how it compares to other categories outside of beauty completely. So this is data that comes from Circana, it's not a L'Oréal report. It's something that was published recently, and I think this is data through the third week in September or so. And it just shows a number of categories and the growth rates, both in value and in units and where beauty sits.

So within the box is mass beauty and prestige beauty, both growing at 4% in value and 2% and 3% in units. So these are only amongst 3 of all of these markets that have positive unit growth, which shows more consumers coming to the market, more consumers using these categories. And we sit in positions 3 and 4 relative to all these categories measured by Circana, which also tells us that within the overall retail business and the overall economy, beauty is a very, very important part of the growth and sits only behind, I think, video games and toys, which I guess one can understand maybe why and lots and lots and lots of other categories that are much slower growth.

This also tells us that for our retailers, whether you're an e-commerce platform or an omni-channel retailer that being successful in beauty and making an investment in beauty matters for your own growth, which gives us additional leverage as well as we speak with our retail partners. It's also, in fact, a moment of positivity. So depending on where you live in the world and which newspaper headlines you look at, sometimes you get an impression that the U.S. might be experiencing some kind of some clouds on the horizon. But in fact, it hasn't been the case at all.

Even underperforming retailers have recently reported pretty good news, whether it's Kohl's. Of course, Walmart, we know has been going from strength to strength over the last couple of quarters. Ulta in a turnaround moment, and I think they released their next quarter tomorrow. We see Sephora as well announced improvements in their trends. And Walgreens has gone private. So one of the biggest pharmacy chains in America is now controlled by private equity. And as a result of that, they're finally able to reinvest in inventory, reinvest in their stores and start to plan and build out their future, which is huge for us because, of course, we have a lot of brands in our consumer division in Walgreens, and it's much better to be in a situation where they're investing than disinvesting.

And CVS, which just reported a 12% growth in their health and wellness area. So by and large, even our retail partners are reporting pretty positive news. And we know the story of the market. I think we've shared that with you, but there was a very unusual Q1, driven very much by a lot of uncertainty, consumer uncertainty after our new administration took office, what would be immigration policy, what would be tariff policy. There was a lot of uncertainty and consumers sort of held back, but as soon as things became clear, of course, the market began to grow and around a 2% growth in Q2 and a 4% growth in Q3.

So again, we're back to this dynamism that we have always been at and this is the rate of growth at which we're running at. And our own growth has accelerated along with that, in fact, even more. So above the market in the first quarter, although not as dynamic as we're used to, coming back strongly in the second quarter and in the third quarter at plus 5% versus plus 4.

So dynamic growth on top of the market and an acceleration of the market. And I think this is really, really important because we have 17% of the market. So a fast-growing market and a fast-growing leader makes for a very good combination. And we feel excited and confident going into the fourth quarter, and we're all picking up here and there, the tidbits of news of how holiday starts and there's been a lot of reports on e-commerce, somewhere between 6% and 7% over the holiday, 5-day holiday periods, depending on how you measure it, they had record numbers of people in the stores, I think 10 million more shoppers over the 5-day period.

I read this morning and even us, we were able to grow our 5-day sales period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, which was your first day here in New York in double digits. So we feel very strong that the positivity of holiday will halo as well on the rest of the year. And I think the holiday season in the U.S. will be somewhere around $1 trillion in sales. So the power of the American consumer to continue to drive the business is really extraordinary.

There's a few parts of our business that are really contributing to our momentum. The first is momentum in hair. So all things hair. And we've known that the consumer is more and more interested in the health of their hair, holistically taking care of themselves, treating their hair, treating their scalp, thinking about the benefits of hair care as a part of their total beauty regimen in new ways and ready to spend more money.

We have 6 of the top 10 brands. We have an explosion in prestige, we have absolutely a massive acceleration of our mass market brands led by L'Oréal Paris and extraordinary innovations like Glycolic Gloss. And we've entered new markets where we have 0 market share like medicalized hair care with CeraVe, which we've just started this adventure, and it starts super well. So we're both accelerating in prestige, way above the market, but a fast-growing market or accelerating in mass and we're entering new territories with huge growth trajectory with the CeraVe brand in medical skin care.

There's also the blooming of the fragrance market. We've watched this since the pandemic. It's been a high-growth market. And we have 2 levers of growth, which is helping us not just grow ahead of the market, but also gain market share, which is, of course, our icons, the brands -- the solid pillar brands that we've had in our portfolio where we've owned these licenses and we continue to grow them like Valentino, of course, which has the #1 fragrance #2 and #5 leading in men's, but also strong presence in women's and then rising stars. -- like Miu Miu and Miutine as well as product paradigm for men. So both icons, brands that are powerhouses in the fragrance world as well as rising stars, new innovations, new products. And the fragrance is very much about that.

Of course, this is the time of year of gifting, but we've been seeing this all year long, and we have a strength in men's and we also have an important strength in women's. And you'll hear a lot more about this later. The year was tricky in mass market makeup in the beginning of the year. I think we all felt this, there was some trepidation. But we saw -- we very quickly got past this with our innovation pipeline. I know you've heard an awful lot about the Beauty Stimulus plan, so I'm not going to repeat things you already know, other than to say that this is what happens when a company that's driven off of innovation brings the innovation that the consumer wants, supports it in powerful ways and you can see the acceleration in our mass market makeup. And again, this is off of a 34% market share. So we aren't talking about growth off of a small base.

We're talking about growth off of a large base. So it's very, very dynamic and exciting growth. And just to give you a sense of some of the things driving it. So we have the core, we all looked at the L'Oréal Paris setting spread in the store yesterday, and I think with a lot of excitement because this has become not just the #1 SKU within the Consumer division makeup portfolio, but the #1 setting spread on the markets. lots of great reasons why, and we'll talk a little bit about that. Fantastic innovation, products, must-have products that are talked about online, like some of the NYX products, the brow glue, liquid IV, these kinds of super viral products that consumers just can't get enough of.

And new products have been the lifeblood of NYX and it's why they're the fastest-growing brand in the mass market makeup. And then, of course, this connection to the consumer, which we call brand love. And we've spoken a bit about that over the last couple of days and our capability to connect our brands with our consumers and we'll show you a little bit of what we're doing with Maybelline and Miley Cyrus, which is interesting because you have the coming together of 2 generations. You have the people who are attached to Maybelline for a very long time. They might be millennials, they might be GenX. And then you have a superstar who's bringing in a bit of Gen Z and younger millennials to bring this Maven brand into the next generation.

So the story of growth is not over for us. I think it's -- we're just at the beginning. And our growth strategy is built off of a couple of strong pillars. First, it's our portfolio. We have the most powerful portfolio in beauty. It's undeniable that we have the best and most desired brands across all categories. We have dynamic and shifting channels and they're shifting in a way that positively influences our ability to reach more consumers, introduce more consumers to our brands and products and broaden our penetration across all consumer targets and that constant ability to connect with consumers.

How do we do that? How do we keep our brands relevant authentic and generating that kind of brand love that drives market share and drives growth. And all of this has to be done to keep us fit for the future. And the reason I say that is because this isn't just about 2026 or 2027, this is about building out our capabilities as a company so that we do this year in, year out. And we'll share that over the course of today so that you have a strong sense and confidence of our ability to keep doing this year in and year out.

So let's start with the portfolio. You know our brands, and we have 37 global brands. We have more brands on top of that are local. You can map them in many ways, but we've looked at this from sort of the more health-driven brands to more glamorous brands, from the most premium price to more accessible price points. And as you can see in this map, we cover all quadrants. You can debate whether it should be a few degrees to the left, right, up or down. But by and large, we have couture brands at the highest price points of the market, very glamorous, very desirable, attracting an affluent market, attracting a dynamic trend-driven consumer. We have very health-driven brands like La Roche-Posay even in hair care, Biolage of course, CeraVe, brands like Kiehl's, which are positioned very much on this idea of taking care of yourself, holistic health Youth to the People, which we spoke about.

We have price points that are more accessible for many consumers, Garnier, for example, which is in hair care and skin care and hair color, NYX Professional Makeup, who has price points -- entry price points between, let's say, $8 and $12 at L'Oréal Paris, which lives on the more premium side, the more glamorous side in the mass market. And then you have Thayers, which is much more in the healthy taking care of yourself side based on skin care, toners, cleansers, acne products and these kinds of things.

So all of this mapping demonstrates that we're in a great place to target the vast diversity of American consumers, across price, across positioning and the strength of this portfolio, I think, will help us continue to drive our business forward. You have to match that with the consumer of the U.S. today. which is the most diverse market in the world. I think we all know that.

We're fortunate to have a couple of younger generations that are obsessed by beauty. This was I don't want to say unexpected, but to watch Gen Alpha, lining up to go into a Sephora, doing Saturday birthday parties with their moms at Ulta. This kind of a thing bodes well for our future. I think we can feel excited unless you have a daughter who's 12 and you're worried about their allowance not being enough. I can tell you it won't be. These consumers are coming our way.

The spending power of the alphas is going to be over $5 trillion by 2030. Think about what that means for our business. Gen Z is the fastest-growing segment within beauty. The millennial are now entering that age when they need a lot of different kinds of products, more and more skin care, more and more hair care and the boomers that are sitting on top of an enormous amount of wealth and affluence and the ability to spend and there's going to be 10 million more boomers, women over the age of 55 in the years to come.

And the Hispanic market, which we all know it's not just the fastest growing, but bringing new needs, we saw the demonstration of what it means to create hair products for curly hair for naturally curly and coily hair. We see more mixed race, more brown skin, more darker hair bases. And then men coming to fragrance like we've never seen before coming to skin care, they're only 10% of beauty and of course, closer to half of the population. So an enormous opportunity for men as well.

So we see this American market, this enormous, exciting mosaic of people needs and of course, we have brands for each and every one of them, and we have a strategy and a way of targeting them and bringing them into our business. So just to share some examples, you have a brilliant Redken brand, which is the leading brand in the professional market. recently working with Sabrina Carpenter, who is beloved by Gen Z and some millennials as well.

It's an extraordinary effort to demonstrate how we can connect celebrity, brand and consumer to bring our brands to these younger consumers. We have brands like Maybelline with Miley Cyrus, who's sort of the icon and queen in the millennial generation on the younger side but also reintroducing the famous Maybelline Jingle, which we all know that's been iconic for decades and decades. We have the Hispanic consumer. So they kind of spokes people at brands like Miu Miu are using that are introducing our brands to this remarkable robust targets. Of course, boomers, Christiano is the most recent celebrity to work with the Lancôme brand, but there's many others, Kristin Davis with in cosmetics.

And why do I share these celebrities? Just to give you a sense of how iconic they are and how much they represent a generation and the importance of connecting those consumers with spokespeople that they both admire, value and understand and bring some identification to themselves. They see themselves in these people and of course, men. So YSL with a little bit more of the street culture, and this is Shai Alexander, who is, of course, an NBA star. And there's many others across the board. I think you've seen Ralph Lauren and Usher, who performed at Super Bowl not too long ago, Tom Holland with YSL. So all of this is to identify these consumer cohorts to connect them with our brands.

And the innovation has to do the same. So they're not separate things. The innovation that each brand brings has to also connect with these targets. And I think we're being more discrete than ever, more intentional than ever about designing our brands, our innovation pipeline and our marketing to be very targeted to be able to have the most complementary array of consumers that you can have to make sure that we're building growth in separate and distinct boulevards by brand and by target. So things like the brow glue for Gen Z, I mean this is extraordinary, how this has exploded and how Gen-Z is connected with their brand.

You see it across the board, YSL with the millennials with Make Me Blush, which is the most extraordinary compact and you have this in your hand and it's something that you just cherish and want to share with your friends, and you do that quite a bit on social media. You have the Hispanic consumer and brands like Garnier with hair color for dark basis, which allows women who start with dark brown or even black to become lighter and either light brown or even all the way to blond as possible. You have P-TIOX, which is like a BOTOX in a bottle for women who aren't quite ready for the needle, but want the same benefit as they could get and are coming to SkinCeuticals for products like P-TIOX. And of course, Ralph Lauren, in this case, Men's Club, which is attracting men across, frankly, more age groups than we ever imagined between millennials and of course, all the way through boomers.

So the innovation pipe matches the target connected to the brand and the portfolio, which allows us to build overall the most complementary business, and of course, in aggregate, the largest and fastest growing. I mentioned the channels, and we know that there's been a fundamental shift in the landscape, the retail landscape of America, as is the case probably around the world. E-commerce way back in 2019 was quite small.

Today, it's somewhere around 35% of the market. And who are the big players that are making this happen and how do we leverage them and work with them. Of course, we all know about Amazon, which is the giant in e-commerce and the most important one overall. You have TikTok shop, the fastest emerging reinventing social selling in the American way. You have Sephora, which is probably the most omni-channel retailer, which does such an amazing job balancing their online presence with their in-store presence with a very, very powerful loyalty club. And you have Walmart and walmart.com. And you saw in the store how they do fulfillment from the store and Walmart tells us.

And I think quite true. As you can imagine, they have 5,000 stores or said another way, 5,000 distribution centers will be able to deliver 90% of Americans same day. So the power of that to put products in the hands of consumers quickly, and also to have more immersive experiences online is very much what's a part of this. Of course, these are all important partners for us.

We're the #1 beauty player in most instances, and I'll share that with you in a moment. And beyond that, the innovation that's coming through these platforms is extraordinary. And I think we saw on the -- just Cyber Monday alone, and this isn't a beauty statistic, but it's a broad statistic. $9 billion of sales were done on Cyber Monday with agentic AI.

Six months ago or 9 months ago, there was no such thing. And already, the consumer is adopting these new tools to help them shop and to help them find the products they want, which plays enormously in our favor because our category is, of course, high interest to consumers. So our business, of course, reflects that same shift. We're now weighted about 26% of our business in e-commerce, growing at a CAGR of around 25%.

We still have 74% of our business in brick-and-mortar. A much lower CAGR in the mid-single digits, but super, super important. And I think you saw that when you were in the market. And we're accelerating in e-commerce. We're gaining market share in the first half and the third quarter were over twice the rate of growth of the market in e-commerce. So we're playing the e-commerce card in a very powerful way. And of course, it comes back to where we started, which is this notion of scale. -- and how do we leverage the resources of L'Oréal and our capabilities to drive this because this is very much a resource business is how do you prepare yourselves and arm yourselves with the capabilities to win on e-commerce, and it's a technology game. And so you have also to be strong in technology.

Across the various platforms, we hold very important positions in most cases, #1. So these are the major players, Amazon, Ulta, Target, Walmart and Sephora. By category, you can see in total, we're #1 everywhere, but we're #3 at Walmart, which is not surprising given the vast array of products they have.

In skin care, we're #1 everywhere, but Sephora make up everywhere, but Sephora, hair, we're #1 with the exempt to being #2 at Walmart, #3 at Target. And of course, fragrance, we're #1. So on each of these platforms, we're #1, in some cases, #2 or #3. Why is that? Because the ecosystem relies on a few different things. First, driving traffic, maximizing the ecosystem and the algorithm to bring consumers to your product detail pages and convert to sale, leveraging the relationships with these retailers, having the right immersive experience and the right content, so the ability to create dynamic content.

And just to contrast it with what life was like when I started in marketing where you created 2 or 3 pieces of communication just to launch a brand on Amazon takes 5,000 pieces of content, and that's just on day 1, which you have to refresh constantly, which we believe gives us an enormous advantage versus smaller players.

On the flip side, there's brick-and-mortar. And brick-and-mortar is a place which is still over 2/3 of our business very, very important. It's still where consumers come, connect with brands, discover. We do panel discussions with consumers all the time. And I was very surprised. We did a panel discussion with Gen Z guys. And their first favorite place to shop for beauty was in stores, which was exactly the opposite of what I might have expected to hear. Why? Because they like the experience of discovery because for them, there are novices on a lot of topics and this is a place that they can really learn and have that experience.

And we see in beauty, dedicated beauty retailers like Sephora and Ulta, which are helping to create this dynamic of the beauty market. stand-alone stores like Kiehl's or ESOP, and of course, big retailers like Walmart, Target, Walgreens, all of them creating beauty experiences. In every case, every retailer has identified beauty as a growth opportunity and a place to invest. And we see projects across all of our retailers to enhance, upgrade and bring new features to their beauty markets. And all of these retailers for the most part, are online and off-line. So they're creating synergies between the 2, which allows us as a major advertiser as well to leverage retail media to create the demand across brick-and-mortar and online. And we're very comfortable whether a consumer decides to buy 1 place or another.

For us, you can advertise on Amazon and sell a product in Walmart, that's okay. So we know the consumer's omni-channel and how you play omni-channel is very, very important. And there's a lot of different opportunities to do that. We create immersive exciting experiences online. We have a great way to connect with consumers on these platforms, Sephora being 1 of the most exciting. I mean, images like this content like this just extraordinary. And then you walk into the store and there you see it table top, front of store or on the gondola and this connection between online and offline creates dynamism excitement and allows us to really bring our products and our brands to life. And then connecting with consumers. So all of this is great, but you have, of course, to create relevancy, connection and brand love with your consumers.

The world, again, has changed awfully fast. And if there's one theme I'd like you to leave with is that L'Oréal has created, we think, the most advanced capabilities to be able to adapt to this new world. So not that long ago, it was the beginning of cookie-based advertising. Life was a little bit simple, a lot of Facebook and things evolve very quickly, precision media, retail media, we create our own capabilities to do our own biddable media in-house, both to be more efficient and also to be more reactive and more agile.

Then the emergence of TikTok very quickly hitting $100 million and now much, much more than that. content, the power of content and the need to create content constantly and then the need to reach the creators of this world. whether you're a YouTube creator, a tick-tock creator, Instagram, that these creators are advocates for our brands, and we need the ability to reach these people at scale, put products in their hands and help them want to support our products and do so in a very interesting and exciting way. So this is called the influence model, and this is today, the predominant way that we connect with our consumers. It starts with extraordinary creativity.

I think we spoke a lot about it, but we -- the reason why we talk about the Super Bowl campaign of 2 years ago with Michael Sarah and the CeraVe brand isn't necessarily because it was the Super Bowl. It's because the level of creativity to create a campaign that started well before the Super Bowl. By the way, the most important part came probably before the Super Bowl was the reveal. But the fun, the comedy, the connection to the brands and the creativity of that just demonstrates the kind of work that we do at L'Oréal across all of our brands. Working at the speed of culture.

We know culture comes from a couple of different places. I mean, we're lucky in the U.S. because culture moves fast, and you have to be connected to a few very clear places. You have to be with athletes and sports. You have to be in Hollywood. Those are the 2 places you need to be. We have a very coveted position of being very close proximity to both. We have a team in Los Angeles that works with Hollywood. We see things and properties coming from the studios before anybody else. So if we want to jump on something or be part of something, integrate it into something we can do that, you've seen us do some fun things with the Oscars and the Kiehl's brand as well as L'Oréal Paris and the setting spray. And then working with creators. It's remarkable the power that these creators have, the reach they have and the kind of numbers that they have following them and to be able to do this in an earned-first way.

And why earned first because it has to be authentic. So just to pay your way into it isn't any more the way to do it. You have to earn their love and gain their support. And when you do that, of course, remarkable things could happen. So with all of this, it leaves us, of course, looking toward the future in a very positive and optimistic way. We think we've built the capabilities to continue to grow, to continue to win, and we have enormous ambition. And of course, all of you know, L'Oréal pretty well. And if you know one thing about us, it's that we're ambitious. We are the current world leader in beauty, but we are building an ecosystem that makes us fit for the future.

There's a lot of technology within that and just to share a little bit about this notion of one L'Oréal, which you hear about, which is how do we harness the power of L'Oréal and our ability to leverage what's happening in technology transversely across the group. And in countries like the U.S., where, of course, it's the advent of AI and where things are moving and happening the fastest, how do we leverage that? And what does it really mean at the end of the day? What does it mean specifically for our business. So there's 3 areas where it's impacting us, and you had a great demonstration of that yesterday in AI-powered métiers in R&I, but it's also in the consumer journey itself.

I mean the reason why I wasn't at all surprised by the amount of sales done on Cyber Monday with the genetic AI is because how helpful and useful it is to personalize recommendations and how amazingly powerful it is when the shopping experience can be done with someone that knows you and knows what your needs are, what your history is, what your skin type is, what your hair texture is. So Beauty Genius from L'Oréal Paris is a great example of that. But it's also all of the AI tools that are sitting even on our retailer platforms.

Amazon, Walmart, they're using agentic AI to help you find the products that you want. And of course, if you are L'Oréal, you have the ability to make sure that you're usually in the recommended stream of products and brands that are served to you. AI-powered métiers is really how AI can help us within each vertical of our company, work better, work more creatively, work faster, work smarter. And you saw how quickly our R&I function has taken AI to help them both sort through fundamental research, reviewing raw materials, reviewing ingredients, understanding how they work together to create formula in a much faster way. iterating. So it was mentioned that it used to take several weeks to formulate a shade of lipstick. Now it takes several hours.

I'm quite sure in the not-too-distant future, it will be several minutes. And of course, we have better outcomes, faster outcomes by using AI in R&I. And maybe even most importantly, is how we, ourselves, as employees are augmented by AI, the way we work the speed at which we work, the efficiency at which we work and how AI is built into our everyday life. And we've spent an enormous amount of time at L'Oréal, upskilling our employees, making sure that AI is on our desktops that we -- it's part of the way we work. Building our own protected tools within the L'Oréal ecosystem and training and developing our people constantly.

And this augmented employee is very much a part of what we see is our role, especially as the leader in beauty and the fact that we want to do things in a way that allows us not just to compete with the biggest companies, which I think we're doing pretty well, but also compete with the smallest companies.

And finally, what I think is our sustainable competitive advantage. Without question, first and foremost, it's our people. We're a 115, 117-year old company. We've been learning about beauty for over a century. It's hard to imagine that there's anyone out there that knows more about beauty than we do. The team you're going to meet today, combined has easily 100 years of beauty experience, if not more. And the nuances of what it takes to win in beauty as a beauty pure player cannot be underestimated.

And I believe our people possess that, that ability, and we drive that sense of entrepreneurship, ownership and accountability all the time. It's a big part of what we do at L'Oréal and especially L'Oréal USA because we're a big subsidiary, so we hold many events. We have many ways to convey and transmit this culture, these values of L'Oréal that are about entrepreneurship, about creativity, about accountability, entrepreneurship and frankly, about winning which is that winning spirit of L'Oréal.

We have an incredible strength in our operational footprints, not just sourcing our own products here in the U.S. in our own ecosystem. Leverage of negotiation, the power of reactivity because let's face it, in beauty, you have sales spikes all the time. Things go viral, you have to be able to react that agility in our supply chain is there. We're a preferred partner to most of our suppliers, and we have capacity to continue to grow. And this is the most important thing.

And all of our footprints today, we have also, let's call it, a secondary footprint even outside of our zone where we can rely on any of the group factories, any of the group resources to support us as well. That strength in operations is also allowing us to continue to evolve our IT. And you know that in the middle of next year, L'Oréal U.S.A. will launch and go on the next SAP platform, which will be another immense move towards simplification and modernization of our IT infrastructure. And that leads us to this digital innovation and technology.

We see the things we're doing in Beauty Tech. We know that as a company and as an industry, technology is enabling ourselves, not just the way we work, but also our consumers. It's creating new opportunities and new capabilities all the time. And in the digital space, in particular, to be able to create 5,000 assets to launch a brand on Amazon isn't going to happen in an art studio with an agency doing them by hand. It's happening with AI, and it could be done very quickly.

So the cost per piece of content is dropping dramatically, which is allowing us to be more effective, more efficient and frankly, more impactful. Tools like Bed IQ, which you've heard about, which is now -- we're running almost 80% of our A&P through this tool to help us be more efficient, gain better ROI and take those kinds of savings and reinvest it in growth, which is fundamentally our model.

So these areas, these pillars are giving us a sustainable competitive advantage. It's the best thing to sort of build a moat around what we do. But more important than that, it's keeping us fit to compete for, I think, is the next 10 years. And I do believe that from our relatively modest share of the beauty market in the U.S. today, we have enormous potential to grow.

I'm not going to say what that number will be in the second bar, but it's definitely going to be a nice big number. And I'm quite sure over the coming years, we're going to surpass 20% share of market in one day 25% and why not 30% at some point. So we see enormous potential in this country, in this very dynamic, very diverse market, where we're very unable to win, and we're very optimistic about what the world is going to look like for us in beauty in the years to come.

So I want to thank you for listening to this presentation, and I think we're going to be able to do a Q&A session at this point.

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