Beiersdorf Aktie

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q1 2026 Results Conference Call. I'm Moritz, your Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] The conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christopher Sheldon, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2026 conference call. I'm here with our CEO, Vincent Warnery; and our CFO, Astrid Hermann. As always, we will start with a presentation of our sales performance of the quarter, followed by a Q&A session.

And with that, I'd like to hand over to Vincent.

Thank you, Christopher, and good morning. Welcome to today's conference call. Astrid and I will walk you through our sales figures for the first 3 months of 2026 and update you on the key strategic initiatives we are executing to strengthen our business. This includes an update on our ongoing NIVEA rebalancing.

Our Q1 sales were in line with our full year 2025 a few weeks ago, we anticipated a chart 2026 with several factors impacting La Prairie and NIVEA new sales performance. Our Derma business continue to demonstrate outstanding growth, fully delivering on its strategy. La Prairie faced headwinds through disruptions in the U.S. department channel and travel retail in China. Finally, NIVEA's first quarter net sales development is challenged, but we are making progress on NIVEA rebalancing. I will share more details on this a bit later.

How does this translate into numbers? In Q1, we saw an organic net sales decline of 4.6% at group level. Our consumer business declined by 4.7% organically. Derma delivered an outstanding plus 8.2% organic sales growth. Healthcare was up plus 1.9% on top of a difficult prior year comparison base. NIVEA and La Prairie faced headwinds with net sales declining by 7% and 14.9%, respectively.

The underlying sellout performance, however, showed an improving trend, making us more optimistic for the coming quarters. Tesa ended the first quarter with an organic net sales decline of 4.3%, mainly as a result of phasing-related double-digit growth in the first quarter of 2025. Our first difficult quarter performance was anticipated and reflected in our full year guidance for 2026. We continue to believe in our ability to return to growth as the year progresses.

Let's review the derma performance with our brands, Eucerin and Aquaphor. With an outstanding 8.2% organic sales growth, we again significantly outperformed the derma market, which is growing at low single-digit rates. This underscores the strength of our portfolio and the successful execution of our growth strategy.

Our success is driven by 2 pillars. First, our innovations. With our breakthrough in ingredients, Epicelline and Thiamidol endorsed by dermatologists, Eucerin continues to lead the way. Consumers are increasingly seeking science-backed efficacious derma products. And second, our successful expansion into white spaces. Three examples of these white space expansions are North America, Brazil and China.

North America, Derma's largest region delivered strong 7% organic sales growth driven by double-digit Aquaphor performance and the continued momentum of Eucerin Face, including Thiamidol. Eucerin in Brazil was able to more than double its net sales in Q1 and is close to the #3 position on the market only years after being #15. A key driver of the recent success is Eucerin Epicelline. Lastly, our Derma business in China is showing continued high double-digit growth, a clear testament to the successful rollout of Thiamidol on the domestic market.

Let's continue with La Prairie. Q1 was impacted by disruptions in the U.S. department store channel as well as travel retail in China. Both had a significant negative effect on the Q1 sell-in performance with net sales declining by 14.9% organic. However, this was not an indication of the underlying sellout demand. Retail sales, excluding disruptions, grew close to 10% in the first quarter.

A key growth driver continued to be China in the fourth consecutive quarter. We remain cautious on the outlook of La Prairie in a volatile luxury skin care market environment, but continue to see green shoots from its reposition strategy.

Now let's have a closer look at NIVEA. In line with what we showed you at our full year call several weeks ago, the mass market environment remains challenging, which is negatively affecting NIVEA performance. As we ended the year 2025, market volumes were flat and continue to be flat in the first months of 2026.

In addition to the market environment, 4 main factors negatively impacted NIVEA net sales in Q1. First, NIVEA lapped 2 strong prior year first quarters, leading to a more difficult baseline. Second, certain trade negotiation conflicts in Europe have had a negative net sales effect. Third, the sell-in of our major innovations, Epicelline and Derma Control lifted NIVEA net sales in the fourth quarter of 2025, while most of the corresponding sell-out was absorbed in Q1 and no new countries were launched in the new year.

Lastly, NIVEA's core portfolio has not returned to growth yet. However, the dynamics are improving as we are implementing our rebalancing strategy to restore NIVEA growth. But before we deep dive into the rebalancing, I want to demonstrate that also global innovations remain a cornerstone of NIVEA's strategy. NIVEA Epicelline continues to be on track.

We have already been satisfied with the sell-in and sell-out performance and are pleased to confirm that also the repurchase rates looks promising. In fact, the initial repurchase rates and intentions to repurchase figures of the NIVEA Epigenetic Serum in Europe are comparable to the figures of Eucerin in 2025.

Let me now take a few moments to remind you of our NIVEA strategy recalibration, the rebalancing of the portfolio. What do we mean by rebalancing? It's a shift in how we allocate resources and drive growth at NIVEA along 3 pillars. First, portfolio. We are broadening our focus across our key franchises, face care, body care and deodorants. In practical terms, this means that we are shifting marketing and innovation efforts to strengthen all 3 categories.

Second, accessible face care. We are rebalancing the focus also to popular face care products at a more accessible price range next to the premium face care lines like Luminous and Epicelline. And third, local relevance. Next to major global franchises, we will support important local product lines by giving key markets, for example, China, the U.S., India, Japan and Brazil, greater flexibility in local execution. This is what we call localization within a frame, empowering our regional teams to develop and activate products that resonate with local consumers while maintaining the integrity of the NIVEA brand.

Let me elaborate on 3 specific initiatives. First, body care in emerging markets. In our emerging market regions, we began to rebalance our marketing budget to body care in September last year. In addition, we focused our portfolio on the right franchisees with the right assortment in the right countries and reached our global advertising approach with local storytelling.

We also stepped up our efforts with the influencers and further improve in-store execution. As an initial results, we have seen NIVEA body care and also overall skin care market shares in emerging markets moving to positive territory this year in terms of both value and volume.

Second example, deodorants in Europe. As part of the Derma Control launch in the fall of 2025, we shifted marketing budget towards deodorants. This did not only help to promote Derma Control by the positive [ alloy ] effect on NIVEA Deo as a category. Together with assortment optimizations, it led to regain customer and consumer attention for NIVEA deodorants. As a result, the NIVEA Deo market share situation in Europe improved and recorded market share gains in the first months of this year.

And third example, Luminous Glow in emerging markets, a global innovation adapted to local needs. NIVEA Luminous initially struggled to scale in emerging markets due to its premium positioning. To unlock the full growth potential, the product was locally adapted across assortment, packaging, pricing and activation. This was implemented at the launch of the Luminous Glow line.

Thailand was the most prominent proof point. The launch of sachet formats, stronger claim communication and intensified influencer activation drove rapid consumer uptake. As a result, Luminous Skin Glow achieved a significant market share uplift and quickly became the #1 serum in the market.

As demonstrated by these examples, the rebalancing of NIVEA is underway. The measures will take some time to show their full impact, but NIVEA's current sellout dynamics already show a substantially better performance than the net sales decline in Q1. In fact, NIVEA's year-to-date sellout grew by 1.7% following 2 quarters of negative growth. These early indications make us optimistic that we are on the right track and that our rebalancing strategy is working.

Before I hand over to Astrid for tesa in the financial review, I would like to turn your attention to China, one of our key white space markets. At this time last year, I presented to you our ambitious plan in China to put our house in order. We implemented comprehensive restructuring measures, especially for NIVEA to lay the foundation for future success in this important white space market for Beiersdorf.

Our efforts are starting to pay out -- off. And we saw impressive growth across all 3 major brands in the first quarter of 2026. NIVEA increased net sales by 1/3 and Eucerin net sales grew in high double-digit territory. Also, La Prairie showed an impressive 12% retail sales growth, which is not a reflection of the weaker net sales performance in the quarter.

And with that, finally over to you, Astrid.

Thank you, Vincent, and good morning, everyone. Let's take a look at tesa's performance in the first quarter. Net sales declined by 4.3% organically, in line with expectations and as reflected in the full year guidance. The decline can be attributed to a high prior year comparison base in the electronics business. This was related to shifts in some customers' production footprint as well as adjusted order patterns.

The automotive sector remained challenging with tesa outperforming the market, especially in applications for new energy vehicles. The Consumer segment was impacted by strong performance in e-commerce.

Let me now take you through some further details of our Q1 performance. Beiersdorf Consumer business net sales declined to EUR 2.077 billion in the first quarter of 2026 at an organic growth rate of minus 4.7%. Adverse foreign exchange effects resulted in lower nominal growth of minus 7.7%. Our tesa business recorded an organic net sales decline of minus 4.3% in the same period, closing the quarter with net sales of EUR 407 million.

Due to unfavorable foreign exchange effects, nominal sales declined in line with the consumer business by minus 7.7%. As a result, the group generated net sales of EUR 2.484 billion at organic and nominal growth rates of minus 4.6% and minus 7.7%, respectively.

Looking at our Consumer business across regions. The negative performance across regions is mostly attributable to the challenging net sales performance of NIVEA and La Prairie in the first quarter, while the underlying sell-out performance is positive. North America, Western Europe and the Africa/Asia/Australia regions were impacted by additional factors I would like to explain in more detail.

North America was negatively impacted by the retail disruption affecting La Prairie as well as Coppertone. Coppertone weighed on the first quarter performance as we are streamlining the portfolio to focus on the sports segment as well as promotional phasing shifts of net sales between quarters. Excluding these factors, the organic net sales growth of North America increases to plus 3.2%, mainly driven by the strong Derma performance.

Western Europe was adversely affected by the disruption of travel retail in China. As you will remember, we record La Prairie's travel retail business in Western Europe, which was 130 basis points headwind to growth in Q1.

Lastly, the crisis in the Middle East weighed on the Africa/Asia/Australia region with 170 basis points headwind on growth. Excluding the Middle East, Africa/Asia/Australia would have grown by 1.1%. Back to you, Vincent.

Thank you, Astrid. To conclude, Q1 was a challenging start to the year, but in line with our expectations. Our Derma business remains strong. NIVEA and La Prairie showed an unfavorable net sales performance, but positive sell-out dynamics point to an improvement in the quarters to come. Based on this, we are confirming our 2026 guidance.

For both our Consumer and tesa business, we continue to expect net sales to be flat to slightly growing organically with an EBIT margin, excluding special factors, slightly below the previous year. At group level, this translates to net sales flat to slightly growing organically with an EBIT margin, excluding special factors, slightly below 2025.

With that, we're happy to answer your questions. Over to you, Christopher, for the Q&A.

Thank you, Vincent. Now we're ready to go to the Q&A. [Operator Instructions] And we will start with Jeremy Fialko from HSBC this morning.

Just one sort of technical one to start with is whether you can give us the NIVEA sort of full Q1 number, whether you have any data that goes to the end of March. I saw the slide just took you to the end of February.

And then secondly, perhaps you could just talk a little bit about the kind of the cost situation and what you'll see from that perspective given some of the higher inputs and to what extent that puts greater risk on the margin side of your guidance?

I will -- Jeremy, I will take the first question and Astrid will take the second one. Your question about NIVEA. So the market share, the data we have is only until end of February, and that's why we're looking at year-to-day February.

In fact, you have -- if you -- the bridge between the net sales and the sell-out, you have 3 factors which explain that. The first one, which is obvious, I mentioned that already in the yearly call, we have an innovation phasing. And we did 100% of the sell-in of the 2 big launches, which are Epicelline and Derma Control in the Q4 2025 and even more in November, December. So obviously, all the countries have been sold in, we have to absorb the sell-out in the first quarter.

The second element, which is also important is that we have a market dynamics, which is flat. It's really 0% growth, and it has an effect on the core business, which remains negative, and this is what we have to correct. Third element, which we were not expecting, obviously, is the Middle East crisis. I think Astrid mentioned that. It cost us 50 basis points of NIVEA growth.

And the last element, which took place partly in March, we have some retailer conflicts. We have clearly some discussions with retailers, particularly in Germany and France, which are willing us to decrease prices. We are not willing to do that, and we will not accept any pressure to go in this direction, especially at a time when we have this uncertainty with the Middle East crisis.

So all of that makes a difference between a negative quarter in net sales and a positive quarter in sell-out at plus 1.7%. On your second point.

Jeremy, on the cost situation. So the immediate impact, given that the direct impact of oil and gas on us is relatively limited, primarily on the logistics side, has been manageable so far. We're obviously really watching the supply situation and ensuring that we are set there, really emphasizing that.

We are working through, obviously, many different scenarios, as you can imagine, on what could come if this crisis is staying for longer that clearly could trigger significant cost increases. And we will then obviously look at all the tools we have to ensure that we can offset the impact from that pressure.

Sorry, just a follow-up. Could you give us a bit more color on the retailer disputes and to what extent those are resolved or to what extent they will carry on affecting the business into Q2?

So it's under negotiation right now. And hopefully, we'll have some good results in the weeks to come. It's clearly focusing on, as I said, France and Germany. It's about a few retailers which are willing us to decrease prices, which is absolutely something we'll refuse. So we are discussing, we are exchanging. Hopefully, we'll have a solution because it's really limited to a few specific retailer in the coming days or weeks.

The next question is from Callum Elliott of Bernstein.

Maybe I could just start with following on from Jeremy's theme, looking at your slide on sell-out. If I look at the Q4, it shows sell-out basically flat and you reported kind of plus 2-ish on NIVEA. So let's call it 2 percentage points of inventory build on NIVEA in Q4.

Then you show positive 1.7% year-to-date versus the negative 7% that you've reported. So there's sort of 2 percentage points of stock build in Q4 and negative 9 percentage points of drag in Q1. Should I infer from that, that the majority of the negative 9 percentage points gap between sell-in and sell-out is the retail dispute rather than destocking?

And maybe you can just help us understand the discrepancy between the plus 2 percentage points in Q4 and the negative 9% in Q1.

I will give you the bridge. It's just to get the figures right. You have a decline in Q1 of NIVEA of minus 7% and you have an increase of sell-out of plus 1.7%. If you try to separate the different elements, as you mentioned quite clearly, you have 2 points of growth, which is the sell-out of the sell-in we did in Q4, you're absolutely right. You have 2 points which are linked to the retailer conflict.

You have, I would say, 50 basis points, which are linked to Middle East. And the rest is the evolution of the core business, let's say, 3%, which we have not yet been able to turn around, and this is what we are looking at with a good example I mentioned to you and deo in Europe, body in emerging markets and body and face in emerging market. This is what we are willing to improve through this rebalancing, but you got the math right.

Okay. Perfect. And maybe just a follow-up on the other sales, Coppertone, Chantecaille, et cetera. I think by my calculation, that sort of division, if I can call it that, is down 25% in reported terms in Q1. And I don't think you talk about it at all in the press release.

So could you just give us some color on exactly what's happening in that division? Is it still just ongoing Coppertone weakness? Or is there something else going on there?

So Coppertone, there was clearly a phasing change. The fact that one of the biggest U.S. customer decided to order in December because the Easter it was earlier than planned, makes us -- make a very nice Q4, but a very low Q1. So it does not impact the sell-ut. The sell-ut is pretty good now that we are focusing on sport. We are growing.

We are even growing in sport at 7.6% in sell-out, which is something we never had since we bought the brand. So that's more this phasing issue in terms of net sales. The rest of the brand, Chantecaille is obviously hit by the same phenomenon as La Prairie. So we have the Saks Fifth Avenue issue that is not sold. We sold -- we are selling back to Saks since March. And you have the change of travel retail operators in China. But the rest of the business is doing well.

And particularly, we are pretty happy with the U.S., if you exclude the Saks issue because we are growing in the U.S. and gaining market share. That's the 2 main brands. You have other small local brands, but not really relevant for the figures.

And the next question is from Warren Ackerman with Barclays.

Yes, a couple from me as well. The first one is just on the organic growth guidance. Given the slow start, Vincent, the minus 4.6%, how do you get confident on the full year guide. I mean you've obviously got a lot to do in the balance of the year. It doesn't look like you've got much wiggle room. Can you maybe sort of give us some of the building blocks to give us the confidence that, that guide is realistic?

And maybe if you're able to say whether you think the Q2 organic growth might be positive given the sort of sell-in, sell-out dynamics you've talked about? And then the second one is maybe a little bit on emerging markets because we still got Eastern Europe down, I think, 8.2% and LatAm down maybe a bit better than it's been trending.

But can you maybe sort of outline the rebalancing of NIVEA, how confident you are that you can get some of these big emerging markets back into better territory? How long is it going to take to see that kind of negative swinging back? That would be helpful.

Sure, Warren. So we are maintaining the guidance for 2026, as I mentioned. We are -- indeed, I would say what is pretty safe is Derma. We are seeing clearly very nice growth ahead of us. We have not only ambitions for Eucerin, but also for Aquaphor. And the fact that we have this extremely strong results in all our white spaces. I also could have mentioned India, I could have also mentioned Japan.

We just launched in Japan, make us pretty optimistic. So Derma will continue to be the growth driver of Beiersdorf for the quarters to come. We are also expecting now that we are out of the disruptions in luxury that now we are selling back to Saks Avenue. We have also the 2 new retail operators in Beijing and Shanghai. They are working. The app is working. So we are back to normal, and we see some pretty nice traction.

We have also, as you might remember, a very interesting launch with a more affordable line for La Prairie, which will allow us also to enlarge our distribution, not only to Amazon in the U.S., but also to other retailers in which we are not today because of the price level of La Prairie. So pretty positive about La Prairie.

The question is NIVEA. What is making us optimistic is that we are growing in sell-out. The plus 1.7% I was mentioning includes positive sell-out in all regions. And Europe, for example, which obviously is important for us, we are growing also in sell-out, plus 1.1%, which is the first time since a long time. So we see that the rebalancing is starting to pay off.

Obviously, one of the questions for Q2 will be the sun season. We've been very successful in the last 2 years. So we are ready to embrace a pretty nice season. So on this basis, we believe that Q2 will be flattish back to growth, slight growth, but we will clearly do better than Q1, and this is why we maintain the guidance.

On your second question about Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe was not so much linked to the focus on premium face care because this is -- we are mostly selling personal care and the body product, was more the strong development of local and Korean brands. and also some retailer issue that we have to tackle. So retailer issues, we are good.

We have a good conversation with the retailers, and we have also -- I think we'll be more proactive in the way we embrace the strategy. We will develop some exclusive partnership with some retailers. And back to growth on the key categories. As I mentioned, we are positive on the deodorants, and this is essential for Europe, not only for the growth, but also for the profit.

And we are also preparing a pretty nice launch in body and face. So we are not yet positive on Eastern Europe, but I think we have a good plan, and we should see some progress in the -- starting in Q2.

And the next one is Celine Pannuti from JPMorgan.

So my first question is on Middle East and the impact of the geopolitics. So from what you said, there was 170 bps impact on AAA. And so at the group level, I think it's like 40 basis points only for a month. So could you explain what that is and whether there was as well extra impact on travel retail? And what have you baked in for the potential impact of that in the second quarter?

And coming back on the COGS, I mean, clearly, we don't know -- there's a lot of things we don't know, but we also see that the spot prices is higher, that there are potential shortages of some derivatives of oil. So at this stage, is it fair to assume that already in the second half of the year, you are going to see a higher COGS inflation than what you thought at the beginning? And if you could give us a bit of an idea on that? And what measures are you planning to take whether pricing or cost savings to offset that?

My second question is regarding AAA. So I understand that there was an impact from Middle East, but nevertheless, growing 1.1% versus, I think, growing 9% in the fourth quarter. I was quite surprised because you should have had the positive impact of comp from China as well as the strong sell-in that you did in Thiamidol.

So can you say how much -- how China was growing in the quarter. What happened maybe in other regions if it was not the issue in China? And then how should we think about that region going forward?

So Celine, I will answer your question related to the impact on costing. So as you might imagine, we are currently protected at least in the current quarter, to some extent also in the next quarter through the contracts that we have, which is good. Immediate impact, as I already mentioned, obviously, on logistics, clearly, and we are managing that.

Yes, as we are looking into, obviously, contract negotiations for the back half, we will start to see some pressure there. We are looking at various scenarios. I cannot give you here numbers at the moment because it is very fluid. And of course, we will need to then make plans on how to offset those. It will be looking at everything, including, to be honest, pricing that we will need to look at for the back half if this continues.

Your second question, Celine, as you know very well, China is not a big part of our business, at least on the NIVEA and Eucerin in France. So the fact that we are growing double digit in China is obviously very important for us. But we have also a big part of the business, which is done in Southeast Asia, where we are suffering from the same issue that we had in other part of the world with NIVEA being done on core.

So the good news, as I mentioned, that we are back to growth on face care with the launch of the sachet glow. We have also some local issue. Thailand is obviously impacted by the border conflicts with Cambodia. Thailand is a very big country for us. We don't sell in some big areas of Thailand. We have also a big pressure from local brands in Indonesia. So I would say in the good side, you have a very strong business in Northeast Asia and India, double digit.

Low side, you have the Thailand and you have Indonesia. This is why all in all, you end up with plus 1.1%, knowing also, as I mentioned, that we are also destocking further in China. We want to be extremely by the books in terms of stocking in the brick-and-mortar La Prairie China. So we have also managed to reduce our stock to the absolute best situation possible in the first quarter in order to embrace also the coming launches in Q2 and Q3.

Sorry, just to follow up. Can you give me what exactly the number is for China? Because like double digit seems to be for Eucerin. So what is China all inclusive La Prairie, Eucerin and NIVEA? And then can you explain the Middle East impact that you saw in Q1 for 1 month? And what should we expect for the coming quarter?

Okay, good. So in China, we're doing pretty well. We have a very strong NIVEA growth. We are growing NIVEA at plus -- India, we're in India, plus 18% net sales, gaining market share on every category.

You might remember that we launched Luminous. Luminous has got a very good start. We launched a specific galenics with tubes in order to be accessible for the majority of consumers. So we are already a pretty good market share. We're also relaunching our core business. NIVEA Soft. India is the #1 country in the world for NIVEA Soft. We are gaining 5 points market share, which is pretty -- so you're asking about China or India, Celine?

China.

China. Sorry, my mistake. Sorry, sorry. My mistake. So China, we are growing in -- on NIVEA at plus 22%, and we're growing on Eucerin at plus 87%. So if you look at China NIVEA, the biggest part of the growth is coming from face care. I know this is a category we have been launching with Thiamidol. We are going on NIVEA face care at 71%, gaining more than 2 points market share, which is very big for us on NIVEA.

Eucerin is flying. Eucerin, we are growing at 87%, so which means that we have already, after only 6 months on the market, we -- our euro product, which is the Thiamidol serum is the #1 derma anti-pigment serum on the market. So we are extremely happy with Eucerin and I'm very, very optimistic with NIVEA.

And the last information was La Prairie, the retail sales, we are at plus 12%, and this is the fifth quarter in a row that we are growing double digit in China. So this is a mix of both brick-and-mortar and also a very strong success online and particularly with Douyin, which is TikTok.

Okay. And Middle East?

Middle East. Do we have the figures of Middle East evolution? We are -- so Middle East is 3% of our sales. If you look at the total, and we are at minus 50% in Middle East. So we are not so much suffering...

50%?

50%, 5-0 in Middle East for NIVEA and Eucerin. It's a small business for La Prairie. We are not suffering in sellout. That's a good news because we've been able to find ways to stock the retailer in due time. We are suffering in net sales, so which means that no issue on the consumption on the sellout, but we hope to be able to continue to find ways. We are extremely creative using all the means you can imagine to drive our product to Middle East.

So we are using the other routes like everybody is using [ Salala, Core Fegan, Yeda]. We are rerouting as much as we can to be sure that we can serve our consumers. So again, nobody can say what will happen, especially now today, but we have found ways to serve our consumers as much as we can.

Thank you, Celine. Then the next one is David Hayes from Jefferies.

Just to quickly follow up on that. Just that minus 50% Middle East, I guess, that's March you're talking about. Is that right rather than the quarter? Just to clarify that first.

Yes.

The 2 questions I have, just again sort of reconciliation. So 2nd of March, you reported the full year, you guided to low single-digit decline in the quarter is gone -- first quarter. Obviously, you did mid-single-digit decline. You talked about the Middle East circa 50 basis points.

So I'm still struggling to see what happened in the month of March that was not expected? I guess the SAC dynamic, the La Prairie travel retail dynamic, all of that would have been known. So just trying to still reconcile why there was that underperformance relative to what you expected 5 or so weeks ago.

And then secondly, on the profitability and delivering on the margin, there's a very big contribution last year, EUR 90 million in other income and expenses that is within the underlying margin. I think a big chunk of that was a reversal of provisions. So I just wonder whether you can give us any visibility or guidance on what that number looks like this year in terms of delivering on the operating margin guide, whether that's going to be a similar number or even bigger potentially, which helps with the profit delivery.

I'll take the first question, and Astrid will answer the second one. Very simple, 2 news, which we're not expecting. One, as you mentioned, the Middle East crisis. So we were not expecting to lose sales in this part of the emerging market. The second element, we got tremendous pressure from some retailers to close the deal before the quarter according to their expectations. I didn't want to accept that. So I don't want to decrease our prices. So we refused that, which impacted obviously March.

In terms of profitability, David, obviously, we manage our SOI overall. We are actively managing also that line of the SOI, and that is built into our guidance. Thank you.

Then the next question is from Guillaume Delmas of UBS.

A couple of questions for me, please, both on NIVEA actually. The first one is on the NIVEA recalibration strategy. Vincent, can you maybe shed some light on the marketing support you are planning behind this initiative? Because I think your margin outlook seems to signal relatively flat A&P spend, both as a percentage of sales and in absolute terms. So just wondering how you will make sure you get the maximum traction on all these initiatives under NIVEA recalibration.

And then my second question, it's still on NIVEA, but the brand declining by 7% in Q1. Could you maybe share by how much volumes contracted in the quarter? And which key categories, regions you are seeing the most pronounced volume share losses? And still on the volume point, I mean, what does it do to your capacity utilization and more broadly to your operational leverage?

On your first question, if you -- you might remember that what I explained also that the face care category is extremely expensive in terms of working media. So you have to -- when you do a launch, you have to spend at least [ 10% ] of the net sales in marketing budget, which is what we did for Luminous and Epicelline. But overall, you are clearly above 40% of your net sales in working media, while the other categories are much cheaper.

If you look at body care, if you put at deo, you are more into the high single digit or low double single digits -- low double digits. So in fact, rebalancing part of this extra investment on face care on deo and body is already making a huge difference on deo and body without impacting so strongly the investment you put on face care. This is what we have been doing.

We started to do that in September on deo in Europe, and you saw already the results. We are doing that also in emerging markets since September on body, and it is also paying off. So we believe that with a pretty stable marketing budget, just by having this rebalancing, we can have a pretty nice effect on the sell-out.

And again, this is what we are seeing in both regions on the 2 major categories, which are deo and body.

I think Astrid, you take the second one.

Sure. So Guillaume, on NIVEA, it is primarily -- the decline is primarily driven by volume. And we do see -- as you would have seen also from the regional chart and impact pretty much across all of the regions.

We do have some bright spots in certain countries, but from a regional perspective, it's quite broad, kind of reflecting also what we have showed you, obviously, from a marketing -- market development, which is quite global in terms of the development of our mass market.

Then the next question is from Olivier Nicolai from Goldman Sachs.

Just on Europe, competition has been intensifying, particularly in Germany. We talked about Mixa last quarter, but you also have now Korean brands entering the market aggressively. What is the risk to your market share in Germany specifically, but in Europe in general? And do you think that you can maintain share with NIVEA? And then I guess it's a bit early, but do you see any sign of consumer weakness in Europe so far?

Sure, Olivier. On Europe, yes, Mixa and the Korean brands took market share away from us, and this is also why we reacted already in September by putting more investment into the core categories, which are body on one side and which are accessible face care on the other side.

So we are expecting -- we have not yet regaining market share in Germany. We are a strong plan on NIVEA Soft. We have strong plan on the NIVEA Repair Care, which is also an answer to the brand you are mentioning. We're also coming with a much more ambitious plan on affordable face care, launching a new line soon. We expect also to be able to fight against these brands.

And also, we are coming with a very smart innovation. We just launched NIVEA Sun Stick coming from Korea, which is clearly one of the best seller we have been putting on the market in sun care. So also leveraging, we have also our own expertise in Korea, also leveraging what we know from Korea.

The good news that we clearly see and we have some kind of long-term view on the market, we see that those Korean brands are not really sustainable. They are not even strong in Korea. So they go up and down. So they take market share away from us, but after they disappear. So we just have to be smarter. And this is, for example, one of the thing we are doing in Eastern Europe. We'll be able to be much more visible on shelf. We have also been extremely aggressive in terms of influencers.

So we are learning from those brands without trying to copy them. So we are not yet positive in Germany, but I'm pretty optimistic starting this quarter that we see some good results in those categories.

Thank you, Olivier. Then the next one is Misha Omanadze from BNP Paribas Exane.

I have 2, please. So first, you mentioned that you may be looking at pricing actions to offset input cost pressures in H2. Does your full year guidance of flat to slightly positive growth for Consumer already embed an assumption of some pricing benefiting the second half?

And the second question would be on growth by brands. I know you don't guide specifically, but if you could maybe just comment directionally what you expect for each of the brands for Q2 and the full year?

Misha, I will take your first question. So we are currently working through various scenarios on the impact of our costing. We have not built those into our guidance, and we have also not built in, obviously, the countermeasures. It's an extremely fluid situation. We're obviously looking at what that could be for the second half.

As you can imagine, it's really hard to pinpoint the exact impact, but we're managing that as much as we can again via scenarios. So neither the pricing, but neither the cost.

Your question, so I will not guide, but I think I mentioned already that we are expecting a flat to slightly increasing Q2 mostly driven by the success of Derma, but also some much better figures on La Prairie and Chantecaille and also on NIVEA.

So I would say on the year, if you look at the guidance, I'm expecting, again, strong growth with Derma, should stay the same across the year, recovery in the second semester on La Prairie, Chantecaille and finishing the year with NIVEA slightly positive, a bit in line with the market, and that should give the guidance we gave you.

Thank you, Misha. Then the next question is from Tom Sykes from Deutsche Bank.

Firstly, just on the margin. Could you give a view on the cadence of margin change in the year, so H1 movement versus H2? And just why doesn't consumer need a more significant margin reset? I mean, to cement the longer-term growth, you could invest more. You're facing a lot of competition from smaller peers in the brands, you pick out more competition in EM. Why doesn't it need a more significant margin reset?

And then on the Sun season sell-in, you mentioned it's obviously a very high-margin business for you. Could you just talk about the scope of that sell-in and in particular, the move or the sell-in online -- to online distributors or retailers and offline? And is that initial sell-in the same scope as it always has been, please?

Tom, I will take your first question. So we typically have a stronger margin, EBIT margin in the first half than we have in the second half, and we expect similar in this year with obviously a stronger first half versus the second half. Again, we will see what impacts we do see from the Middle East. Again, the attempt or the ambition is to offset those impacts.

And in terms of your question around whether or not we need an even stronger margin reset. Look, this is the plan we have made. We feel like we can with this plan, deliver on the guidance we have committed to. We are starting to see some green shoots, as we've mentioned also in our presentation, also seeing the sellout moving in the right direction. We're not yet happy completely about, obviously, how strong that is, but we do think we will see continued impact from all the changes we are making.

To your second question...

I was just going to say on the -- sorry, Vincent. The change year-on-year in margin rather than obviously the seasonality, but the year-on-year change in margin, are you expecting -- how are you expecting that to progress? Sorry, Vincent.

Yes, it will be a similar impact throughout the year. We don't see it -- Thank you.

Question on sun care. We are ready. We have done the sell-in, which is in line with last year. What is the good news for us is that we're doing better in the emerging markets. Last year, the success was really more driven by Europe. So at this stage, sell-in, again, sell-in driven, we are good in everywhere.

So again, what we are expecting is the sun, but we are ready. We have also a very strong plan with influencers. We are also, as I said, new products, which I think will be interesting also for Gen Z. It's something we are willing to do this year. So more to come. As you know, it's starting now and the sell-out will be clearly in Q2 and I hope to be able to share some good figures at the end of this quarter.

Thank you, Tom. And then the next one is Fulvio Cazzol from Berenberg.

My question, which is on the investment rebalancing. Vincent, I remember when you became CEO a few years ago, you highlighted the strategy change away from the decentralized model that Beiersdorf had previously. At the time, you highlighted the inconsistency across countries on product launches, on marketing practices, which basically resulted in lower returns from investments in categories like body wash, sun, deo, et cetera.

Now it sounds like you are taking the business back to that more decentralized model, investing in products with lower price points that generate lower margins. So what will be different in the next few years that gives you the confidence of a better return on investments versus, say, 6, 10 years ago?

Fulvio, this is the right question, and thank you for asking. I think we clearly -- the situation in 2021 was indeed that we were ultra localized. So every country was doing what they wanted in terms of launches, in terms of advertising campaign, in terms of support of key initiatives. And we did up into a kind of patchwork of different look and feel, different visualization of the brand and clearly no return on investment.

So clearly, on top of the direction into premium face care, I went into a very strong globalization, and I went too far. I was clearly -- it's obvious when you look at the results. I went too far into the globalization because there are some local franchises, which suffered from the fact that they were no longer invested. So are we back to what we were before? Not at all.

What we are talking about is the localization in a frame, which means that clearly, we are controlling everything from the center. So when, for example, I'm talking about the new support towards some local franchises in emerging market, it is driven by Hamburg with our own R&D organization, our own marketing organization, and we don't give the right to everybody to do what they want. I mentioned 5 countries, and it's not just a coincidence.

We consider that countries like Brazil, India, China, Japan and the U.S. are different and that they deserve a specific treatment, and we expect the neighboring countries to follow exactly the same logic. So what I do in Brazil, I was last week in Brazil, Argentina and Chile. I can tell you that what we are doing in Brazil will be followed by Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Colombia and all the other countries.

The second element also is important. We are leveraging the global franchises, but accepting local execution. I gave the example of a sachet, which seems to be clearly not rocket science. But the fact that we are able to have the exact same formula with the exact same concentration of Thiamidol with different galenic is something new.

Yes, you have the product you know the dispenser in Europe, which is pretty premium. But you have a tube in India, you have a sachet in Thailand, and you have something even more premium in China with NIVEA Thiamidol. So we are much more, I would say, open in terms of Galenics, which are following -- which are using the same global platform.

And last but not least, in terms of communication, together with Publicis, which is our global agency on both NIVEA, Eucerin and Hansaplast, we have created some specific hubs in specific countries and those 5 countries I were mentioning, where we have the global marketing team and the Publicis team working together in order to be sure that what we are doing locally is also consistent with the global look and feel of the brand and the way we want to push forward our initiatives.

So it's clearly more freedom. It's also more ability to the countries to test new ideas, but it is clearly control. We don't want to come back to the kind of food salad we had in the past with so many different look and feels and different executions.

Thanks, Fulvio. And the next one is Fon Udomsilpa from RBC.

Just a few questions on NIVEA Body Care, please. So you gave color on regional performance for body care, but could you confirm the market share momentum for NIVEA Body Care globally? And tying to that, with the early results you've seen on the rebalancing strategy, momentum in the Body Care in many markets improving and with the lower media costs that you mentioned, has your view towards investment in the body care category change?

Does improved momentum give you confidence in increasing investment for the rest of the year and how much flexibility to do so considering higher cost inflation in the second half?

I think I shared a few examples already in the call, and they are very important for us. It's the emerging market body. This is also the emerging market face and the European deodorants category. So they are products.

There are categories where we started the rebalancing in September. It's, I would say, easier in emerging markets because we have a lot of local franchises that we just had to revamp, and this is what we've been doing. And we see -- and this is really important for us, we saw clearly that we are gaining market share in those regions.

Globally, we have been gaining market share for the first time, if you look at the total NIVEA brand in January. And this was the first time we are gaining market share on NIVEA global since end of '24. So pretty good news. We are slightly down in February, but it's really, I mean, just a few base points.

So overall, we see clearly a dynamic which is positive, which is very positive for deodorants, as I mentioned, which is positive for body, which is not yet as positive as we expected on face care. So face care is clearly the category will push forward. There are some launches coming in affordable face care.

As I mentioned, I was last week in Brazil, we have a fantastic line called [ Facial, ] which has a 25% market share. We are revamping this line with new initiatives, new ingredients also, not only the one coming from Brazil, but also some very well-known ingredients. So all of that should materialize in the Q2, Q3. So hopefully, I will also get the same kind of growth figures in the months to come.

Thank you, Fon. Then the next one is Eno Tilly from Morgan Stanley.

The first one was on the NIVEA Epicelline launch. I'm just wondering if you're seeing any cannibalization in the Eucerin Epicelline product because just looking at the last couple of months, there seems to have been a bit of a slowdown in Eucerin in Europe.

And then on the second part, on the areas where you've seen improved sellout in NIVEA, could you just give any steer on the magnitude of the gross margin differential of the parts of NIVEA that are starting to perform better with the rebalancing strategy?

On your first question, absolutely 0 cannibalization. That's a very good news. It's particularly easy, I would say, in Europe because we are not sold in the same retail environment. You find NIVEA Epicelline in mass market, you find Eucerin Epicelline pharmacies. But even in regions and partly the case for the U.K., but also for emerging markets where we are sold in the same drugstores, we have absolutely 0 effect on the sellout.

Epicelline is really doing extremely well on Eucerin. We are also adding new SKUs. We are enlarging the routine, so coming with a day and night product. And NIVEA Epicelline also will benefit also from the same kind of addition. What is great is I mentioned that in the call that the repurchase rates are absolutely amazing for NIVEA. We are reaching level between 35% and 48% depending on the countries, which is even above Eucerin, which is also more expensive. So we feel pretty safe with both products.

You have also to remember that we decided also not to launch NIVEA Epicelline everywhere. So for example, it's clearly a brand which is skewed towards Europe. We didn't launch NIVEA Epicelline in countries like Mexico and Brazil because it's too expensive. So we obviously -- this is -- the field is totally open for Eucerin, and this is also where we are reaching very, very high level of net sales market share and repurchase.

On the second question, Astrid?

Yes. So gross margin, as you can imagine, across our various categories is quite different subcategory by subcategory and tends to be obviously quite a bit lower on our personal categories than our skin care categories.

That said, when we're looking at what we call margin 2, so the margin, including also our marketing spend, we see a much more even picture. And in fact, there our face care business has some of the lowest margin too. So as we are rebalancing that, we can manage this margin to pool and thereby managing our profitability.

Thank you. Then we have 2 more questions. First, we have [ Annelie Payman ] from Thomson Reuters.

I have some questions on what oil price is the forecast based? And has the company taken any specific measures due to the higher gasoline or kerosene costs, for example, allowing more working from home, reducing business travel by plane. And last, do you have to pay any tariffs in the U.S.A.? And are you now claiming back them?

Thank you so much, [ Annelie ], for your question. So we are in the midst of working on our forecast. And as I mentioned, we have various scenarios that we're looking at. Obviously, one scenario with a quite high oil price than kind of a middle ground and one where it doesn't quite return to the previous place pre this crisis, but significantly lower than what we're seeing this minute, and we're working towards what that means then in terms of the actions.

What I can tell you that we anyhow have very much watched T&E and so on or travel cost over the last years, absolutely. We continue to want to save there. And that's what's also contributed to managing our overheads quite well over the last years and is a continued impact even in this year. In terms of your questions on tariffs, as we've mentioned in the previous calls, our impact from the U.S. tariffs has been quite limited. We are, in that sense, more lucky, I'll call it, given our footprint of producing quite a bit of our sales in the U.S. itself or in Mexico and thereby, the impact was low. Of course, we will still use what we can in terms of refunding and so on to offset the limited impact we have had.

Thank you, [ Annelie. ] And then the next one is Ulrike Dauer from Dow Jones.

I hope you can hear me properly.

Yes.

Okay. I have one question related to the Middle East. What would be the maximum impact on margin that could you envisage in your worst-case scenarios for the full year? And also in terms of retail related, so I better understand, what was the problem with the U.S. department stores?

And you mentioned delays of innovations getting in stores. Is that related -- could that threaten your innovation timing this year?

On the Middle East, Ulrike, we are not sharing a max impact because to be honest, we really want to manage that impact. And again, it can have a substantial impact on our cost, which we will try to find measures to obviously offset. Given the size of our business in the Middle East, the direct impact will be quite low, but we know, obviously, this could lead to a much more global impact and then obviously have a much larger impact on us.

Department store. The issue on department store is sold. We -- I mean, it's public knowledge that axis Avenue was in a difficult situation, and we were not selling anything to Saks Avenue until we had an agreement on the other dues. Where they were still selling in store and they still had some product they could sell, but we are not selling to them. And this is now over.

We have a deal with them, and we are back absolutely back to normal. We are selling La Prairie and Chantecaille in each and every Saks store in the U.S. No issue on that.

Okay. And you mentioned the pricing discussions with European retailers. And at the same time that some innovations were not getting in the store or there was a delay between delivery and getting into the stores. Is that threatening or could that threaten somehow your innovation timing this year?

No. No, no. The only -- what happened regularly when we have some customer conflicts. And again, it's mostly about NIVEA, it's mostly about France and Germany. There is this kind of black mail that might delay some innovation, but that's normal business. Retailers are smart enough to bet on the right products. So we are not suffering from that. We are able to put the right product on shelf when we want them to be on shelf.

Thank you, Ulrike, and thank you, everyone. That was our last question. This concludes our conference call. Beiersdorf's next Investor Relations event will be the release of our half year results on August 5, 2026. We appreciate your interest in Beiersdorf, and look forward to seeing you back here again in the summer. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference has now concluded, and you may disconnect. Thank you for joining, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our full year 2025 results conference. I'm pleased to present an overview of our performance, together with Astrid, who will later provide a detailed financial review.

But before we begin, I want to touch on the situation in the Middle East. In situations like this, the safety of our employees and their families is our highest priority. Teams are in place in the regions to offer assistance and support on the ground, and we are in close communication with them.

Given the volatility of the situation, it is too early to assess any potential impact on our business. We hope for a peaceful solution soon.

Let me now turn to our full year 2025 results. 2025 was a year that demanded a lot from us. Economic and geopolitical uncertainties, shifting consumer behavior and continued trade disruptions negatively affected market dynamics. Skin care market growth slowed to levels not seen in recent history, with particularly strong effects in the emerging markets region.

These conditions shaped and challenge our performance more than anticipated at the start of the year. Even so, we continue to make progress in several important areas and where we fell short, we took immediate action. At the same time, 2025 showed that the core elements of our strategy remain effective.

Our focus on science-based innovation, our global footprint and expansion into new markets, our culture of care and responsibility. This provided important stability throughout the year. In a challenging market environment, we were able to maintain our position as the best-performing skin care company globally for the third year in a row.

Once again, our Derma business was an undisputed success, driven by innovation, white space expansion and strong scientific credibility. La Prairie showed initial signs of improvement towards the end of the year, but the recovery remains fragile in a volatile luxury market and disruptions in the retail landscape negatively impact Q1 2026. And while our skin care focus strategy has delivered on many fronts, the most recent performance of NIVEA requires a strategic rebalancing.

We have taken decisive actions, laying the foundation for restoring momentum and returning our business to a more attractive and profitable growth trajectory. In 2025, the global skin care market slowed significantly, decelerating from mid-single-digit growth in 2024 to around 1.5% to 2%. This slowdown intensified as the year progressed and was particularly visible in regions that have driven strong growth in previous years, including Eastern Europe and emerging markets.

Pricing normalized after inflation-driven increases, geopolitical tensions influenced consumer sentiment and consumers became more cautious and increasingly selective in their routines. While Beiersdorf was affected by this market slowdown in 2025 and continues to feel its impact in 2026, we were still able to deliver solid growth in a significantly more challenging environment.

NIVEA ended the year with an organic sales growth of 0.9%, reflecting the impact of weaker market dynamics, a repositioning of our business in China as well as a back-end loaded innovation pipeline. Our Derma business delivered double-digit growth for the fifth year in a row, supported by breakthrough innovations and successful expansion into white spaces.

Our Health Care business continued to perform strongly, with close to double-digit growth, providing further evidence for our innovation-driven strategy. At La Prairie, organic sales declined by 4.5% in 2025. The performance improved quarter after quarter, but market conditions remain volatile. Tesa delivered moderate growth of almost 2%, driven by a strong performance in the electronics business.

Altogether, our skin care business grew by 3.7%, clearly ahead of the market. Once again, we outperformed our key competitors in this segment and remained the best-performing skin care company globally. This performance underscores the strength of our skin care expertise and its ability to deliver sustained outperformance.

Let's dive a little deeper into our Derma business. The undisputable success story of our Derma brands Eucerin and Aquaphor continued in 2025. Net sales reached a record EUR 1.5 billion, approaching close to 20% of consumer net sales, supported by continuous market share gains in a market growing only at low single-digit rates.

In Q4, facing a tough comparison with the Epicelline launch in the prior year, Derma still grew by nearly 10%. Derma growth in 2025 was broad-based across all regions. In Europe, our home market, Derma delivered an impressive 8.3% organic sales growth as Epicelline continued to drive the performance.

In North America, our largest Derma market, we grew by nearly 9%, an outstanding results driven by Face Care and Radiant Tone, our Thiamidol product in the U.S. In emerging markets, at 16.3% organic sales growth, Thailand, Mexico and Brazil were the key performance drivers.

In addition, India, domestic China and Japan were important white spaces that we expanded into. We also continue to outperform competition. This is a testament to the success of our science-based growth strategy of launching breakthrough innovations and successfully expanding into white space opportunities. Our innovation, our hero ingredients, Thiamidol and Epicelline are continuing their success stories.

Thiamidol, in its eighth year, continued to grow at double-digit rates. In early 2025, we launched it in the U.S. and later in the year, we brought this innovation to the domestic Chinese market. Epicelline, our anti-aging breakthrough ingredient continued its successful rollout across Europe and in emerging markets.

Our Derma innovation pipeline remains strong and sets industry standards. The entry into white spaces has unlocked new growth opportunities for industry. Let me share a few examples. In India, Eucerin's launch generated strong momentum. It was one of the first global dermocosmetics brands to enter the market and quickly became a top dermatologist recommendation.

In China, following regulatory approval, Eucerin's Thiamidol serum was launched on the domestic market and has become the #1 derma anti-pigment serum. And in Japan, we introduced Eucerin, marking another important milestone. As the world's third largest cosmetics market, expectations for quality and innovation are extremely high.

For this debut, we developed a premium anti-aging line, tailored to local consumer needs. Our Health Care brands, Hansaplast and Elastoplast delivered one of the strongest years in history with organic sales growth of more than 9%. The launch of our Second Skin Plus Protection plaster illustrates how we continue to drive innovation even in mature categories. This advanced technology offers superior healing and protection. It is setting a new benchmark in wound care and resonates strongly with consumers.

We continue to invest in research and development to reinforce our leadership in this segment with new innovations coming soon. NIVEA faced a particularly challenging year, navigating difficult market conditions and delivering growth below our initial expectations.

There were 3 key factors behind this development. First, the market slowdown was more severe than we expected. Second, we completed a comprehensive repositioning of our business in China, which temporarily affected our performance negatively. And third, most of our major innovations were scheduled for the second half of the year, which limited momentum early on.

In 2025, the mass market for skin and personal care products slowed significantly. The decline was most notable in emerging markets, where value growth rates more than half versus 2024 and further deteriorated throughout the year with volume growth turning negative in Q4. Skin and personal care were most effective than other beauty categories. This had a direct impact on NIVEA's performance over the year. The speed and scale of the market downturn exceeded our initial assumptions, requiring adjustment to our guidance during the year.

In China, we successfully completed a fundamental repositioning of NIVEA to prepare the brand for long-term success in this key market. Our strategy in China is clear. We aim to win through innovation in skin care. Therefore, we shift our focus away from price-sensitive personal care categories and partners, prioritizing premium skin care and accelerating growth through digital-first channels.

This involved streamlining our portfolio, optimizing distribution and tailoring innovation to local consumer needs. These measures were completed by the end of third quarter and NIVEA is now better positioned to compete in China's dynamic market and capture future opportunities.

Subsequently, we launched Thiamidol under NIVEA in the domestic Chinese market, leading to impressive double-digit growth rates of NIVEA in the fourth quarter. Our innovation pipeline in 2025 was strong but the major launches were concentrated late in the year. As a result, the contribution for innovation to our full year performance was limited, particularly in the first half.

The rollout of breakthrough innovations such as Epicelline began to contribute in the latter part of the year, especially in Q4. In 2025, we launched Epicelline on the mass market. Our NIVEA Cellular epigenetic serum represented the strongest NIVEA face care rollout in our history. The selling performance has been strong and in line with our expectations, reflecting robust retailer demand and effective distribution.

We also saw very good sellout momentum. The product quickly reached #1 positions at leading retailers and continues to be the #1 serum across Europe. Reliable data and consumer repurchase rate is not yet available, given the recent launch.

This will be a key metric to monitor in the coming months to assess long-term consumer loyalty and the sustained performance of Epicelline in the mass market. Our Luxury brand, La Prairie represents a smaller share of our business, but it remains a strategically important part of our portfolio. The full year remained below 2024 levels. But as we had expected, the business showed a sequential improvement quarter-over-quarter, growing plus 3.8% in Q4. This was mainly driven by more favorable deployments in China, particularly in e-commerce. At the same time, the luxury market remains highly volatile with persistent weakness in the U.S. and in travel retail markets.

Ongoing disruptions in the U.S. department store landscape as well as travel retail in China are expected to negatively impact our performance in the first year of 2026.

With that, let me hand over to Astrid to walk you through tesa and our financials.

Thank you, Vincent, and good morning from my side as well. Let me start with the performance of our tesa business. In 2025, tesa delivered organic sales growth of 1.8% in a challenging global economic environment, characterized by tariff disruptions and ongoing challenges in the automotive industry.

Within our industry segment, electronics was again the main growth driver, with particularly strong results in Greater China and Asia Pacific. The product ranges from mounting front and back modules, solutions for battery bonding and conductive tapes were further developed and converted into customer-specific solutions.

The automotive business closed the year broadly in line with the prior year. Ongoing volatility in Europe and North America continued to weigh on the performance, while China and Latin America delivered growth supported by successful customer projects. Printing and Packaging Solutions also recorded year-on-year growth.

The performance was driven by expanded activities in splicing tapes and flexographic printing, with notable contributions from North and Latin America and continued positive development in China.

Finally, the Consumer segment delivered growth despite a challenging market environment, especially in Europe. E-commerce showed strong year-on-year development and made a meaningful contribution to the overall result.

Let me now walk you through our 2025 financial performance. Overall, we delivered a stable performance in a challenging market environment with organic sales growth of 2.4%.

We also made further progress on our profitability. Our EBIT margin increased to 14.0%, up 10 basis points versus last year, reflecting continued cost discipline and ongoing operational improvements. Earnings per share increased to EUR 4.25, up 4.9% compared to 2024, driven by improvements in our profitability and our tax rate.

This outcome underlines the financial stability of our business in a year marked by significant external pressures. These results provide a strong foundation as we recalibrate our NIVEA strategy, continue to innovate and drive sustainable long-term growth.

Let's now turn to the segment level performance. In 2025, Beiersdorf Consumer business net sales grew to EUR 8.176 billion at an organic growth rate of 2.5%. Adverse foreign exchange effects, including a softer U.S. dollar resulted in a lower nominal growth of 0.02%.

Profitability improved with EBIT, excluding special factors, growing to EUR 1.108 billion, a 20 basis points margin increase driven by disciplined cost management despite cost pressures on our gross margin. Our tesa business recorded organic growth of 1.8% during the same period, closing the year with net sales of EUR 1.676 billion.

Due to unfavorable foreign exchange effects, nominal sales slightly declined by negative 0.7%. The EBIT margin, excluding special factors, was 16.1%, in line with our guidance.

Now let's take a closer look at our performance across the different regions. In Western Europe, we achieved robust organic sales growth of 1.8%, particularly in key markets like the U.K., Italy and Spain. As always, it is important to highlight that our luxury travel business is also included in this region and had a negative impact of nearly 100 basis points.

Our business in Eastern Europe declined by 2.3%, driven by softer markets and overexposure to personal care, retailer disruptions as well as intensified competition with local brands, particularly in our key market, Poland.

The Americas regions closed the year with sales growth of 3.1%. This good performance was largely attributable to the outstanding results of our Derma brands in the United States and in Canada at high single-digit growth rates as well as the continued strong growth of NIVEA in Canada.

At the same time, Latin America experienced a notable slowdown, particularly in the Personal Care segment. As a result, our softer NIVEA sales in key markets such as Brazil and Argentina, weighed on our overall regional performance, while Derma sales grew at double-digit rates.

The Africa, Asia, Australia region recorded 4.5% organic sales growth. India was the most important positive contributor to this growth next to Japan. Our NIVEA repositioning activities in China negatively impacted this region in the first 9 months of 2025.

Following the successful completion of our repositioning activities, China contributed significantly to increasing the region's organic sales growth to 9.3% in the fourth quarter.

Now let's take a look at the development of our consumer gross margin. Our Consumer gross margin decreased by 70 basis points year-on-year from 61.0% in 2024 to 60.3% in 2025. Pricing contributed positively, adding 30 basis points, underscoring the continued strength of our brands and our ability to partly offset cost inflation despite a more moderate pricing environment. Increased costs driven by higher raw material prices and limited volume growth weighed on our gross margin.

Mix effects positively contributed 40 basis points, primarily driven by the continued outperformance of our Derma business. Lastly, unfavorable foreign exchange effects contributed minus 50 basis points.

Let me conclude our financial overview by highlighting the key elements of our group income statement for the year. Our group's net sales grew slightly to EUR 9.852 billion in 2025. Our group gross margin declined to 57.7% with tesa experiencing similar cost and foreign exchange pressures as our consumer business.

Our marketing and selling expenses remained roughly at the previous year's level, reflecting a slight increase in the Consumer and a slight decrease in the tesa business. We continue to drive strong support for our brands with consumer-facing activities, which we were able to increase in 2025, while also driving effectiveness and efficiency of our marketing expense. As in previous years, we have taken the decision to continue to increase our R&D spending, reflecting a strong commitment to fostering breakthrough innovations that will shape our future.

At the same time, we maintained a disciplined approach to our general and administrative costs, leading to a reduction of these expenses in 2025. Our EBIT, excluding special factors, grew to EUR 1.378 billion, a 10 basis points EBIT margin increase in line with our guidance. Lower special factors as well as an improved effective tax rate were additional drivers to increase our profit after tax to EUR 955 million or EUR 4.25 per share, a EUR 0.20 increase compared to 2024.

Back to you, Vincent.

Thank you, Astrid. After 5 years in our roles, this is the right moment to take a closer look at what has driven our performance and how effective our strategy has been. Over the past 5 years, we increased net sales by almost 30%, reaching a level of EUR 9.9 billion in 2025.

Despite the slowdown in 2025, we continue to be the best-performing skin care company, outgrowing our key competitors in this important category. EBIT, excluding special factors, also improved significantly by almost 40%, a clear proof of our commitment to profitable growth.

Our top line outperformance was fueled by 3 key pillars: First, breakthrough innovations. Science-based research and development are at the heart of what we do. Second, successful expansion into white spaces, both in terms of categories and markets. And third, a strong and growing e-commerce business. We have been growing double digit in e-commerce for more than 5 years in a row and gaining market share.

In 2025, we generated 17% of our net sales online. Let's start with innovation. One of the clearest examples is Thiamidol. This highly effective ingredient has been cascaded across our brands and markets, the latest additions being Chantecaille as well as the U.S. and China.

Since I started at Beiersdorf, we have turned the Thiamidol franchise into a EUR 500 million business. We are continuing to grow double digit and are gaining market share again, supported by high recognition of the ingredient in the scientific community.

Thiamidol was validated by a scientific consensus of 10 world-leading dermatologists as the only dermocosmetics solution for the management of hyperpigmentation. Another breakthrough innovation is Epicelline, a game changer in anti-age, and while everybody speaks about longevity, our epigenetics technology already provides a solution. After its success in the Derma segment, we launched Epicelline to the mass market through NIVEA. This reflects the same principle as Thiamidol, developing highly effective ingredients based on strong science and systematically making them accessible across brands and markets. Microbiome research at S-Biomedic is the next frontier of our innovation pipeline. What started as a venture capital investment and R&D partnership several years ago has turned into the development of a breakthrough microbiome innovation for acne-prone skin.

We developed PROBIOM8 to correct blemishes from acne-prone skin using the first-ever skin-native probiotics. With significant results proven in clinical studies, it is planned to be launched under Eucerin DERMOPURE CLINICAL in the second half of this year. Evaluated by hundreds of dermatologists and tested on thousands of consumers, PROBIOM8 significantly improves acne-prone skin with no side effects.

More to come later this year, stay tuned. Turning to the second pillar of our strategy, expansion into white spaces. We have focused on the defined set of key markets and made strong progress in the U.S., Brazil, India, China and Japan.

Let me briefly zoom in on the U.S., Brazil and India. In all 3 markets, our white space strategy has translated into measurable progress. In the U.S., we launched Eucerin Sun followed by Eucerin Face and introduced Thiamidol in 2025. This strengthened our foothold in one of the world's most competitive dermatological skin care markets. Our Consumer business in North America has reached EUR 1 billion. In Brazil, Eucerin advanced from a niche positioning to one of the leading players in the market. Within just 5 years, we managed to move from #15 in the market to a #4 position.

And India remains a clear success story for us. While we been present in India with NIVEA and our Health Care business for a long time, we managed to more than double our business within the last 5 years. This was driven by outstanding performance of NIVEA as well as the launch of our full skin care portfolio, including Eucerin, La Prairie and Chantecaille.

Our Derma business has fully delivered on our strategy. Since 2021, we almost doubled our business, reaching sales of EUR 1.5 billion in 2025. Even in the slowing Derma market last year, our Eucerin and Aquaphor brands demonstrated double-digit growth. Also, NIVEA, the largest skin care brand in the world grew by an impressive 34% over the last 5 years.

We succeeded in regaining credibility in face care through Thiamidol and Epicelline. However, the required investment has not allowed us to maintain the right advertising focus on other categories. And through our exclusive global innovation program, we lost some momentum on core local ranges in some key countries. As a result, we were not able to outperform the market to the same extent as in prior years, and NIVEA's growth slowed significantly in 2025.

We have, therefore, taken decisive action to recalibrate our strategy for NIVEA to restore the brand's growth trajectory, which is a key priority for '26 and 2027. What exactly does this recalibration mean?

We are rebalancing our NIVEA strategy along 3 pillars. First, we are broadening our focus by strengthening categories next to face care, such as deodorants and body care. So going next to major global franchises, we'll support important local product lines by giving key markets such as China, the U.S., India, Japan and Brazil, greater flexibility in local execution.

And third, we are putting more effort behind accessible face care products. Let me dive a little deeper into each of the pillars. NIVEA already has a strong foundation in categories such as deodorant and body care. Building on this base, we are shifting parts of our investment in R&D, marketing and new launches in these categories. By broadening our range, we are strengthening NIVEA's position across a wider set of segments and creating additional growth opportunities. In recent years, NIVEA focused strongly on global launches and centralized campaigns.

Going forward, we'll continue to rely on growth innovation platforms and hero ingredients as a foundation, but give local teams greater freedom to tailor launches, products and marketing to local needs and push key local franchises. One example is LUMINOUS Glow, a successful innovation for Emerging Markets. Another one is NIVEA Facial, a key face care line in Brazil that we launched in other markets as well.

Lastly, we rebalance the focus also to popular face care products at a more accessible price range next to the premium face care lines like LUMINOUS and Epicelline. NIVEA remains an iconic yet accessible brand. Our portfolio deliberately spans from everyday essentials to premium innovations.

And as you know, the vast majority of our portfolio is priced at very accessible levels. The rebalancing of the NIVEA is underway. In the fourth quarter of 2025, we initiated a shift in our advertising and promotional spending, reallocating resources to support a broader range of categories and local initiatives.

This marked the first step in the rebalancing process. In 2026 and beyond, we are implementing a set of pipeline measures to strengthen our innovation road map. This includes breakthrough ingredient line extension on the one hand, and broader launches across categories on the other. We are fostering fast-track execution of innovation to meet current trends, and allowing for certain regional innovation tailored to local consumer needs.

These measures will take some time to show their full impact. We are confident in our ability to return NIVEA to sustain growth, and will report on our progress in each of the coming quarters. So let me turn to the outlook for our business. We own and manage some of the most iconic skin care brands in the world and operate in the highly attractive skin care market, the largest category in the beauty space.

Over decades, this market has demonstrated strong resilience and a consistent ability to recover within 1 or 2 years after periods of slowdown or decline. Our well-established and trusted brands together with our Win With Care strategy, provide a strong foundation to navigate the current market environment and to deliver sustained long-term growth.

Let us now look at our midterm guidance. In an evolving market environment, our focus remains firmly on outperforming the market. We'll do so by continuing to expand into white spaces, launching breakthrough innovations and responding dynamically to changing market conditions. A key priority will be to return NIVEA to an elevated growth trajectory through a clear action plan and targeted measures as part of our strategic rebalancing.

On top of that, the use of our cash position to pursue inorganic growth opportunities remains an important element of our strategy and should provide additional upside. We also remain committed to profitable growth in the midterm, which translates into growing EBIT at least as fast as net sales. We are convinced of the continued EBIT margin expansion potential for our business.

In light of the global market dynamics, we will not quote a specific number. We'll have to be flexible to respond to market conditions and will not sacrifice long-term value creation opportunities for short-term margin gains. While the use of cash for inorganic growth remains a core element of our capital allocation strategy, we have also strengthened our commitment to returning cash to shareholders. This is reflected in enhanced cash distribution through share buybacks and dividends.

As a next step within this framework, we are continuing to strengthen shareholder returns. The Executive and Supervisory Boards of Beiersdorf propose that the dividend for the 2025 financial year is confirmed at EUR 1 per share. The proposal will be submitted to the Annual General Meeting on April 23. Following the successful share buyback programs in 2024 and 2025, Beiersdorf will initiate a further share buyback program valued at up to EUR 750 million over a period of 2 years.

While we remain very confident in our profitable growth prospects over the mid and long term, it is important to acknowledge that market dynamics has not improved at the start of this year. We saw a clear slowdown over the course of last year, and the softer environment has continued into early 2026 without clear signs of a near-term recovery. And while we have initiated our NIVEA rebalancing strategy, the measures will take some time to become fully visible. In parallel, the luxury skin care market remains volatile.

And while improvements were visible in China in 2025, severe disruptions in the U.S. department store landscape and travel retail in China negatively impact the current performance. We view these disruptions, especially in China, travel retail, as temporarily and not a full reflection of the underlying consumer demand. Nevertheless, they will have a noticeable negative effect on our Q1 luxury performance.

Let us turn to our guidance for 2026. Against a continued challenging and volatile market environment, we expect sales to be flat to slightly growing organically across our business segments. This applies to both the Consumer and tesa segments as well as at group level. We still expect to be able to outperform the market as demonstrated in previous years.

The first quarter of 2026 is expected to land below this range at a low single-digit negative organic growth rate. While Derma is expecting to deliver another strong quarter, NIVEA's innovation momentum that positively affected Q4 2025 is less impactful this quarter. In addition, the disruptions in U.S. retail and China travel retail landscape we put significant pressure on the luxury brands in Q1.

On profitability, we expect the EBIT margin, excluding special factors in Consumer, tesa and for the group to be coming slightly below the 2025 level. This is driven by raw material cost increases, unfavorable FX and only limited fixed cost leverage on gross margin. At the same time, we'll not decrease our marketing spend proportionally as we want to ensure sufficient investment behind our brands.

This concludes our full presentation, and we are looking forward to your questions. Over to you, Christopher, for the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And we will start with Callum Elliott of Bernstein.

Hopefully, you can hear me. So my first question is on the strategic rebalance, specifically, the increased support and spending that you were talking about behind deodorants, body care, local product lines. Is that incrementing -- incremental spending vessel or just a reallocation of resources away from face care? And can you talk a bit more about when you expect to see the benefits of some of that rebalance?

And then my second question, please, is on cash conversion. You guys have the weakest cash conversion of all large cap global consumer staples companies. and it gets worse this year in 2025. I understand that there's part of this driven by strategic decisions around CapEx, et cetera, but on more executional pieces like working capital, again, we see you getting worse this year, working capital now over 10% of sales. So my question probably more for Astrid, is this cash conversion a strategic focus for you at all? And if yes, when should we expect to see improvement? And if no, why not?

Thank you, Callum. So I will take the first question. Obviously, the focus that we had on premium face care was very expensive in media. This is by far the most expensive skin care category. So what we are doing is simply to reallocate part of the spendings from premium face care into body and deo and affordable skin care. The good news is that on those categories, they are much less media intensive. So we can really develop strongly those businesses with an amount of working media and amount of promotion, which is much below what we are currently spending on the NIVEA premium face care.

Second question?

Yes. So Callum, to your question related to cash conversion, yes, it was not where we were hoping it to be this last year. There were some impacts that were related to some aging tax payment that we've made to stop the clock there, but are absolutely looking to recover.

We also had, obviously, given the very backloaded Q4, some impact, obviously, on working capital. We also had some higher inventory than we would have liked to, but we are looking to improve that. And I can promise you that it is a focus for us as a company, and we're looking to make progress in 2026.

And then the next one on the line is Celine Pannuti of JPMorgan.

So I wanted to first come back on the guidance for the year. Low single-digit negative, you said for Q1. So you mentioned the impact from the department store and travel retail. Is it possible to give us a bit of an idea of how much double-digit down will La Prairie be in Q1? And likewise, NIVEA, I would expect still it to be as well negative. Would that be the case in Q1? And does it mean that the rest of the year, you expect it to be up low single digits or thereabout? And how do we think about this when you have a tough comp in the second half?

My second question is on NIVEA, because Vincent, you are recalibrating the strategy. I was nevertheless surprised that we don't get more innovation benefit. You said that the innovation benefit in '25 was really hitting at Q4. And why don't we get that innovation benefit in H1? I appreciate you don't have the data from the repurchase rate, but like it feels like the innovation doesn't have a lasting impact. So what visibility do you have on this? And if you could also explain the -- you give more freedom to local markets to adapt. I understood when you came 4, 5 years ago that probably there was too much freedom. So can you come back and explain what's different when -- in the recalibration you're making? Sorry for long questions.

Thank you, Celine. On your first question on the Q1 2026, I think we are -- obviously, we are very optimistic regarding Derma, and this is clearly the driving force of Beiersdorf. It has been, it will be. On NIVEA and La Prairie, we have 2 different phenomena. On NIVEA first, Q4 was clearly a quarter of selling because we have tesa, as you remember. From September, this is where we had most of the innovation.

So we have done a good quarter with NIVEA, but now we have to sell out the innovation. We don't have new selling innovation coming in Q1, it's more Q2. So it's about absorbing the volumes, being sure that we drive the sellout. The good news that the first market share is positive. That's encouraging, but this is what will happen in the Q1.

On La Prairie, it's a bit specific. We are clearly seeing over the year a progress. The retail sales, the sellout is improving. We are even growing double digit in China. We are improving our figures in the U.S., growing high single digits in Europe, but we are hit by 2 phenomenas, which are not hitting only La Prairie, and you've seen that in the course of our competitors. On the one hand, the U.S. department store environment is difficult with one key retailer being on Chapter 11.

And in China, there was a change of travel retail operators of the 2 airports of Beijing and Shanghai Sunrise, which obviously has an impact on the volumes because they are -- they didn't buy in December and the new trade -- travel retail operators will buy more at the end of the quarter, beginning of Q2. So that has an impact on the selling figures of the Q1. And to give you -- to quantify that, it will be a double-digit loss, but hopefully, after looking at the good health of the sellout, we'll do a better job.

On your question on NIVEA, the recalibration in fact, is clearly taking place in September. It started by the launch of the Derma Control deodorants together with Epicelline. And then it's coming with new launches, new initiatives, which will hit the shelves starting in Q2, but more surely in H2. When you look at the launches we did in the last quarter, we are very happy with Epicelline. Epicelline is -- we said that already, but it's by far the best ever launch of NIVEA in face care.

We went immediately to a position of being the #1 serum in Europe, very, very important launch for us. We have seen the sell-in. We have seen the sellout. We are just waiting for repurchase rate. But as you know, we know pretty well the formula, because it's very close to what we launched in -- on Eucerin. Derma Control is starting well, it's a good figures in Europe. We are gaining market share in deodorants, which is something we didn't have since a long time.

So we hope to see those 2 launches developing well in Q1 and Q2. And we have also a lot of other opportunities, other launches, other activities coming in the second quarter. So yes, we'll see clearly the digestion of the selling of Q4 into Q1 and this development of the sellout. And then we should enter into a more positive dynamics, having still in mind, and this is also one of the main reason of the guidance that we are working on the skin care market, which is at 1% growth. So that's also the big change versus what we had in the past years. We are clearly in a slowing market, and this is impacting, obviously, a brand like NIVEA, which is very large, which is in multiple categories.

On your last question, Freedom, in a frame, this is the way we call it. You're absolutely right. In fact, when I took over as a CEO, I saw a NIVEA landscape, which was purely local. And it's not that it was working because we had a lot of small things in the countries, but none of them being really impactful. So I move it to a direction, which was a bit extreme, which was to globalize NIVEA. So it was successful, as I said, on franchises like LUMINOUS, Thiamidol and Epicelline, but it also was made at the expense of some strong local franchises.

We mentioned Facial in Brazil, which used to be, in fact, the basis of NIVEA skin care in some key countries. So we are not only reassessing those local franchisees as key priorities and coming with new launches. But also, we are ensuring that the countries can play with them. It's about influencers, for example, it's about specific in-store activities. It's about also advertising campaigns. We'll have some global campaigns, but we'll have also some local campaigns in China, in Japan, in India, in Brazil, in the U.S. that we believe will be better at recruiting new consumers. So that's this rebalancing. We are not back to the history, but we are just rebalancing versus the globalization that took place since 2021.

The next one is Warren Ackerman of Barclays.

It's Warren Ackerman here at Barclays. So one operational question and one strategic. The operational one is really -- can you maybe dive into Eastern Europe? I know it's been weak all year, but it really lurched down in Q4. I think it was down like 7% organically, well below consensus. So -- and I know you've talked about Poland and other places. But can you maybe kind of slightly deeper dive into what actually is going on in Eastern Europe? And is that one of the key reasons why the guide is so low for 2026? What is your expectation for Eastern Europe for this year? Are you seeing kind of delisting? Is it just big share losses? What's happening in Eastern Europe?

And then the second one is strategic. I think on the wires, Vincent, you say that M&A is a top priority. I think the quote is we're looking at every skin care opportunity that comes to market. Just a bit surprised on that comment, given you're in the middle of a big repositioning of NIVEA, you've got soft skin care market to deal with. Is this the right time to be looking at deals, where you've got so much going on, on the base business and also when perhaps some of the results from Coppertone and Chantecaille haven't been the best. Just interested in the timing of that comment and what's behind it?

Thank you so much. On your first question, yes, we had a difficult year in the Eastern Europe, and it used to be a growth driver for the Consumer division. First, the big thing is that the market went down from something that used to be 15% growth to flat 2%, 3%, which was, in fact, the results also of some consumer -- lack of consumer confidence. And the fact also that over the years, we all have now to increase prices due to increase of cost of goods.

So there was clearly an issue of consumer confidence. We had also a specific issue in the fact that we're over-indexed in personal care in these markets. We are pretty small in skin care. We are more in personal care. And in deodorants, we were hit by a lack of new products, but also a lack of investment.

And there is also a dynamic which is very interesting. There is a strong development of local brands. Korean brands, for example, which is obviously a challenge for us. So we have to come back with new products, new initiatives. We had also some difficult discussion with some retailers indeed. The good news is that we are back to very good discussions with retailers, and we have some good plans in place. We have also a lot of new launches, and I mentioned this affordable face care. This is one of the regions where we'll be clearly investing in affordable face care.

And last but not least, we believe also that some of the activities we are putting in place, for example, influencers, will help us also regaining market share again, Korean brands. So it's not yet the light at the end of the tunnel, but we feel more positive about Eastern Europe than we were in 2025.

On your second question, yes, we are looking at every acquisition. We are obviously looking at businesses that we could improve. This is why we will clearly not buy companies in places where we have no muscles, no know-how. We have to look at that. We have, as you know, a pretty small portfolio. We have also learned. We -- I think the M&A muscle has developed over time. We did a much better job with that Chantecaille than we did with Coppertone. Chantecaille is one of the big hopes of 2026. We fixed the basics. We have also a new team in place. So I believe we have a kind of knowledge or learning curve that is making us more able to integrate and to make good businesses.

So when they will come, we look at them, we might make an offer. We might not make an offer because every time we look at really at the price, but we need to be clearly looking at opportunities because today, we have a portfolio which is much too small.

And the next question is from Joffrey Bellicha Meller of Bank of America.

The first question is on the Chinese growth component in the fourth quarter. I was just wondering if you could explain a little bit more of the contribution from Thiamidol in the country and whether you had seen any cannibalization effects from your cross-border e-commerce sales previously. More importantly, I guess on China, thinking about 2026, you obviously have an easy base or an easy comp due to the rebalancing act you've performed last year. But I really wanted to understand whether you saw any legs to the growth that you saw in 4Q? And maybe I'll leave it at that on the Chinese piece.

The second element that I wanted to ask, maybe this is more for Astrid, but with this affordable face care line that you want to launch, what will be the impact on mix for the gross margin in 2026? And also in the press release, in that regard, you mentioned that the NIVEA rebalancing was going to last into 2027 as well. So is there any way of guiding us or helping us understand where we could land in terms of margins on EBIT for 2027?

Thank you, Joffrey. On China, I must say that we feel pretty positive. If you look at the different brands of the portfolio. I will start with La Prairie. La Prairie, we grew double digits, not only on e-commerce, but also on brick-and-mortar. We are gaining market share. So we are pretty positive about the development of China.

And I think some of the new products we are launching in the coming months will make our business on La Prairie business even better. We have also the launch of Chantecaille, which started at the end of the year, which is pretty promising. It's more e-commerce than brick-and-mortar, but this is clearly an opportunity for us. And then there is a Thiamidol effect that we took us 12 years to get the registration of Thiamidol. We started to launch Thiamidol and Eucerin, and we are extremely, extremely happy with the results.

Immediately, the serum, the anti-pigment serum became the #1 anti-pigment serum online in the market. And we are even the #2 anti-pigment brand online. So clearly, outstanding results on Eucerin. We are coming also with new products, the beauty of the Thiamidol story is that it comes with a lot of new SKUs. So I clearly believe that on Eucerin, we have found our way and China will become one of the top countries in the next future.

On NIVEA, we started late. We started only at the end of the year in November, December. The figures are good. But I want to be not overpromising. We have still some work to do. As you remember, we are transforming a cheap offline personal care brand into premium online face care brand. It has obviously -- it is a stretch. We have some good launches. We have some good activities. But overall, I think we'll have a good quarter 1, and we'll have a good year on all the brands of Beiersdorf in China.

And then your question on the affordable face care and the impact on mix as well as your question on EBIT. So look, the affordable face care line still tends to be accretive to our overall margin, especially also because the A&P spend behind it is not quite as strong as in our premium range, so it's still accretive.

Additionally, we continue to believe that we will grow our Derma business quite strongly, which will have a positive impact on our margin and our mix. Of course, there is then the investment behind other lines such deo and body, which will partly offset that. We're looking to still have a slightly positive or a balanced impact on margin and on the mix. So let's see.

In terms of 2027 EBIT, what we are saying for the midterm is that we look to continue to drive profitable growth. We are not at this time committing to a specific EBIT increase.

The next question is from Jeremy Fialko of HSBC.

Look, when we take the '26 guidance in aggregate, it obviously implies a worse performance for Consumer relative to 2026. So perhaps you could kind of give us a little bit more color from a sort of a brand standpoint, what you're expecting over the year? For example, do you think that NIVEA can grow in the year? Or is the repositioning and the work you need to do going to mean that it will be negative?

And then I guess maybe the second question is if we can just go a little bit deeper down into some of the drivers of the growth that you'd expect to see from NIVEA? And what I'd be interested to hear your comments on the things such as the drag you're likely to see on Personal Care, and whether there's going to be any sort of negative pricing effect on NIVEA, if there are certain things that you need to reposition or whether you think that the brand volumes actually can be positive? So those are my 2 questions.

Thank you so much, Jerry. On the guidance, we clearly have built the guidance on what we know and not what we hope. So when I look at what we know, we know that the skin care market has slowed down, used to be 7% last year. It's today more into the 1%, even negative in emerging market in volume.

So that's something we have to take into account, which is particularly important when you deal with NIVEA. It is also confirmed by the performance of some competitors. You saw the #1 skin care company delivering close to 0% growth. So we know it's a difficult moment for skin care. That we know.

The second thing we know, which is obvious, we know that Derma will continue to overperform. We are extremely optimistic with Derma. We have some big launches, and we mentioned and we'll talk about that later at the launch of Activia. We have also some big things coming at the end of the year. So more to come, but Derma is more than ever the growth engine that we know. We know also that I mentioned that, the effect of Sunrise and also the U.S. retail department store environment is causing us a big decrease in Q1. So obviously, we'll have to make it up in the next 9 months, which means that the performance of La Prairie won't be in line with the good performance we see in the sellout.

And last but not least, something we don't know yet. We don't know yet when the recalibration of NIVEA will show its effect. We are happy to see that the January market share is positive. That's something we didn't experience since a long time. So that's a first very, very good sign. We know also that the new products are coming in the second semester that we are also having this activation of local franchises in the second quarter. So we will -- clearly, we are aiming at having a positive NIVEA in 2026. But clearly, the market dynamics will pay a role. The appeal of our new products and new advertising campaign will have a role, and this is something we'll monitor. And of course, we'll update you every quarter.

On the second element, NIVEA Personal Care, it's a complicated environment because we have clearly a good proposal in Europe, and this is why we were happy to see some market share gain in Europe with the launch of Derma Control. So we are even in a pretty good position and #1 in many countries.

It's a bit more difficult in emerging markets. We have clearly some markets which are collapsing, was the case of Brazil. We know also that we have to improve the value of our deliveries in the sense that we cannot increase prices, but we have to increase profitability in order to invest. So there is some value management to engage in. So we are working on that. We have not yet -- we have not yet found the perfect recipe for emerging markets, but this is clearly a priority.

And also here, what is interesting, we have big, big local franchises in Latin America, in Thailand. So we will also leverage those franchises, which have a pretty strong appeal locally, and that will complement the global launches like Derma Control and the relaunch of Black & White. So we don't need to decrease prices. You have to remember that NIVEA is cheap. It's between EUR 2 and EUR 10. Only 2 products are more expensive. This is LUMINOUS serum and this is Epicelline. So we have a good price, but clearly, we have to find the good activities in the country to regain momentum.

So the next one is David Hayes of Jefferies.

So a couple for me. Just following up on the sort of volume mix pricing dynamics. Can you give us a sense of what the contributions will be across those 3 elements in that sort of flattish guide for 2026 in Consumer? And I may have missed it, but can you give us that for retrospectively 2025?

And then secondly, on the margin reconciliation. Is there kind of an accelerated cost save intention program within the margin guidance? I'm just trying to reconcile the moving parts again, given marketing spend seems to be at least equal, you've got this FX headwind dynamic. I'm just trying to understand what the offsets are to that, that the margin would still be relatively flat.

And maybe on the FX, 50 basis point headwind last year. Is it possible given where we are today on rates, et cetera, to give a sense of the quantum of the FX headwind in 2026 as it stands?

I think Astrid will take both questions.

In terms of this year's growth, 2026, we do see primarily volume growth from what we are expecting at the moment, much, much less pricing growth, as we've already seen. Again, from a mix perspective, we do see a balance where we continue to drive certain parts of our business, particularly Derma, but also face care and so on, that should be accretive to our margins.

And then we will see, obviously, and hopefully acceleration of our deo business, which will be partly offsetting, but hopefully really contributing to that volume growth. In terms of, I'll call it, cost discipline, I think we have worked the last years and plan to continue to do that, to really ensure that in the end, when we're thinking about our overheads, we invest in the strategic areas of our business, but then look to continue to keep all other costs really under control and even reduce.

You would have seen that we've made some progress there. And yes, FX headwinds has obviously been quite significant in the last year. We have had some help, obviously, from what we've hedged into the new year. That's a bit less, unfortunately, of an impact.

We do see that negative on our results. Let's see where it ends up being. It's really very uncertain right now to really give you a precise number. We will monitor that and make sure that obviously, we find ways to offset the impact there.

The next one is Guillaume Delmas of UBS.

Two questions for me, please. One on NIVEA and one on La Prairie. On NIVEA first and the innovation program for 2026. I think at the same time last year, you were showing us that 47% of the brand would be launched or relaunched in 2025. So wondering how does 2026 compare to that 47% level of 2025? Should we expect a similar magnitude or even a further step up?

And still on the innovation topics for NIVEA, I mean you announced this morning, you're launching -- you will be launching accessible face care propositions. At the same time, you've also introduced very premium products such as Epicelline. So how do you ensure that you do not overstretch too much the NIVEA brand? And then my second question on La Prairie. I mean, brand had an encouraging end to '25. But yet, if I look at the annual turnover of La Prairie, it's now nearly 30% smaller than what it was in 2022. So you indicated the Q1 softness, but where does the brand go from here? I mean do you think it needs some adjustments to its strategy? Or you're confident that it will be back to positive growth territory in 2026? And that you can go back to the 2022 sales level in not-too-distant future?

Thank you, Guillaume, for your question. On your first question, you're right, we had planned to do, 40% of our portfolio is supposed to be relaunched, was relaunched in 2025. It is true also that most of the relaunches were based on some sustainability changes. So it was not really visible in some cases by consumers.

So we will -- and we have also made some changes that was what required a lot of investment and did not really deliver additional sellout. So 2026 will be a bit wiser in terms of relaunches. We have some launches and they will be hitting the shelf in Q2 and Q3 mostly.

And in terms of relaunches, will come really when we come with a true added value. For example, we are relaunching Black & White deo with a bit formula. We're also launching our sun care line. So clearly, choosing the areas where R&D can provide a visible benefit to consumers, and we'll do that in the, as I said, mostly from April.

On the -- your question on accessible face care and premium face care is absolutely right. But I would say there are 3 cases. And there are the cases where we can do both. I think Europe is obvious. We have a brand, which is so large and so wide that it is not a problem, and you just have to visit a store to have LUMINOUS and Epicelline around EUR 20 and have an accessible Q10 at EUR 10 and Essential at EUR 2. So we have to find a way to support both. Most of them -- some of them are media-driven, other are more promotional-driven, some of them are influencer-driven. So we'll be able to do that.

In emerging markets, it's a bit different. There are countries, for example, I was mentioning Brazil, where we are not launching Epicelline because we believe that the consumer price of Epicelline is too high, then here in Brazil, the focus will be clearly facial will come with new innovation in the second semester and also a big launch in 2027.

So facial will be the absolute priority for the skin care business, the face care business of Brazil. And other emerging market where we will privilege on the contrary, the premium face care offer, but using some specific elements. For example, you might have seen the pictures. We are launching LUMINOUS in Thailand, in a sachet. So we have the most premium of NIVEA, this is Thiamidol, but we use also the right way to each consumer and to be sure that consumers are purchasing the LUMINOUS in their stores.

On your question about La Prairie, you're absolutely right in your statement. I think the new strategy that we are putting in place is starting to pay off. And again, if I eliminate this one-off effect of our Q1, it's about coming with a more affordable proposal. And when I talk affordable, this is obviously something which is more around EUR 300.

We tried that already with some smaller sizes of existing franchises and Skin Caviar, for example. We are coming soon with a new franchise, which will be priced between EUR 150 and EUR 300, which will allow us to convince to recruit younger consumers, which obviously could be a bit reluctant, putting EUR 1,000 in a cream of La Prairie.

The second element where we are clearly accelerating e-commerce. We are already pretty good in China. I was mentioning the successive double-digit growth that we have since 5 years in e-commerce, Tmall, JD, and TikTok, but we are also becoming much more ambitious in the rest of the world. We are launching next month, for example, La Prairie on Amazon in the U.S. That's something which is a premier, and we are working with Amazon to be sure that the equity of the brand will be respected.

We have other plans also like that, which we lose to be more accessible, especially in the world where you see clearly that department stores are losing ground and the e-commerce is taking over. So the strategy is starting to work. Again, China is a good example. Much more to do. So hopefully, again, after this hiccup of the Q1, we should see some good things happening on La Prairie.

The next one is Olivier Nicolai of Goldman Sachs.

First question is on Germany specifically. One of your competitors launched a Mixa brand. Do you see any impact for core NIVEA there? And how you're planning to protect your market share?

Yes, Mixa is a brand which has been launched in Europe and starting in Germany. So obviously, aiming at taking over market share from NIVEA. This is a partly strong in body and not present in other categories.

I mean, they are part of the competition, the way CeraVe was a competitor also in the past. We have a good formula. We have also good activities. If you were in Germany, Olivier, you will see today this week, a big campaign on the NIVEA cream Vegan. We're adding a new SKU to NIVEA cream, the historical iconic NIVEA cream also to gain some shelf and to gain also new users, and it's working very well. So we'll treat Mixa as a normal competitors and forcing us to be even better on body and on NIVEA cream, but so far, so good. We are growing on body.

And the next one is Karel Zoete of Kepler Cheuvreux.

Question with regards to the margin. You look back to the last 5 years, and we see good progress from both top line and bottom line. But if we go back to 10 years, you had a business with a 15% operating margin in Consumer.

Today, you're almost 50% larger on the top line. So I was just wondering why is there not more operational leverage in your business given the scale you've added during that period of time? And good gross margins. So that's the first question. And the second question is really quite straightforward, given where FX sits today, your expectations on EBIT, would you expect EPS growth in 2026?

Astrid?

Yes. So look, in terms of our progress, we have showed even some in our presentation this time around. We have made really nice progress in the last few years. In terms of your answer where we are versus the time when it was similar or even higher. During the time, the margin was primarily achieved through really cutting advertising spending to drive profitability, while a lot of investments in the business, e-commerce, digital and so on were not made. We have since, as you know, back at a few years back, really kind of done a margin reset to really invest in those businesses.

But then with the investments in those businesses drive the right kind of growth that will allow us to hopefully scale much, much faster in the future. And we've made that progress. As you see, we have really caught up on e-commerce.

We're doing very well there. We're really digital in terms of our advertising. We're trying to be where the market is and really compete there. We've significantly invested in our innovation in our white spaces. So we're really putting the money to good use to then drive longer-term growth. Yes, this last year has been a bit of a hiccup, also driven by the markets, but we do think for the future, we have that opportunity with these investments to continue to drive profitable growth.

And then in terms of your question, look, we are at this moment, given also the uncertainty giving this guidance of slightly below prior year in terms of EBIT. We will stay with that right now to allow us that flexibility but hope throughout the year, we can provide more color on that figure.

And then the next one is Fon Udomsilpa from RBC.

Two from me, please, on market share and pricing. So first one, you already provide a lot of color around market share performance by region, but could you also comment on the performance for the whole Consumer business through 2025 following the launches in Q4, how has that trend compared to the beginning of the year?

Any number you could give would be helpful. And another one on NIVEA pricing, sorry. So in preparation for the strategy to broaden price range for the portfolio, could you help us think where do you see the current price positioning of NIVEA? Any part of the portfolio you think maybe the brand is not as price competitive yet or any part of the portfolio that you see higher competition?

On the market share, overall, we gained market share in a very strong way in Derma. In Derma, we are overperforming the market by a factor of 3. So gaining market share in absolutely every country, on absolutely every category. It's not only the case of anti-pigment. It's also the case of anti-age. We became, for example, #1 anti-age brand emerging market, and we were already #1 in anti-pigment. So clearly, sun care gaining market share every year in every country. So clearly, Derma, we are really in this dynamic since 5 years, and we believe that it will continue.

On NIVEA, we are not gaining market share, and this is why I was happy to mention that January '26 is positive after a number of months without positive gain. We're not really losing market share against the big guys. We are losing market share against local brands and indie brands, so which is forcing us to react, hence, the localization in some real, hence the use of influencers.

But overall, this is one of the priority. I clearly would like NIVEA to regain market share and to be back into this positive dynamics. On La Prairie, different profiles. Overall, we are gaining slightly market share. But clearly, where we overperform in China. China, we are gaining packet share in brick-and-mortar and e-commerce. In the U.S., we are getting better and better quarter after quarter.

So in the last quarter, we were at parity with the market, knowing that the U.S. is a bit specific. We are only sold in the department store, and we are also a bit victims of the disaffection of department stores. So overall, okay, and some good also news in some European countries. And last but not least, Health Care, we are gaining market share every year since 9 years, overperforming the market. This is an extremely strong brand, also very profitable.

So very happy to see that. So in total, as I said, we are a business -- skin care business, which grew 3.7%. The skin care market grew 1.5%, 2%. So we gained market share in 2025 as a company in skin care.

On your second question, I think, as I mentioned, the price positioning of NIVEA, we are an 85% of the range is between EUR 2 and EUR 10. So we don't have an issue of price. We did have some issue of pricing with our LUMINOUS range in emerging markets. This is why we decided to change the packaging of LUMINOUS in order to be able to price down LUMINOUS but still being profitable. That's the change we have done. So we don't have the same packaging LUMINOUS versus Europe versus emerging market. We have also reworked to know the formula to be sure we would be affordable in India.

If you remember, I presented the case, and we moved from dispenser to a tube in order to have the same gross margin, but to have a product which is acceptable. And we just did the same with the sachet in Thailand, also to have the right offer while not deteriorating the gross margin. So we are no -- we don't want to decrease prices. We are coming with a moderate price increase and even no price increase in some cases. But clearly, we believe today that we have the right setup for our brands, and this is how we believe we're going to be able to regain momentum.

So we'll have 2 more. We'll start with Bernadette Hogg of Reuters, and we'll have Mikheil afterwards. So Bernadette, please go ahead.

So my first question was, are you thinking of joining some of your peers and asking for paid U.S. tariffs back now that the Supreme Court has judged them to be illegal. And at the 9 months results, you mentioned the skinimalism trend. Is that something you see continuing through 2026? And how do you think about positioning yourselves within trends like that?

We didn't get the second question.

What sort of trends are you speaking about?

Skinimalism. You talked about that 9 month...

Absolutely. Skinimalism. On the first question, no, we are not planning to be part of the company suing the U.S. government simply because we are not really hit by the tariffs. As you might remember, we have -- 90% of our products are either products produced in Mexico where we have the U.S. MCA agreement.

So we are not -- there's no additional tax and the rest is produced in the U.S. So the part which is produced in Europe is a very small part of the Eucerin range. So we are not planning to be part of this movement. On the second element, yes, absolutely. The skinimalism is something which is very important. We see that in all categories. We see that in derma, we see that in luxury, we see that in the -- on mass market.

It's about having the right ingredients, it's having the right offer. So we are -- one of the things also we are recalibrating, We used to be very obsessed by our own ingredients and Thiamidol, Epicelline. We are coming also with other ingredients, which are well-known, could be vitamin C, could be niacinamide in order to be sure that we are able to offer in one product, an even better, an even stronger performance by mixing ingredients.

We are also working on some specific products, which are combining the skin effect of, for example, moisturizer and a cream. So all of that is underway. And we believe also that our brands are pretty well positioned. If you look at Eucerin, this is a problem solution brand. So exactly spot on with the trend. And if you look at NIVEA, we are used also to convince women which are using a small routine, for example, Germany, but also a very large routine, like in China, Korea or Japan. So we are equipped for that, and we leverage this trend.

Next one is Mikheil Omanadze of BNP Paribas.

I have one, please. Based on what you hear in the market, what actions are your major competitors taking to remedy this skin and personal care slowdown? And are any of your large retailer partners pushing for price reductions, which may suggest maybe more material pricing pressure in mass skin and personal care that is factored into your full year guidance?

Great question. The slowdown we -- it happened already. I was looking at the history, in 2013, skin care market minus 2%, 14% plus 2%, 15% plus 14%. If you look again 2018, plus 3% the year after, plus 9%. So it's something it's cycle. At the end of the day, the skin care market remains the most strategic market.

The way our traditional competitors are acting is coming with new innovations. We were lucky to be really the one bringing all the top innovation in skin care. As I said in my introduction, a lot of people are talking longevity. We have launched Epicelline already 1 year ago.

So this is the way you drive market up. We are in a business, which is offer driven, and which is not really demand-driven. So if we come with a nice proposal, if we come with a new formula, this is a way we attract new consumers. We convince them to buy our products.

Are other players doing another game? Yes, of course, if you look at the local brands, if you look at the indie brands, it's about cheaper prices. It's about very well-known ingredients. It's about influencers only. And the good news in a way that it goes up and down. And at the end, the big brands are back, and this is where the consumers come back when they want to have a safe formula when they want to have a safe ingredients.

And this is also why we feel that the market dynamics will come back. I mean one good example I could mention, if you look at Derma, we are delivering a double-digit growth every year since 5 years, despite the fact that the market went down to low single-digit growth in 2025.

The market is what you bring to the market, and we are pretty well equipped in skin care with the Beiersdorf R&D muscle.

Sorry, on pricing potential?

No. Pricing honestly, when you look at competition, we don't see any actions, which I think will damage the market. We are doing promotion in mass market. That's true for everybody. No big issue on this front.

Thank you. That was our last question. This concludes our full year results conference. Beiersdorf's next Investor release event will be the release of our first quarter results on April 21, 2026. We appreciate your interest in Beiersdorf and look forward to seeing you here again in April. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Q3 Results 2025 Conference Call of Beiersdorf AG. I'm Moritz, the Chorus Call operator. [Operator Instructions] And the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast.

At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Christopher Sheldon, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter conference call. I'm here with our CEO, Vincent Warnery; and our CFO, Astrid Hermann. As always, we will start with the presentation of our sales performance of the quarter and the first 9 months of the year, followed by a Q&A session.

And with that, I'd like to hand over to Vincent.

Thank you, Christopher, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call. Astrid and I will provide an overview of our sales performance and key developments of the third quarter and the first 9 months of the year.

The third quarter continued to be impacted by a very challenging market environment. Despite the headwinds, Beiersdorf was able to improve its performance versus the prior quarter. Our Derma business continues to outperform, delivering outstanding double-digit growth and winning market shares across regions. In September, we kicked off 2 major NIVEA launches. In our face care franchise, we roll out our breakthrough ingredient Epicelline. In our deodorant range, we launched the new Derma control line. While the initial impact on Q3 was limited due to timing, these launches are a key building block for our performance in Q4.

We've also initiated a strategic rebalancing of the NIVEA core portfolio by broadening our efforts beyond face care to other skin care categories and reinforcing high potential categories like deodorants. And finally, in a continued challenging market, La Prairie returned to growth in Q3, supported by improved momentum in China.

Let's take a closer look at how these developments are shaping our recent performance. The third quarter showed signs of gradual improvement, while we continue to see volatility across key markets. NIVEA continues to face pressure from an even weaker mass market environment especially in emerging markets, resulting in an organic sales decline of 0.4%. The major launches initiated in September only had a limited impact on Q3. Excluding the strategic repositioning in China, which is now completed, NIVEA's organic sales growth would have been positive.

Our Derma business, with Eucerin and Aquaphor, once again delivered strong double-digit growth of 12.4%, reaffirming its role as a key growth driver in our portfolio. Our Health Care business, which includes the Hansaplast and Elastoplast brands outstanding growth of 9.8%, still supported by the successful rollout of our Second Skin plaster innovation. And despite ongoing market volatility, La Prairie continued its sequential quarterly improvement as planned, turning to positive organic sales growth of plus 1.6% in Q3. Overall, our Consumer Business recorded organic sales growth of 2.1% in the third quarter.

Let me point out that our skin care organic sales growth increased to 4% in Q3 compared to 2.6% in the first half of the year. Beiersdorf's performance in the third quarter was flat, in line with our expectations and impacted by the difficult environment in the automotive industry. The Electronics segment, on the other hand, delivered a positive contribution, driven by a strong performance in Asia. Overall, this results in group organic sales growth of 1.7% in Q3.

Looking at our Derma business in more detail. Once again, we delivered double-digit growth of 12.4% in the third quarter, a fantastic results on top of the tough 2024 comparison base when we first launched Epicelline. This underlines the strength of our innovation pipeline and our ability to identify and capture white space opportunities. It proves that we can deliver outstanding results and outperform competition even in markets that have slowed down substantially compared to previous years. Innovation remains the cornerstone of our success. This applies both to breakthrough ingredients and to the regular relaunches across our portfolio.

Epicelline launched just a year ago, continues its successful rollout and remains a key growth driver in our Derma portfolio. And Thiamidol, which has been on the market for 7 years, continues to grow double digits. At Europe's leading dermatology congress EADV, Thiamidol was recognized as the only Derma-cosmetic active ingredient delivering effective treatment of hyperpigmentation at the root cause. This was endorsed by a newly established global consensus for the treatment of hyperpigmentation, a powerful validation of our science-led approach. But innovation doesn't stop with our hero ingredients. We continue to invest in regular relaunches across our portfolio.

With our new Eucerin DERMOPURE Clinical range, for example, we are not simply introducing a new product line. We are delivering science-based solutions for acne, a skin concern that affects up to 85% of people globally. Acne is a leading reason for dermatological consultation and one of the fastest-growing categories in skin care.

Our Derma business is not only performing across categories, it's also delivering across regions. In North America, our largest market for Derma, we achieved outstanding growth of plus 56% in the Eucerin Face category despite the slow overall market. The launch of the Eucerin Radiant Tone range with Thiamidol earlier this year, is showing excellent traction. In Europe, we are excited to report double-digit growth of plus 10%. This was fueled by the continued success of Epicelline, which is reinforcing our innovation leadership in the region.

Looking at Northeast Asia, the entry of Eucerin into the domestic market in China has exceeded expectations with exceptional organic sales growth of plus 86% in the third quarter. Following the official approval of our patented ingredient Thiamidol last year, we are already seeing early success in the market. The Eucerin Thiamidol serum has already achieved a double-digit market share making it the #1 derma anti-pigment serum in China. And last but not least, we'll be launching Eucerin Japan, another white space next month.

With NIVEA, we successfully started the launch of our breakthrough ingredient Epicelline in September. Building on the strong results achieved with Eucerin, we are now scaling this innovation into the mass market. This is the biggest NIVEA launch of all times. While the impact on our Q3 figures were still limited due to timing of the launch, the first week has already performed above our expectations. We are seeing strong early traction, including #1 category positions across key European markets. In France, for example, the NIVEA Epigenetics Serum reached the #1 position in hygiene and beauty products.

And in Germany and Austria, we secured the #1 face care position at dm, the region's largest drugstore retailer. The initial strong launch performance is also visible in our September net sales figures for NIVEA with organic sales growth of plus 7.8%. A key driver of this momentum alongside the very recent NIVEA Epicelline launch, has been our NIVEA Derma Control Deodorant range. This is where our skin care expertise meets the high performance of personal care, the skinification of deodorants.

While our recent launches are encouraging, we acknowledge that NIVEA's overall performance has fallen short of our initial expectations this year, particularly in the second quarter. So let me remind you of the journey we are on. Four years ago, we put a strategic focus on skin care, our core strength. We are committed to innovation, expanding into white spaces guided by our belief that beauty is global and offer-driven. This strategy has delivered outstanding results since 2022, 2023 and 2024, NIVEA achieved exceptional growth in some cases even double digit. That success gives us confidence in the path that we have chosen.

Now to ensure that NIVEA continues on the strong growth trajectory we are making targeted adjustments with a proactive rebalancing of our portfolio. What does it mean? We are broadening our focus within skin care. While face care remains a key category, we are balancing our R&D and marketing investments across other skin care segments.

We're also reinforcing deodorants as a strategic growth pillar, a category where NIVEA has a strong right to win through innovation. NIVEA is a value for money brand and stands for affordable prices, and that remains unchanged. While we see customers' willingness to pay for breakthrough innovations like Thiamidol and Epicelline, most of our portfolio continues to be priced at accessible price ranges. We know there is work ahead, but we also know that we are capable of, and we are taking action to bring NIVEA back to stronger growth and continue building on its legacy as 1 of the world's most trusted skin care brand.

And let's not forget, as we have always said, even a brand has established as NIVEA still offers significant white space opportunities. A great example is India, where we launched NIVEA Face earlier this year and are continuing our double-digit trajectory. We are equally excited about the potential of NIVEA Thiamidol in China, where we are just beginning to build momentum. This leads me to our NIVEA repositioning efforts in China, which were completed at the end of Q3. Performance has stabilized, and NIVEA in China is already back to growth in October setting the stage for acceleration in the remaining fourth quarter.

Our strategy in China is clear. We aim to win through innovation in skin care. With Thiamidol as our hero ingredient, we are confident that it provides a distinct competitive edge in this highly dynamic market. China remains a key opportunity for us in the mid- to long term. It's a demanding environment, but with the right portfolio and continued innovation, we are convinced that NIVEA is well positioned to compete even against strong local brands.

Coming to La Prairie, which is back to growth. While the market environment remains volatile, La Prairie delivered a solid Q3 performance with growth of plus 1.6%. This was driven in part by continued momentum in China, which achieved growth of 3% and an outstanding double-digit sellout. I'm also pleased to announce a major milestone in our global expansion strategy. After successfully establishing NIVEA Face and Eucerin in India, we've now expanded our premium portfolio with the launch of La Prairie, exclusively on Nykaa. This marks our entry into 1 of the world's most dynamic and fast-growing beauty markets, an important step in strengthening our global footprint.

Before I hand over to Astrid, let me turn to our e-commerce performance. E-commerce continues to be a key growth driver for Beiersdorf. In the first 9 months, we achieved organic sales growth of 16.6% with Q3 accelerating to 19.2%. We are gaining market share everywhere, with particularly strong momentum in emerging markets in Europe. Our Luxury e-commerce business continues to grow, fueled by targeting online activations, while our Derma portfolio shows global trends delivering double-digit growth across all regions.

Astrid will now take us through the tesa results and our financial performance in more detail.

Thank you, Vincent. Now let us review tesa's business performance for the first 9 months of 2025. Despite ongoing market challenges, tesa delivered 2.0% organic sales growth year-to-date, rising uncertainty and the potential impact of U.S. tariffs continue to affect demand, particularly in Europe and North America, while Asia continues to be a strong growth contributor. Our Electronics business was a key growth driver, supported by strong demand for major customers, particularly in Asia. The automotive segment continues to navigate a complex and volatile market environment. Despite the challenges, the segment showed resilience and delivered growth in some regions, particularly in Asia Pacific, where we are winning new customer projects.

tesa's consumer segment remains under pressure, especially in Europe, Nevertheless, it achieved growth over the first 9 months, supported by a solid performance in the third quarter. Finally, I'd like to highlight a leadership change Dr. Kourosh Bahrami, has succeeded Dr. Norman Goldberg as CEO of tesa, with over 30 years of international leadership in the adhesive industry, Dr. Bahrami brings strong leadership and a clear commitment to drive customer value and sustainable growth. We thank Dr. Goldberg for his transformative leadership and look forward to continuing tesa's successful course under Dr. Bahrami's direction.

Now let's continue with our 9-month sales performance in more detail. In the first 9 months of 2025 Beiersdorf Consumer division grew by 2.0% organically. Due to unfavorable foreign exchange effects, nominal sales declined slightly to EUR 6.25 billion. The tesa division reported solid organic growth of 2.0% for the same period. In nominal terms, net sales remained flat at EUR 1.29 billion. Overall, the group generated EUR 7.5 billion net sales in the first 9 months of 2025, translating into 2.0% organic sales growth.

Now let's take a closer look at the performance of our brands within the Consumer Business segment. Vincent has already provided an overview of the third quarter sales results. So I will focus on a summary of our brand's performance in the first 9 months of this year. In a persistently challenging market environment, NIVEA delivered modest growth of 0.6% in the first 9 months. Our performance was further impacted by higher competition from local brands and the strategic repositioning in China, which we successfully completed at the end of Q3.

In addition, our innovation pipeline was weighted towards the second half of the year, especially Q4. Key launches, including Epicelline and Deo Derma Control, were launched in September and only had a minor effect on Q3. They are expected to be a strong pillar of our growth in Q4. Derma sustained its strong momentum with an outstanding performance over the first 9 months, achieving 12.3% sales growth, clearly outperforming the market and our peers. Eucerin Face delivered exceptional results driven by the successful rollout of Epicelline and the launch of Thiamidol in the U.S.

Growth was further supported by the remarkable success in Latin America, particularly in Brazil and Mexico, as well as the successful launch of Eucerin in domestic China and India. Building on the strong momentum from the first half of the year, Health Care continued to reinforce its market position in Q3, delivering a remarkable 8.8% sales growth for the first 9 months. Australia and Indonesia delivered double-digit growth, both in Q3 and across the 9-months period, while Germany also accelerated to double-digit growth in Q3.

For La Prairie, we have seen a gradual improvement quarter-by-quarter, resulting in a return to growth in the third quarter. This recovery was supported by an improving performance in China, particularly a strong e-commerce business during Q2 and Q3.

Let's take a closer look at the organic sales growth of our Consumer Business in the first 9 months across regions. In Europe, we grew by 1.2% with Western Europe growing 1.7% and Eastern Europe slightly declining with 0.7%. Western Europe was negatively impacted by the global luxury travel retail business, particularly during the beginning of the year. Eastern Europe faced pressure from a broader market slowdown and retailer conflicts, particularly in the first half.

The Americas region concluded the first 9 months with a robust growth of 2.2%. North America showed a mixed performance with excellent results in Derma, driven by the Thiamidol launch in the U.S. while facing some headwinds in the mass business and with Coppertone in the tough sun care market. Latin America grew by 2.0%, also reflecting a mixed performance. Eucerin delivered strong double-digit growth with outstanding results in key markets such as Mexico and Brazil while our NIVEA business was impacted by general market slowdown, particularly in the deo category and by increased competition from local brands.

The Africa, Asia, Australia region delivered solid sales growth of 2.9% despite a negative impact from the ongoing NIVEA portfolio cleanup in China, which was successfully concluded by the end of Q3 as planned. Strong growth was recorded in markets such as India and Japan.

With that, I would like to hand over to Vincent, who will provide the outlook for the rest of the year.

Thank you, Astrid. Let us conclude with our guidance for the rest of the year 2025. The Consumer Business delivered plus 2% organic sales growth over the first 9 months with an improvement visible in Q3. At the same time, we saw a further deterioration of the market in the third quarter, especially in emerging markets, which is affecting the core of our mass market business. As a result, we are adjusting our full year guidance to around 2.5% organic sales growth for consumer.

Our expected growth for the fourth quarter is based on the following pillars. NIVEA is entering the final quarter with a strong innovation pipeline. We recently launched Epicelline, our breakthrough innovation in skin care along with our new derma control deodorant. These launches are still in the early stage and are expected to gain traction and visibility throughout the fourth quarter. Early indicators and the September performance are positive as highlighted in our presentation.

The remainder of the year will be driven by the performance of these launches as well as the strengthening of Nivea core business to support both we have implemented targeted rebalancing measures to reinforce our core categories, while at the same time, supporting the successful rollout of our innovations. In China, the strategic repositioning of Nivea, which had a negative effect on our performance during the first 9 months has now been completed and will no longer weigh on our results going forward.

Our luxury business with La Prairie is beginning to show encouraging signs of improvement, the return to growth in the third quarter. Finally, our Derma segment continues to perform strongly. We expect double-digit growth over the full year while Q4 is expected to remain below the 9 months performance due to an exceptionally strong fourth quarter in 2024 when Epicelline was rolled out initially. We still confirm our EBIT margin guidance with an improvement of 20 basis points, excluding special factor in the Consumer segment for the full year.

In the tesa Business Segment, we confirm our guidance of 1% to 3% organic sales net growth and an EBIT margin, excluding special factors, at around 16%. At group level, we expect organic sales growth of around 2.5% with the EBIT margin, excluding special factors, slightly above last year's level. We continue to be committed to outperforming the market over mid-term, driven by innovation and strategic expansion into white spaces.

On profitability, as we have stated in the past, will not sacrifice long-term value creation potential over short-term margin optimization. Nevertheless, we remain committed to profitable growth with EBIT growing at least as fast as the top line. We'll provide further guidance for 2026 and beyond in our full year 2025 call.

Now over to you, Christopher for the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And we will start with Patrick Folan of Barclays this morning.

Just 2 questions for me. Maybe focusing on NIVEA first. You had a strong September performance. Was this mainly due to the Epicelline sell-in here and your Derma deo performance? Or was there a wider recovery in the core portfolio here? And my second question is that you talk about value for money for the NIVEA brand, are there any changes you are making to the current pricing strategy with NIVEA in any of your markets? And in terms of the Epicelline price point in Europe, are you still targeting a EUR 25 to EUR 30 pricing?

Patrick. On your first question, yes, absolutely, the success of the month of September is mostly due to the launch of Epicelline, NIVEA Epicelline and Derma Control, as the core business, the core market has been in line with Q2. Epicelline is really doing extremely well. I receive every day very good sell-out results. I mentioned, #1 hygiene and beauty product in France. I mentioned also Germany. I was looking also at Italy. This is already the #1 serum in Italy. This is the #1 serum in Netherlands. This is the #1 face care product in Switzerland, in Belgium, in Spain, in Portugal.

So clearly, it was already by far the best ever launched Epicelline, but we clearly sell out going in the right direction. Derma Control, we launched it a bit later. We are doing extremely well. I mean, Romania, we are back to the best ever market share in deo. We are regaining market share in deo in Germany. So I feel also very positive about that.

On your question about the value for money, I think you have to really to remember that there are only 2 expensive products in the range of NIVEA, which are the Epicelline and the Thiamidol launch. The rest of the product are priced between EUR 2 and EUR 4. So there is no issue of price positioning. This being said, we are currently launching Epicelline. And the way the business is managed, we have some promotions. So for example, if you go to the U.K. that [ Bucci ] is promoting the product at GBP 24, for example, versus a normal price at GBP 29. We have also some promotions.

So we will fine-tune the -- we'll see a little bit of the first months are working. And if we feel the need to go below EUR 29, could be EUR 28, EUR 27. We'll do it just to be sure that we have absolutely the right price elasticity. On Derma Control, we had EUR 2.80, so absolutely no issue. So the only open question and again, we'll have the market results soon is do we decrease the price of Epicelline by EUR 1 or EUR 2 in Europe, knowing that, as you might remember, in emerging markets, we are pricing Epicelline below. We are at EUR 22, having also a specific packaging, which allows to keep the same margin, but at a lower price.

Okay. Just to clarify one thing there. Just on pricing, so you feel comfortable with the price points you have in your current portfolio as we go into next year?

Absolutely. I mean the prices are between EUR 2 and EUR 4. What we are clearly trying to do is to reduce the price increase we do next year. You might remember that we were the only brand doing a price increase in 2025, which created some customer retaliations. We try to minimize that next year, focusing really on the products and the innovation where we are bringing a real added value to consumers.

The next question is from Celine Pannuti of JPMorgan.

My first question is on the market growth. Vincent, you said that the market has decelerated, especially in emerging markets, and you adjusted your guide for that. How do you feel the company can deliver as you look into 2026? So also given that you're talking about the rebalancing of investment for NIVEA, I wonder as well if you can provide on how you feel in terms of your new level of investment in the deodorant and personal care part and whether for 2026, we should expect that you have -- you need this extra investment and maybe a limited margin expansion? That's my first question. I'll give you the second one after.

On your first question, Celine, so what we clearly see, and I mentioned that in my speech that the market -- the skin care market is difficult. And we have -- if you look at the year-to-date figures, we are more -- we are around 0.5%, 1% growth on the market with, of course, different dynamics in mass market, we are around 5%. Derma, this is the news, we are more into the 3%, 4% and luxury is still at minus 5%. So this is a market which is not growing as much as expected. We are expecting a small recovery in the months to come.

We see, for example, that the derma market in the U.S. is doing better, and we are over performing this market. We see also luxury, I was mentioning China, but also saw some good figures in luxury going in the same direction. So overall, for the market growth this year between 1% and 2%, and we believe that we go slightly above next year. What we are -- what is making us optimistic in a way is that the worst market dynamics is the derma market. And this is a market which really used to be growing at double digit. And we are now into a market dynamics, which is around 3%, 4%. And this is a market where we are overperforming by a factor to between 2 and 3x the market because we are coming with innovation and because we are supporting those innovation.

And this is why when I look at the dynamics next year, on NIVEA. I feel a little bit better than I would say, in 2025 because we have the launches that we are doing right now, and I mentioned Epicelline and Derma Control, but we have also a launch plan, which is much more -- much better balanced next year with more launches in the first semester versus this year and something where we can really have a more balanced dynamics launches versus core.

And we are indeed, thanks also to the courageous decisions we have taken on prices, we are able to manage a pretty good gross margin, allowing us to invest -- to continue to invest on those launches. So we will rebalance a little bit the investment between the face care premium product, and we had to launch both Thiamidol and Epicelline in 2025. So rebalance this money into not only other skin care categories, also on more affordable face care proposal, for example, in emerging market, but also on the other end. So with the current P&L equation, we can increase the marketing spendings beyond NIVEA. And of course, on Derma, there is no question, we will continue to invest more.

All right. Just maybe to follow up on that, asking whether the 50 basis points plus margin expansion that's your midterm target, how you feel about it going into '26. So that's my follow-up. And then my second question, Astrid now. Can you provide a bit more details about Europe, which really came back to good growth at 3%. Was there a travel retail impact there? If you can tell us what quantify this? And how do you feel about the overall consumer and retail environment? Of course, you have the benefit of the sellout and sell-in of Epicelline. But overall, how you feel the European market is developing as we look into the quarters to come.

On your first question, so we will not give a guidance for 2026, and we'll give that in 2025, but we maintain the idea that we have to overperform the market and continue to grow profitably. So we'll come back to that in 3 months. On your question about Europe, yes, travel retail has an impact on the performance of Europe. This is a 40 basis point impact because we are overperforming this market with La Prairie, but this is a double-digit negative market. So this has an impact on Europe.

When you look at the question sell-in versus sell-out, the fact that we see some improvement in deo, for example, which was really the biggest market share loss in 2025 in Europe is making us more optimistic. Even if you look at Germany, which is by far our biggest deo market we have been gaining market share over the last 3 months in a row, which is a good news. We see also that the outstanding success of the sun season in Europe, we grew 12% in a market which was growing double digit, but this is really one of the best performance in Sun is also giving us some good momentum.

So deo, I would say we feel positive. Sun care is positive. The question is face care. As I said, the sellout results we are getting from specific retailers is promising. But you remember my story, sell-in is one thing, sell-out is another thing. Repurchase is absolutely essential, and this is what we'll be able to measure in the first quarter. So not to -- neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but some good signals that will -- should give us some better performance in Europe next year.

The next question is from Jeremy Fialko of HSBC.

So a couple of questions from me. First one, just to go into the Eastern Europe region that was kind of pretty negative within the period. So just what's going on there? And then the second question is just on kind of capital return. Now you've done the EUR 500 million share buyback for the last couple of years. Do you think -- what do you think the potential would there be to increase that in 2026, given where the share price is [indiscernible] given the kind of existing authority that you have got, if that's something you think would be on your agenda to bring on a board?

First question, yes, indeed. Eastern European used to grow double digit. The market was really booming. It suddenly decelerated vigorously and moving from a plus 12% to plus 2%, plus 3%. There's also interesting competitive environment, which has changed. If you look at a country like Poland, 100% of the growth is coming through Korean brands and not really big Korean brands, but Korean brands are there for 6 months and then replaced by others. So all of us, all the global brands are suffering from that.

What also worsened the situation are a few customer issues that we have been able to solve. So that's something where we should have a positive momentum in 2026. But the key question is, and this is where obviously rebalancing the portfolio for us is to be sure that we are not only investing on Epicelline and Thiamidol, but we have also a strong action on deodorants. This is by far our biggest market in Eastern Europe. So that's what we are doing right now.

And I mentioned the example of Romania, for example, where we reached our best ever market share in deo. That's something which is giving us some hope. On your question about share buyback, we just closed, the second time we did share buyback. So you have to allow us to discuss with the Supervisory Board at the end of the year what we want to do. What is essential? You remember that in terms of priority, we know that we have too much cash available and the priority should and will continue to be M&A.

The next question would be from Guillaume Delmas from UBS.

Two questions for me, please. The first one on the 2025 revised outlook. I mean, still trying to reconcile this updated guidance of around 2.5% for Consumer. That seems to imply a little bit more than 4% organic sales growth in Q4, but you also had that very strong momentum of NIVEA in September, growing nearly 8%. So why -- wondering why you would expect such a sequential slowdown between September and the fourth quarter?

And then my second question, it's on the changes you are making to your strategy, particularly that stronger support behind more skin care categories and deo. I mean, I guess, first, when do you think we should start seeing some benefits from this? I mean, could it be immediate? Or is it more of a slow burn? And secondly, given that your margin guidance for the year for 2025 for Consumer is unchanged, would it be fair to assume that at this stage, it's much more about reallocation of resources rather than an overall increase in your marketing budget?

Guillaume, on your first question, you should not forget that, obviously, when you launch a new -- I mean, the biggest launch ever on Epicelline and NIVEA plus a range of 6 or 7 SKUs of deo in September, you cannot continue the same momentum for the next 3 months. So you will have -- the pipeline effect will be, I would say, September, October. And then you have the sellout. So this is why we have indeed planned the growth with the full success of those launches, but a core business, which will not improve dramatically. So that's the assumption of the Q4. This is why we wanted to come with a more realistic assumption for Q4, which is, by the way, consistent with what all of you thought.

On the rebalancing, no, I mean, the reason why we came with Q2 and we decided to change the guidance on EBIT moving from plus 50 basis points to plus 20 basis points is simply because we knew that those big launches were coming in Q4, and we knew that it would have been a shame not to support them just because we wanted to deliver in a kind of dogmatic way the first guidance we gave on EBIT.

So the 20 basis points that we -- the 30 basis points that we decided to allocate to marketing budget are exactly the money we're going to spend in Q4, and we have the biggest ever spending on the face care launch on NIVEA and the biggest ever spending on the deo launch on NIVEA on top of, of course, continuing to support the launch of all the launches and the activity of Derma and the bigger mission in China with 11/11. So no change in the media strategy, just using the 30 basis points that we freed in the Q2 to support those big launches in the weeks to come.

The next question is from like Ulrike Dauer from Dow Jones.

I hope you can hear me. I don't have much of a voice today. Sorry. I'd like to ask a question about the U.S. import tariffs after the failed tariff deal between Switzerland and U.S., the import tariffs are now 39%, which are affecting La Prairie. And I was just wondering, will you be able to pass on the additional cost to customers? How much more expensive will be even already expensive products deal? And is that still not enough for a strategy change? Or do you consider maybe producing more in the U.S. now like many other companies more or less voluntarily are planning to do? Also, the overall import tariff exposure, you said that a lot of the products for the U.S. market are produced in Mexico or other countries. Can you quantify additional costs related to those new import tariffs by quarter, by full year? Is there any additional information you might be able to provide? I have some other question about Kering. Maybe you can answer that question later.

Your question about La Prairie. So yes, indeed, the Swiss government has not yet been able to negotiate a reduced tax level tariff increase with the U.S. So we have indeed this extremely difficult situation. We have been, of course, anticipating the change of service. So we are covered, I would say, in terms of stocks in the U.S. For the time being, we are waiting -- wait and see in a way. We do not believe today that it will be wise to implement immediately the tariff increase on the La Prairie prices, which, as you mentioned, are already very high.

You imagine that in percentage is high, but in absolute value, it's extremely high for La Prairie. So we are not planning to do that. You can imagine that we have anyway a gross margin, which is pretty comfortable on La Prairie. We will see the way other competitors are acting. What is absolutely out of the question is to produce in the U.S. because the strength of La Prairie is made in Switzerland. That's the story of the brand. So we'll absolutely not produce in the U.S. We'll continue to produce in Switzerland.

On your second question, you rightly mentioned that we are in a way, lucky because we have one -- a big part of the production that we are selling in the U.S. is produced in the U.S. and the other big part is in Mexico, where there was no additional tariffs. So we have today an economic equation, which is pretty good for our business. Yes, we have a few products produced in Europe. So they will be affected by the 15% tariff increase, but it's really a minor, minor part of the range, and we'll be able to absorb that either through small price increases or just by managing value engineering projects. So all in all, yes, La Prairie is an issue, but it's a small part of the business in the U.S. The rest of the range is in a way, protected.

May I ask one more question about the Kering brands that were up for sale. Have you looked at them and considered or don't they really match your portfolio strategy?

Ulrike, we are good in 1 category, which is skin care, skin care, skin care, and we are lucky enough that this is by far the biggest beauty category in the world. We have no expertise in perfume. So it would have been a mistake to enter this field without any expertise, so we did not even look at the project.

And the next question is from Bernadette Hogg of Reuters.

I'm sorry. I was still in mute. So it's a bit of a recap question on the slowdown of the market -- in the emerging markets for skin care. So do you see these factors as temporary? Or is it more structural? And how long do you anticipate it lasting? And what are the major causes of the slowdown?

A clear deceleration. We used to have an emerging markets, skin care growing double digit. We end up to a level which is close to low single digit, even negative in some countries. There are a few phenomenons which are taking place. Obviously, Latin America is hit by the -- not only the political uncertainties, but also all the discussions about U.S. tariffs, not U.S. tariffs and Mexico is a country where obviously, we -- the market was suffering with that.

We see in other countries, the development of simplified routines. People -- this is what they call the skinimalism trend where people are buying less product and some of that cheaper. So the only solution, and this is what we are doing pretty successfully with Derma is to come with innovation. In fact, the worst market dynamics in emerging market is the derma market, and we are growing extremely high with double-digit growth in each and every market. We gained market share everywhere. So the recipe that we have been using successfully with Eucerin, we are using it now with NIVEA with also some changes and some rebalancing.

For example, I mentioned already the fact that we -- it's the first time we are launching the same global product Epicelline with 2 different packaging proposal, so one allowing us to sell it at below EUR 22 in emerging markets, and that's much cheaper than the EUR 29 we have in Europe. We are also putting a lot of focus on products like NIVEA Soft in India, which is a fantastic accessible product, but also Facial in Brazil, which has a 30% market share in skin care.

We are rebalancing our investment also on deo. I mentioned Derma Control, which is a global launch that we are launching everywhere. So we are not optimistic on the development of the emerging market dynamics. We'll see what happens. But clearly, we are coming with a much stronger innovation portfolio and -- I would say, much more -- much better adapted launch portfolio to emerging markets. So we hope to see some good figures in the months to come.

The next question is from Anna Westkämper of Handelsblatt.

I have 2 questions regarding tesa. First of all, how dependent are you on the recovery of the automotive sector here? And second of all, are you looking into expanding into other industries like defense with tesa?

Thank you so much, Anna, for your questions. So look, automotive is a big part of the tesa business. Between automotive and electronics, they're really the pillars of what tesa has established. The nice thing about tesa is that they continue to make progress in each of the industries, in automotive as well. So while the market certainly was challenged in Europe and North America, the projects it gained, particularly in Asia Pacific, have really helped kind of balance that impact. so again, not an easy market and certainly not a huge growth driver for tesa year-to-date, but 1 that is also not a huge drag, which is very, very helpful.

And yes, tesa has really invested if you followed some of our commentary also in previous calls. They've really invested over the last few years significantly into innovation and business development, and that is really to go beyond these 2 industries as well and significantly drive more business in other industries.

And the next question is from Olivier Nicolai of Goldman Sachs.

Just very 2 quick follow-ups. First, on NIVEA Epicelline, you obviously have it in Europe and a few other countries. But are you planning to roll this brand out across your whole geographic footprint in next year? And then secondly, on tesa, just a quick follow-up. In the context of obviously what we just discussed about the automotive market, should we expect most of the growth for tesa for next year to come from Electronics?

Thanks for your question. Yes, absolutely, NIVEA Epicelline will be launched and is launched absolutely everywhere. So obviously, not yet in China because we are focusing all our energies in Thiamidol. But this is -- the objective is to launch it in most of our NIVEA countries in the next 6 months. We have already covered Europe. We are starting now in Q4 to launch it in some emerging markets, but this is clearly a very big priority for NIVEA globally. On tesa, Astrid?

Yes. Thank you for your question on tesa. Look, we -- the tesa business absolutely wants to continue to grow in electronics. As you know, a lot of the Electronics business is a project business. So we need to win projects every single year, for example, also with the big device manufacturer. So absolutely, we continue to look for growth in the electronics business as well.

Next question is from Mikheil Omanadze from BNP Paribas.

The first one would be on NIVEA. So if September was so strong, it would imply quite a sluggish delivery in July, August. Would you please be able to provide some color by categories within NIVEA, which were particularly weak in July, August? And my second question is on Chantecaille and Coppertone. How did both brands do in Q3?

On your question about the NIVEA, yes, July, August was well low also because, obviously, we had 0 launches at the time. We had also no effect on any price increase. So we did a minus single digit, I think, on NIVEA, if I remember well, on July, August, compensated by the figures of September, I was just sharing. You have also to keep in mind that's important also to mention that, that the Chinese relaunch has changed -- has obviously impacted strongly the development of NIVEA. If you look at the first 9 months, if we didn't have that this revamping of the Chinese business, NIVEA will be growing plus 1.3%. So that's also something which obviously we decided to do. We are hoping at the time to have a better NIVEA business, but it has obviously impacted the situation. The second question, Mikheil was?

It was on Coppertone, Chantecaille.

Coppertone, Chantecaille, yes. Coppertone, the only good news on Coppertone is that we finally found our way. We clearly have tried a lot of things with Coppertone, trying to launch in face care, trying to launch in spray, trying to develop the brand in a lot of directions. If you know a little bit the U.S. market, we have refocused on sport. We took a very famous rugby -- female rugby player. We are gaining market share on sport. It's not enough to compensate the loss of the rest of the categories. But at least we will continue to support that. We'll focus all our investment on sport, which is the legacy, the origin of the brand and try to gain market share in this category.

Chantecaille, we had a very good first semester with also the launch of China, which impacted the figures. Q3 was a little bit more difficult because we suffered from the slow development of the U.S. luxury market, and we are very dependent on the luxury market. And we have not yet been able to open the stores we wanted to open. They are more coming in the fourth quarter and the first quarter. So all in all, we grow at 7%, 6.8%, which is good, but I was hoping to do better. And we'll see really the way the Chinese business, but also the Indian market, and we are launching in India will also complement hopefully, a better U.S. business in the months to come.

And then we have Tom Sykes next in line.

Just, I guess, some -- a couple of follow-ups on questions already been asked. But in terms of the rollout or level of innovation in full year '26, excluding the sort of country rollouts of Epicelline, then what's the level of that in full year '26 compared to '25? Because you obviously had theoretically a large upgrade of many products in NIVEA? And how would you view that being phased H1 versus H2? And just on pricing, I don't know whether you've given the -- I don't think you've given the commentary on sort of pricing versus volume at all at the moment. But any view on commentary you can give on that? And to what degree do you need to push price to maintain gross margins given that FX has moved from where we were, please?

Tom, on the rollout, yes, absolutely. We have a better launch plan for next year, better in 2 directions. First, balance between H1 and H2. I mean, one of the difficulties that we had this year was the fact that we had almost no launches on NIVEA in the first semester. One of the reasons being that I didn't want to launch NIVEA Epicelline too early after the launch of Eucerin Epicelline. So it has clearly created a first semester with a very low level of innovation.

Next year, we have a big plan in the first semester, where clearly it's really 50-50 in terms of new launches, H1 versus H2. The second difference also it's also a wider plan in the sense that most of the initiatives in 2025 were in face care and Derma Control deo at the end of the year. We have next year some very good launches on body, on deo, on lip, on sun care. And on face care, which is interesting, not only the, I would say, the usual suspects, the premium product, Epicelline and Thiamidol, but also a very big ambition also on some more accessible offer, NIVEA Q10, NIVEA Soft, facial in Brazil in order to be sure that also in face care, we maintain this good value for money dimension.

On pricing, I always say that the objective is clearly to have a dynamic which is more 2/3 volume, 1/3 price. What I find interesting in the third quarter is, in fact, this is a quarter which is purely driven by volumes. And this is the first time because obviously, the price effect was in Q1 and Q2, which I find interesting because it proved that this is one of the best performance in volume we had since a lot of quarter. We are able to regain this volume growth and also to recruit new consumers. So next year, will be surgical. We'll not do price increase over the board. We'll be surgical. We'll do it only when we are obliged indeed to do it because we want to protect the gross margin.

And we are also willing to be much more demanding in terms of cost of goods increase. We are challenging our suppliers. We are moving also from a high dependency on single sourcing to a much better multi-sourcing in order to make some negotiation on the cost of goods. And we'll show that we do price increase where we have to protect the gross margin and/or where we are coming with an innovation or innovation was a true added value in the eyes of retailers, but also in the eyes of consumers. So the level of price increase will be strongly, dramatically below the one we had in the years before.

And it looks like we have one follow-up question from Celine.

What China did in the third quarter, it seems that it was negative for NIVEA. But overall, if you can talk about how comfortable you feel about the reacceleration in the fourth quarter? And if you could comment as well on La Prairie.

I must say, Celine, I feel well with China. Let me start with the absolutely obvious success. We have Eucerin, which is growing 83% in Northeast Asia, which means that we are growing 150% in China. We have the anti-pigment serum of Eucerin, which is today the #1 anti-pigment serum in China. So we are beating not only the global competitors, but also local competitors. And the first 11/11 figures, so it's only 30% of the time, but we are growing in sell-out by 83% versus last year. So pretty, pretty happy with Eucerin. We have a great story. We have this unique ingredient, which is exactly what you need to succeed in China. So more to come, but an outstanding performance in 2025 and 2026.

The second element, which is making us optimistic is La Prairie. I mentioned the fact that we are growing in net sales by 3%. But if you look at sellout, we are growing at 10% and with e-commerce growing at 30%, and that's really something that we did not experience in China since a long time. So La Prairie, good dynamics, compensating -- more than compensating the difficulty of Hainan, which was always small for us. I think the job which has been done by the new CEO and the team is starting to pay off. And the fact that we discovered late, but clearly, with a great execution, e-commerce is doing well.

Last but not least, NIVEA, this is a question. What I can tell you that when you look at the face care business over the last quarter, we have been growing step by step. If you look at sellout quarter 2 plus 18%, quarter 3 plus 36%. Again, if I look at my 11/11 first figures, again, 30% of the time, we are growing plus 30%. I also believe that this Thiamidol story with, of course, a better price is an asset for NIVEA. And again, we are also using Eucerin to make some -- to create some awareness on Thiamidol. So I would not open champagne, but I think when I look at the 3 major brands in China, we have pretty good signals and more to come in Q4, which will be extremely strong for China.

Thank you. That was the last question. This concludes our conference call. Beiersdorf's next Investor Relations event will be the release of our full year results on March 3, 2026. We appreciate your interest in Beiersdorf and look forward to seeing you back here again in the new year. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now over. Thank you for choosing Chorus Call, and thank you for participating in the conference. You may now disconnect your lines. Goodbye.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Beiersdorf H1 Results 2025 Conference Call. I am Valentina, the Chorus Call operator.

[Operator Instructions]

At this time, it's my pleasure to have to Christopher Sheldon, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us this morning for the presentation of our first half year results 2025. I'm here with our CEO, Vincent Warnery and our CFO, Astrid Hamman. As always, we will start with the presentation of our results, followed by a Q&A session. And with that, I would like to hand over to Vincent.

Thank you, Christopher. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's conference call. As Trey and I will now present an overview of our financial performance and key developments for the first half of 2025. Beiersdorf showed a solid performance in the first half year despite a challenging market environment. Market growth, especially in the emerging markets was slower than expected due to broader economic uncertainties, geopolitical effects and lower consumer confidence.

Our core brand EVA navigated a weaker mass market and faced a tough comparison base in 2024. This resulted in a disappointing performance below our expectations in the first half of this year especially in the second quarter. Our Derma business, on the other hand, once again set a bet stack in the industry, performing against tougher market conditions, Derma continued its growth trajectory from Q1 achieved outstanding double-digit sales growth in Q2. Our strategy of launching breakthrough innovations across our global brands and expanding into white spaces continues to pay off. This is our expertise and our strengths, and we have demonstrated it with the outstanding success of our anti-age ingredient epiceline under uterine.

This gives us great confidence the launch of Eucerine under NIVEA will be even more successful and boost our sales in the second half of 2025. Looking at our luxury brand LaPrairie, we saw some positive signs in China during the second quarter, while other markets remain soft, particularly the U.S. and Travel Retail. Altogether, I mean the volatile market environment, we continue to advance on our path towards global leadership in skin care because skin care is what we know and do best. Although we aim for strong growth our skin care performance outpaced that of our key competitors. Reviewing our sales performance, the first half of the year showed a mixed picture for our brand portfolio. framed by old-style and demanding market dynamics. Nivea grew by 1% organically in the first 6 months, impacted by slower markets and a high prior year comparison base of 11.1% while the first quarter 2025 showed a solid performance, the second quarter did not meet our expectations.

With 12.2%, our Derma business delivered again a strong double-digit organic growth despite a softer market environment, driven by innovation and expansion into white spaces, our derma brands continued to be our current growth powerhouse. The Healthcare business, which primarily comprises the Antas and LastPass brands delivered strong organic sales growth of 8.4%, a significant improvement compared to 4% in H1 2024. The increase was again innovation-led and mainly driven by the launch of the new innovative Second skin protection plaster in the first half year. As planned, La Prairie was able to decelerate the sales decline over the past months after a drop in sales of minus 17.5% in the first quarter, the second quarter was at minus 1.5% and leading to minus 10.7% in the first half year 2025.

All in all, in the challenging market environment, the consumer business achieved sales growth of 1.9%, [indiscernible] reached 3% sales growth in the first half of the year due to the high-performing Electronics business. This results in a group organic sales growth of 2.1%. Nivea fell below our expectations in H1, which is the result of a mix of expected and unexpected factors. We are comparing against an exceptionally strong first half year 2024 when Nivea grew 11.1%. As we move into the second half of the year, the comparison base softens, giving us a more favorable setup in the coming quarters together with a stronger second half year innovation pipeline. In China, we have taken bold steps to reset and refocus the Nivea brand, moving away from price-sensitive Personal Care segments towards premium skin care and grow through a digital-first approach. These planned measures are on track but continue to impact our short-term results.

In addition, the mass market did not grow as anticipated. For [indiscernible] growth drivers, particularly emerging markets and Eastern Europe, have slowed significantly with market value growth moving from double digit to mid-single digits and volume growth in emerging markets declining from mid-single digits to nearly 0. This was due to economic uncertainties and more cautious consumer spending. The unpredictable nature of U.S. tariffs has been adding further uncertainty. Like many of our larger competitors, we are facing increased competition from local brands. Many of these small brands are based on a simple ingredient story and have shorter life cycles. We have successfully navigated similar competitive pressures in the past, and we plan to continue to do so through breakthrough innovations and product launches in many markets.

Our Derma business is a showcase for success on the global scale through innovation based on skin science. Our double-digit sales growth continued through Q2 at an impressive 13.3%. We gained market shares across all regions and outperformed the market by 2.1x. Expanding into white space market was the key driver of our business in the first half year. In North America, our biggest market for Derma, we delivered strong double-digit growth of 11.6%. This was mainly driven by the continued success of Thiamidol, the launch of the Eucerine Radian tone collection in early 2025 shows excellent traction. The entry of Eucerine in domestic China exceeded expectations with an outstanding 61.9% organic sales growth in the first half of the year, and there is more to come. Following the official approval of our patented ingredient [indiscernible] in China last year, we are ready to unlock the full potential of these markets. A key driver of these results was Eucerine, which reactivates youth genes to reverse signs of aging. In less than a year after the launch last September, we have taken #1 positions in many markets across the globe. In Germany, Mexico, Brazil and Chile, or use in Epigenetics serum has become the #1 antiaging product in the respective markets.

We have not only reached #1 positions in many markets. The true power of innovation lies in how it resonates with consumers and performs against top products from peers over time. Our repurchase rates are impressive across market with a 51% top score in Thailand followed by France, Germany and Mexico. While the cumulative 23% of consumers in Germany have repurchased epigenetic serum since launch, an outstanding 37% of consumers who bought the product in the first month of launch have repurchased it in the meantime. This is 3x higher than other top innovative products in the market. Further growth potential is expected as we continue to grow out in [indiscernible] across the world and unlock the full consumer potential. Now it's time for Nivea to bring Epicelline in to a new level. By launching Epicelline in our iconic brand, we tap into even greater potential as we enter the mass market and make this breakthrough in agents available to a large attractive consumer base.

Introducing the NIVEA hypigieletic serum is a major milestone in our innovation strategy. and a game changer in the mass anti-aging market. We are extremely excited about this launch. Longevity is top of mind for consumers. And our goal is to lead the way in longevity science by cutting-edge research based on real consumer insights. By leveraging the power of epigenetics with our breakthrough in gradient Epicelline, we provide an effective solution for more useful skin already today. For us, true skin longevity means scientifically proven ingredients that target the root causes of aging. The launch of the NIVEA Epigenitics serum is underway. Starting in September, consumers in Europe will benefit from this innovation, which is scientifically proven to reverse skin age by reactivating new cell functions. And we are fast. By the end of 2025, NIVEA epigenetic serum will already be available in 30 countries worldwide. This ambitious launch plan realized in just a few months, reflect the strengths of our organization.

With Eucerine, we have seen that this product can truly make a difference with we make this difference even more accessible, which is why we aim to roll out the product globally as quickly as possible. I look forward to sharing the results with you in our future quarterly calls. Innovation will pave the way for a stronger second half of the year for Never. With a strong innovation pipeline ready to be rolled out, we are confident to improve our growth and gain market share in the coming months. We expect net sales from launches to be almost double the 2024 level. As already mentioned, the market entry of the NIVEA epigenetic serum is anticipated to be the biggest launch ever for Beiersdorf. Other examples are the launch of the Derma control deodorant range, which brings skin care expertise and personal care performance together, I will come back to that in a moment.

In the new skin glow range with Thiamidol, building on the success of [indiscernible] minus 630. This new range makes our hyperpigmentation ingredient available to a broader, more diverse consumer base. Coming to La Prairie. The Luxury brand was able to decelerate the decline in sales over the past few months. The second quarter showed encouraging dynamics with organic sales growth of minus 1.5% after minus 17.5% in the first quarter of this year. Overall, the brand recorded an organic decline in sales of minus 10.7% and in the first half year of 2025. In China, La Prairie managed to grow by 3% in the second quarter amid a volatile market environment. This result was driven by the continued outstanding performance of our online business of plus 36% organic sales growth in the second quarter.

However, despite first signs of improvement in China, other regions remain challenged. The market in the U.S. and Travel Retail were negative in Q2. We expect market conditions to remain volatile in the coming months and are therefore cautious in our outlook. Chantecaille delivered outstanding double-digit sales growth of 16.1% in the first half of 2025. The already impressive performance in the first quarter was followed by organic sales growth of 16.3% and in the second quarter. The U.S. contributed to this result with plus 15.3% growth. Following the record time launch of Chantecaille in China in 2024, we are on track with our business in the market, particularly in e-commerce, where we continued to build momentum. In May this year, we took the next step by opening our first brick-and-mortar boutique in Shanghai, a key milestone in our growing presence and commitment to the Chinese market.

Altogether, our skin care business grew by 2.6% organically in the first half of the year. While we certainly aspire to drive stronger growth, we performed better than our key competitors in this category even in a certain market environments. Because it is skin expertise that sets Beiersdorf a part. It's not just what we do, it's what we do best. We focus on what matters most to our consumers. We target future-defining skin care needs from hyperpigmentation to aging skin with innovation that make a difference take Thiamidol, for example, our patented solution designed to reduce pigmentation market. It's a global growth driver across our key brands. And Epicelline, after years of pioneering research in epigenetics, we are setting new standards with our edge cloud technology and the breakthrough anti-age ingredients, and we deliver with a PCD in user and now with NIVEA.

With our innovative product offering, we attract consumers across the world and are able to expand into white spaces with success. Take India as an example, with the right assortment and launch strategy, we were able to successfully introduce Eucerine and Lift Nivea to new APs. In this highly competitive market, our business grew by more than 30% and in the first half of the year. And we are succeeding in effectively competing against private labels. In Seneca, we have managed to successfully outperform the market and gain market share this season across our key markets, most prominently in Europe, the largest region for BSN. Here, we grew by 12.7% in the first half year. Our Derma business is 1 of our long-standing contributors to Beiersdorf's success. With the launch of the Derma control, the odorant range, we are bringing something new to our consumers. For the first time, we are combining high-performance personal care with our trusted skincare promise, the result superior skin care without compromising on efficacy. Now over to you Astrid for the results of our tea segment and the financial for the first half of the year.

Thank you, Vincent. Now let us review TSA's business performance for the first half of 2025. During this period, Tesa achieved organic sales growth of 3% year-on-year despite a challenging economic environment marked by rising political uncertainty, which continues to weigh on demand across markets. The Electronics segment was a significant contributor to this growth, benefiting from a favorable phasing linked to earlier phone and tablet launches and strong demand in Greater China and Asia Pacific. The automotive market, on the other hand, remains volatile, especially in Europe and North America, offset by a strong performance in Asia Pacific and Greater China.

The consumer segment continues to face difficulties, particularly in Europe but showed strong double-digit growth in the e-commerce channel. I'm excited to share some great news. Tesa has partnered with Zeiss microoptics to develop next-generation holographic solutions. By combining Tesa's advanced optical clear adhesives with Zeiss' optic expertise, we're speeding up the creation of transparent high-performance applications for the automotive and home tech markets. Together, we are working on industrializing holographic films starting with automotive windshields. This technology will allow us to integrate holographic display seamlessly, enhancing both functionality and design.

The automotive industry will benefit a lot from this development. Holographic windshields can support features like head-up displays and augmented reality, completely transforming the driving experience. This innovation can not only boost safety and user experience but also offers more design flexibility by simplifying the overall structure. Our partnership with Zeiss is a strategic booth that leverages our strength to deliver innovative solutions that will shape the future of automotive and home technology.

Now let's continue with the detailed financial results. Let's start by reviewing our sales performance at both the segment and group levels. In the first half of 2025, Beiersdorf Consumer division grew by 1.9% organically due to unfavorable foreign exchange effects, including an appreciation of the euro, nominal sales remained flat at EUR 4.3 billion. The Tesa division reported strong organic sales growth of 3.0% for the same period. In nominal terms, net sales increased by 1.6% to EUR 858 million. Overall, the group generated EUR 5.2 billion net sales in the first half of 2025 translating into a 2.1% organic and 0.2% nominal growth rate.

Let's take a closer look at the organic sales growth of our consumer business in the first half year across regions. In Europe, we grew by 1.0% with Western Europe growing 1.1%, and Eastern Europe 0.4%. Western Europe continued to be impacted negatively by our global luxury travel retail business, especially in Q1 this year. Eastern Europe was impacted by a market slowdown compared to previous years. The Americas region concluded the first half year with a solid 2.5% growth. Consistent with Q1, North America experienced a mix performance resulting in 2.3% growth. Our Derma business continued its double-digit trajectory, while we were facing challenges with Coppertone in a weak sun season.

Latin America grew by 2.7%, also a result of a mixed performance. User grew at excellent double-digit rates in our key markets, Mexico and Brazil, while our Nivea business was affected by an overall slowdown of the market compared to the previous years. The Africa, Asia, Australia region delivered sales growth of plus 2.7%, negatively impacted by the ongoing Nivea portfolio cleanup in China, which is progressing as planned. Strong performance on the other hand was recorded in countries like India and Thailand. Now let's review the key figures at the group level. I already spoke about the sales figures, so let us focus on profitability. In the first half year, we generated EBIT, excluding special factors of EUR 836 million, which translates to an EBIT margin of 16.1%. The slight decrease versus 2024 was due to the lower Tesa EBIT. Excluding special factors, our earnings per share remained unchanged versus last year and amounted to EUR 2.54 per share.

Let's turn to the performance by segment, again, with a focus on profitability. We increased our consumer EBIT to EUR 691 million in the first half of 2025 corresponded to an EBIT margin of 16.0%. The 10 basis points increase versus 2024 was mainly a result of higher -- of the higher gross profit margin. Tesa's EBIT at EUR 145 million was slightly lower than last year, mainly as the result of unfavorable foreign exchange effects, phasing and additional investments in growth. The gross margin of our consumer business increased by 30 basis points in the first half year. We faced an 80 basis point pressure on cost, mainly due to unfavorable transactional foreign exchange effects.

Thanks to the strength of our brands, our global pricing power and favorable mix effects, we were able to more than offset the higher cost of sales. The positive mix effect driven by our focus on skin care and the success of our Derma business contributed to the gross margin improvement while the weaker performance of La Prairie had a dilutive effect on the overall gross margin. Finally, I would like to walk you through the key figures of our group income statement for the first half year. As I mentioned previously, we reported sales of EUR 5.2 billion in the first half of 2025 growing at 2.1% organically. Our group gross margin improved by 20 basis points, driven by the positive development in the Consumer business.

Our commitment to growth through innovation is visible in our ongoing investments in research and development work. Our marketing and selling expenses increased both in absolute and relative terms, and we plan to continue investing behind our strong launches in the second half of the year. However, we want to emphasize our commitment to improving the return on investment within our marketing budget with a focus on working media, digital advertisement and precision marketing. Our general and administrative expenses slightly increased due to the phasing effects and an extraordinarily low first half last year. We expect this to normalize throughout the year.

As a result, we achieved an EBIT of EUR 836 million, slightly below the previous year's level. Our profit after tax amounted to EUR 561 million, which is EUR 29 million below the 2024 levels and mainly a result of extraordinary expenses, which occurred in the first half of 2025 on the back of an extraordinary gain due to the sale of real estate in the prior year period. Our financial results was also below the level of the first half 2024, largely due to an extraordinary income in 2024 and revaluations due to currency fluctuations in 2025. The underlying interest income in the first half of 2025 was comparable to the prior year period. With that, I would like to hand over to Vincent, who will provide the outlook for the rest of the year.

Thank you, Astrid. Let's conclude with our guidance for 2025. We acknowledge that our first half year results with an organic sales growth of 1.9% for consumer were below our initial expectations. The volatile developments in large areas of the world result in a high degree of uncertainty in the markets, which have remained challenging through July. Nevertheless, we remain optimistic about our ability to drive growth through strong innovations and the expansion into white spaces. We have strong confidence in our brands and our ability to navigate this time successfully. We also expect to deliver a stronger second half of the year than the first half as outlined in our presentation.

As a result, we expect an organic sales growth of the consumer business for the full year 2025 of 3% to 4%, reduced from the previous 4% to 6%. We have also taken the decision not to reduce our marketing budget proportionally as we want to ensure continued investments in our strategic launches. We remain committed to delivering profitable growth and an improvement of our EBIT margin. For 2025, the EBIT margin, excluding special factors, in the consumer segment is therefore expected to be 20 basis points above last year's level, down from the previous 50 basis points guidance. In the Tesa Business segment, we continue to expect organic net sales growth of 1% to 3%, with the development of the automotive market paying a crucial role in data mining, whether we reach the upper or lower end of this range.

Additionally, we confirm our guidance for the EBIT margin, excluding special factors, which is expected to be around 16%. Overall, our group organic sales growth is expected to be at around 3%, with the EBIT margin, excluding special factors, projected to be slightly above last year's level. Now over to you, Christopher for the Q&A.

Thank you, Vincent. Now we're ready to go to the Q&A. I note that we have a maximum of 2 questions per caller. I can see there are already a number of questions on the line. So the first one will be from Celine Pannuti from JP Morgan this morning.

So for instance, maybe my first question is trying to understand on the new targets for consumer, 3% to 4%. You mentioned that July still seems to be quite weak. So could you please explain how the cadence of growth will happen in the second quarter? Because you also mentioned that Epicelline will be launched in September. And what will drive -- I mean, which regions will drive an acceleration needed to get to your new 2% to 4% range.

My second question is on NIVEA. The weakness that you referred, I believe that Live was probably negative in Western Europe. And you did mention as well that Sun Care was quite good. So I would like to understand what's really going on within the skin care range. Is that what's driving the weakness? And do you think that -- is it an issue of pricing of being too elevated? Are you losing share in the market, explain and your confidence that the Western Europe market for NIVEA is in a good place as you launched the Epicelline range.

Thank you, Celine, for your both questions. So on the coming quarters, we have a few big events which are making us more optimistic. The first one you mentioned is the launch of Nivea Epicelline, which is starting in September. So we have the start of the selling and as we said, we have 30 countries and obviously the biggest countries, which will be covered by this launch until the end of December. We are pretty optimistic not only because we have seen the success of use also because we're coming with a more accessible proposal.

The price of [indiscernible] will be between 40% and 50% cheaper than you Sarin. So we see more into the value for money positioning of the brand. The second element, which is also important for NIVEA is also the development of China. As you know, we have taken the decision to clean and to make the house ready for Thiamidol. So we had a pretty negative Q1. Q2 has been better. Q3 will be still negative but clearly, in Q4, this is the moment when we'll start to see really a good momentum in China. So this is why [indiscernible] , we are pretty optimistic. The big thing also which is making us positive is that we have an increase of the net sales linked to launches by 98% in the second semester have a pretty unbalanced launch plan in 2025. Part of it is something we should have done better.

Another part is that we decided, of course, to give the time to uterine to establish selling before moving to Nivea a few months after. On your big strategic question on Nivea, I would say there are 2 phenomena. One is obviously fact that what used to be our big markets, growth markets, emerging markets and Eastern Europe, are no longer delivering the level of growth they had in the past. We are talking about market growth divided by 2, moving from 12% to 6%, which is obviously impacting the core business. We have also -- and we are not the first company mentioning that the issue we have with local brands, those local brands which are cheaper, which are based on the ingredient and which are obviously taking market share away from all of us.

What is making us positive that we might have found the solution is the very good results of the sun season. Because clearly, I think I mentioned that to you Sun is the most difficult category for us when you face private labels and local brands because it's very difficult to explain why my own Nivea SPF 50 is worth 3x the SPF 50 of a private label. And I think we came in 2025 with exactly what the recipe of [indiscernible] , which is not only with -- coming with a true innovation, we brought [indiscernible] , which is a major ingredient for us and alongside into fantastic product, which is called the primer, but also by having a much better story about the difference between the ever formula, particularly in terms of penetration to the skin versus the private label, and we are growing double digit.

So that is giving us a good idea of what we can do in the coming months, having breakthrough innovations, having found also the way to counter attack against local brands and private labels. And I think this huge portfolio of launches coming in the months to come. What is also -- a last good news we were mentioning Europe, we were, by far, the most aggressive company in terms of price increases, and we had some big regulations in some countries. We are almost done. I mean, we have covered 90% of the business. We have signed a pricing agreement. So we have nothing really big remaining, which means that we are now in a position to have to be back on shelf in some stores where we are delisted, to have full support of retailers in most of our upa countries. That's why we believe that the year to go will be much better than the year-to-date.

All right. So just to follow up on your price positioning in Nivea in Europe, are you happy with the level of pricing versus other brands?

But we are obviously more expensive than local brands. We are more expensive than private labels, but we'll find -- you will be able to find a beautiful Nivea Epicelline between EUR 25 and EUR 29, which is a pretty good price for the most innovative innovation in the last 12 months. So I think we are -- of course, it's more expensive than the Nivea cream that you know very well. But I think we have seen with Luminus that it's a great price positioning. So we are confident.

And the next question is from Callum Elliott from Bernstein.

I wanted to focus a little bit more on the longer term, if that's okay, and the strategic repositioning away from personal care towards is obviously a very challenging category right now, as you highlighted, despite the weak growth in H1, you're actually outperforming peers. And on top of that, in the scanner data, you see you losing a lot of market share in many of the categories that you seem to be deprioritizing in Personal Care, which is obviously sort of weighing on growth in addition to those market headwinds in skin care.

So my question is, in this kind of challenging environment, do you start to doubt the longer-term strategy at all? And then I have a follow-up, second question on margins as well.

We said it skin care is what we do the best. And we see that despite results, which were below expectation. We are growing much faster than anybody else. And you have seen already the results of the big, big skin care companies. What I think is a difficult in a short-term basis is obviously, we are losing market share and sales in categories where obviously, we have not really the right win.

If you look at the main saving, if you look at shows -- there are categories where we have no added value. I mean it's not really driven by innovation. It's cheap. We don't have a very good gross margin. So this is clearly not something in which we'll reinvest. What is absolutely essentially within personal care is deodorants. And this is a category which is not only very important for us in terms of sales, but where we believe and we know that we can bring really innovation. We created 15 years ago, Black & White, and we created this new category, and Black & White is by far the biggest franchise of tea. And we are coming today with something which you might say we should have done that a long time ago, which is meeting the skincare expertise of with obviously the best diluent formula and this is derma control. This is hitting the shelves right now. So we will clearly invest more in deo.

We'll rebalance slightly the investment between skin care and the other ends. And we believe this will help us making -- delivering a better growth in the months to come. So we clearly, to answer your question, we clearly believe that skin care should and will remain the absolute priority of the company, but there are some smart ways to bridge skin care with categories. I also mentioned plaster. I mentioned deo now, where we believe we can really bring something to the market, and this is what we're going to do bigger and better in the months to come.

Okay. And then on margins, obviously, you've trimmed the 50 basis points target for 2025 to prioritize growth. My question is over the more medium term, how do you think about balancing these priorities would you, for example, be willing to sacrifice the margin expansion again in 2026, given that it seems that industry growth is quite likely to remain challenging in the near term.

I will not give you a guidance for 2026, and we have time, and we see what happens in a year to go. I think clearly, we are absolutely committed outperforming the market and delivering profitable growth. That's clearly the 2 objectives. What is clear, Callum, we will never sacrifice growth and the long-term value generation for just the ring short-term margin. You imagine that, obviously, we could have delivered a 50 basis points, but it would have been done at the expense of marketing spending, which is absolutely not something we want to do.

So we will really, we want to grow. We want to overperform the market. We want to be sure that when we come with breakthrough technologies we're able to take over the market, look at what happened with [indiscernible] , even in being confronted to a big attack from a major competitor, we overperform and we are still, by far, the market leader in this category. That's the obsession that will be always what will drive the way we deliver the growth and the way we deliver our strategy.

And the next question is from Guillaume Delmas from UBS.

Very much -- 2 questions for me, please. The first one on Derma and the second one on [indiscernible] IP genetics. So on your derma franchise, I mean, no signs of slowdown whatsoever and despite a much tougher market. So question here is you're going to start lapping quite a challenging basis of comparison from Q3. I think you start annualizing the rollout of face care in the U.S. and then the launching of Epicelline from September.

So would you anticipate some normalization in your quarterly organic sales growth for Derma from Q3? Or at this stage, no reason to assume that you can't continue to print double-digit organic sales growth. And maybe confirming that in the persistent weakness you observed in July, that did not affect at all derma? And then my second question is on [indiscernible] Genetics. So launch in the second half, which is expected to boost sales I was wondering if you could help us quantify a little bit that impact on your numbers. I mean, just looking at the last big breakthrough under Nivea, which was Luminous I think in the year, let's call it, year 1, it was annual sales of EUR 45 million.

How much bigger do you think epigenetics can be relative to that year 1 of Luminous and also related to that, would it be fair to say you've got a relatively good visibility on that second half benefit from epigenetics? Because at this stage, it's mostly sell-in, invoicing and so all the sellout and repeat purchase that's not going to start being reflected in your organic sales growth until probably early 2026.

Thank you, Guillaume. On Derma, you're absolutely right remark that it's impressive. It's true that the delivering double digit in Q1 in Q2, and we are very optimistic for the year to go. -- is something that is really confirming that when you bring innovation to a brand like us in when you are also ambitious in terms of white spaces, it is paying out. And it's interesting to note that we are delivering this double-digit growth in the market, which is no longer growing the way it used to grow. We are back to a level of growth of the Derma market, which is equal to mass market, and we are overperforming the market.

The year to go, we are very optimistic. We might have a slower Q3 versus Q4 because obviously, as you mentioned, we launched Epicelline last year in Q3, but we will clearly deliver a yearly performance, which is in line with what we have seen on the Q1 and Q2. And as you know very well, we have also nice things coming next year with the launch of Activia, which is also extremely promising. Nivea epigenetics, we are clearly doing a much better job than Luminous, first, because we are coming with a proposal which is also, I would say, much larger. We are coming into the anti-aging category, which is by far the biggest category in the market. We're also much quicker our phasing, the first time ever, we are able to launch new initiatives in 30 countries. Normally, we are much slower also linked to the production and normally it takes us 12 months to do something like that. We are able to do that in exactly 5 months.

And also, we are very optimistic because we have a price also we learn also from Luminous. Luminous in some countries were too expensive. We're coming with a proposal which is pretty nice -- being EUR 25 is a pretty nice proposal. So we believe -- I don't want to give you figures now. we believe that we'll do better than the minus at the beginning. I have a few sellout with us, which are super promising. I got some results from Spain, for example. But obviously, we have to wait a little bit more. And as you rightly said, the sellout will be reflected into the selling of Q1 2026. And that will be one of the key success, I would say, a key driving forces of the beginning of the year for NIVEA next year.

And next one is Olivier Nicolai from Goldman.

Just a few follow since most of my questions have been asked already. First of all, could you quantify the negative impact that you had in China in terms of business realignment on Q2? What Q2 would have been or even H1 if you prefer would have been without but voluntary adjustment of your go to market in China ahead of the launch of Nivea Thiamidol. And then secondly, on the guidance, on the top line for consumer obviously, taking the midpoint of your guidance implies mid-single-digit growth in H2. If I look at your guidance, the 3% to 4% for consumer on the full year basis, could you give us perhaps a bit more details on the underlying assumptions you have to explain whether you're going to read 3 or whether you're going to reach 4?

On your -- I have to look at the figures for the first question, excluding China. On your second question, I think you have the 2 elements which are -- we take into account in the figures, the launch plan -- so we're increasing sales of new launches by 100%, 98% or so, and it's starting in September. That's, I would say, safe figures because, as [indiscernible] mentioned, this is selling. So this is something we control in a way that we know the orders of the customers. And we know are we going to play it in display and in terms of media.

And the second element, which is also important, we have a few also improvement. So I was mentioning China. China, the Q4 will be very, very positive because we'll be able to -- we are -- we will be clean from the personal care categories, which used to be -- which are no longer what we want to support, and we'll be also starting to launch non-Nivea domestic. If you exclude -- do we have the figures excluding China?

If you exclude China from the effect, we should be -- will be, in fact, in the Q2 will be single-digit negative is what we have.

And then the next one is Jeremy Fialko from HSBC.

So a couple from me. The first, if you take this innovation kind of pipeline got this bigger effect of launches in the second half. How much of that is attributable to the NIVEA Epicelline, then how much is just other stuff that you have going into the business. I really just sort of understand kind of how reliant you are on this. And then the second thing is talked about some of the retailer retaliation in Europe in Q2. Could you give us some sort of an indicator of kind of how much that cost in the quarter due to the extent to which you're free of that in Q3 and the back half of the year?

On the first question, Epicelline is around something like 20% of the pipeline. We have -- the deodorant business is extremely big for Beiersdorf and Derma control is we're launching a full line of, I think, something like [indiscernible] So that's also something like 40% of the portfolio. And then we have many, many other launches coming. We have also the sun season, which is starting in emerging countries in the south part of the hemisphere. We have Brazil. We have Australia. We have South Africa. So Epicelline is a big part of it, but we have also a very big things coming on Nivea, which are also making us optimistic.

On your second question, we had -- in fact, the Q2 was particularly impacted by customer retaliations. -- many retailers, particularly in Germany and France and in Benelux, which we're asking for deflection and not only accepting the price increase by winning a price decrease, which we refused. We came -- we ended up the negotiation with a price increase, which is around 2.6%, 2.7%, which is 2x to 3x higher than what competition has done. The good news, as I said, now it's over. We still have one not to issue with some local retailers, but it's over. And we have also some very good news in terms of relisting. Shower, for example, was a good example of a category which has suffered a lot from delisting. We will be back on shelf in the second semester.

So second semester, no big customer issue. They want all of them play big Epicelline and derma control. This is why, particularly in Europe, we are pretty optimistic regarding the year to go.

And sorry, any indication of how much that might -- if we take your Western Europe could see more organic sales growth, any idea of how much these delistings might have cost you in Q2? Any sort of.

Q2 -- I mean Europe, it has cost us 2 points of growth easily.

2% consumer growth due to the delisting do you think that will go to approximately 0 in Q3, Q4?

Absolutely 0. And again, back to shelf on some categories. When you get some deals with those retailers, all the SKUs, which were delisted are relisted, and that's obviously a benefit for the year to go.

And so could it be that you even overcompensate because of some -- you say because of some relisting where there was like a pipeline -- repipelining?

We can. But it's also, as you can imagine, they are always delisting the least strategic SKUs, they don't delist the big ones. So I would not expect a miracle here, but yes, we'll have some upside coming from this relisting, yes.

The next question is from Roshan Kwan from Morgan Stanley.

Just a couple for me, please. So first one, you upped your marketing spend year-over-year again, but obviously, growth a bit more muted. I recognize it's a challenging environment. You also talked about the increased competition from local brands. We've seen M&A activity picking up in the sector as well. I mean, I guess the question is, do you think the cost of doing business today is higher versus a year, 2 or 3 years ago as in you're not getting as much ROI for the incremental investment spend as before and actually to spend more to retain a similar level of sales?

I guess maybe another way to ask it, do you still think the 50 basis points margin expansion annually is the right target over the medium term? And then second question, can you just give us a bit more of an update on the China repositioning of Nivea and whether you think Thiamidol is still a 2026 event or if there's a possibility that you can get a head start in Q4? And more broadly, just in China in terms of the dynamics, LaPrairie, 3% growth encouraging. Some of your peers have spoken about a bit of a stabilization in that market, and you touched on that a little bit.

Can you just talk a little bit more about what you're seeing in China? And do you still expect La Prairie to be in growth in the second half of the year?

We will take the first question. I will deal with China.

Has actually probably the first 2 of your 3 questions, given that you also asked about midterm guidance. Let me answer your first one on marketing spend. We are not seeing marketing spend to get significantly more expensive. Just a little bit on the dynamics in the first half. We have had a number of very significant activities that we've done from, obviously, expanding epigenetics and [indiscernible] So clearly supporting that through strong launch plans also into this year.

We launched Thiamidol in the U.S., as you know, obviously, with a strong support plan. We have rolled out in India, as you know, Thiamidol as well. So we have had lots of activities. I think what we've, unfortunately, obviously not quite had on the other side. [indiscernible] is a stronger top line on Nivea, which we would have expected. And then you would have seen a bit of a different certainly marketing percent to spend, right? So there, just from that perspective, you're seeing a bit of a dynamic play out like that.

In terms of your 50 bps, as Vincent just said, look, we are in the midst of planning. We're trying to understand obviously, better where markets are going, but also very clearly how we need to support our very strong innovation pipeline also into the next year. So at this point in time, we're not sharing any further information on that.

On your question about China, we start to feel more positive about China. So we have already a very, very clear success with uterine use also faring the logic of cascading we started to go domestic with -- the middle with urine and you saw the figures, plus 62% on a pretty good basis. Clearly, we see that the huge appeal of the Thiamidol [indiscernible] and we will continue to grow obviously in the second semester.

We have in Luxury, it's important to mention that we grow. So we grow in net sales, we when you look at the retail sales and the sellout if you look at China, we are -- in the market is that plus 4%. We are growing at plus 5%, which is pretty good, and it's driven by China e-commerce at plus 34%. What is also good is that even in the very difficult environment, which is Travel Retail, China, which is minus 18%. The market -- so we're also gaining market share. So we see that the Chinese business now that we are coming with also a new look and feel in the counter. We are also much better in the way we drive or communication campaign on TikTok and [indiscernible] on JD and Tmall.

The new launch is coming. We are optimistic and China could be a good news for [indiscernible] The last thing obviously is NIVEA. So NIVEA will start to go domestic at the end of the Q4, and we will not be able to fully leverage [indiscernible] we are coming too late. So that's why, I mean, the big, big part of China will be more in 2026, but you will see already in the Q4, a pretty good figure on Nivea. The Nivea personal care cheap brands will be all gone. We'll have renegotiated all our partnership with retailers. We will have also new partners to go online. So very good, but more to come in 2021. But all in all, and I could also mention [indiscernible] growing double digit everywhere in China every quarter. China is getting better and better, and we're starting to look at China with more positive mood, I would say.

Then the next question is from David Hayes from Jefferies.

A couple from us -- so first, just on the margin and the spending. So just to be clear, are the budgets that you put in place for the brand spending unchanged effectively gone up potentially. And I guess related to that, is the 30 market rollout in the second half of Epsilon the original plan as well. And then just a little bit of detail on the margin of the line, which is in the underlying in EUR 39 million, I think it was in the first half, up about EUR 20 million. I just wonder what that is so that line. I just wonder whether you can tell us that EUR 20 million was related to?

And then the second question, just in terms of the performance. I mean mid-April when we had the last set of results, you were talking about potentially doing 4-plus in consumer in the second quarter. It feels like May and June must have got a lot worse quite quickly, and then you talked about July being still weak in the release last night. So what really happened in May and June? Was there a sharp drop-off and where? And then if you look at the sequential performance of underlying trends, as July better than May, June? Or is it still very similar as you come to those 3 months?

David, I will take your first question. So in terms of pending. Now what we do not want -- we do not want to have to cut to achieve the 50 basis points. We want to continue to support our new product innovations as we have planned. So that's really what this is related to. In terms of your second sub-question, I guess, related to spend. We didn't quite understand you were a bit hard to hear. If you are talking about our overall profitability, we did have some benefits in the prior year. One-time benefits both on some real estate that we sell as well as some financial investments that really helped us, and we have there an unfavorable comparison in this year because of these onetime benefits. So maybe that explains what your question was. Not sure if I answered that correctly.

I guess is that in special factors? Is the other line that's above the underlying operating pot, I think on the slide you showed it was $29 million versus $8 million, I think, last year. I'm just trying to see whether anything specific in that number? Is it always moves around a little bit.

Yes, this is what I mentioned. We did have some gains of a real estate transaction, the old campus that we own. So that's -- we got a benefit there last year, which we do not have this year.

On your second question, the issue we faced in May, June and July that we -- we had all the bad news in the sense that we saw clearly the market declining and particularly emerging markets in Eastern Europe. We were also suffering from retaliation of some customers in Europe, and we didn't have big launches that what is changing. We are not overoptimistic on the market dynamics, but we know and you know that skin care is a offer-driven market. We know that we are coming with new proposals, new offers. We know also what customers have ordered. We know that we have planned in terms of in-store activity, media influencers. This is why we believe it's going to change dramatically the situation of Never in the months to come.

But May, June, July where, I would say, the bottom of the year because no big launch, and this market dynamics is not really helping us.

And the next question is from Patrick Folan of Barclays.

Just on your regional performance, if we look at Latin America, there's been commentary on a weaker market there, the view is weaker, as you said. Can you comment maybe on what the year growth was in Brazil? And are you seeing strong competition in markets like Brazil? And should we expect an improvement in the second half across our whole Latin America business? And second, regionally, within Eastern Europe and in Poland, in particular, you commented on that this morning. Where are the pressure points there? Are there certain categories that are weaker than expected?

And then my second question is just on the 2025 just very quickly. Does the H2 consume organic guide, does that include potential for further mass market weakness as you kind of outlined on the call, it seems to be a bit of an issue. So is that incorporating maybe further weakness over the coming months?

On your first question, Brazil is a very interesting case. We have an extremely, extremely good performance on the user, and we are gaining -- I think we are growing by 60%. While we are declining in Brazil, we are hit, particularly on the other runs. We have been -- we have not launched anything new over the last years is why the launch of Derma control is very important. And it's a market which is complicated. We don't have great margin also. So we don't have so much space to invest and we are looking. We are struggling with local brands with so -- that's a big challenge.

Brazil is a challenge for us with NIVEA, but again, the launch of Demacontrol, the launch of Epicelline should help us and we've seen the success of Epicelline on Brazil. Poland, we have a few -- we have 2 problems. Poland, we have market dynamics, which is no longer what it used to be. So the market dynamics was divided by 2. We are back to a kind of market growth, which is similar to what you find in Western Europe. And until recently, I mean, countries like Poland were growing as fast as emerging market. And we have also -- we had some big retailer issues, big expectations from retailers that will decrease prices, which we didn't do. So we had some delisting I would say, we used to struggle a lot in France and Germany. Poland has been the third country joining the group. Again here, we found the deal. So we have no issue anymore in Poland. And we update the big launch plan coming. Epicelline is already in shelf. We have also Derma control. So hopefully, I'm expecting better news on Poland.

On your second question, very bounty, we have considered that there is absolutely no improvement in the market dynamics in both mass market and derma. So the guidance we are giving for the year to go is based on the fact that we are not over optimistic on market dynamics, but we know what we are bringing to the market, and we take into account the launch plan together also with the marketing spendings that will support these initiatives in the months to go.

And the next one is Victoria Petra from Bank of America.

I have a couple of clarification questions. First of all, it's a bit of a longer term as biometrics and Acne treatment, are you still testing this free of charge sampling how should we think about it going forward? Or do you still see a potential there? That's number one. And my second question just details on 2 markets. First of all, Bill category performance in LatAm. We have heard that there is some slowdown there. How does it fit into your extend that dermatological builder and launch expectations for the second half? And when we look at La Prairie 3% sales in China, what is the approximate split between travel, off-line and e-com in China for LaPrairie brand?

On your first question, acne, so it's the launch of, we call it, Activia next year is doing extremely well. So as we decided we are -- we have given 3 products to top key opinion leader across the world. I think we have something like 300 dermatologists, which are using the product right now with our patients and is doing extremely well. And I got yesterday night, the first results. We have it's absolutely impressive. We have 77% of the patients which are already seeing a bigger improvements and the extraordinary news is that it's after 4 weeks, while our concept or promise is after 8 weeks. So we are pretty happy. We'll share those results in the ADV, the bigger dermatologist Congress in September.

But more than ever, we believe that this launch next year will be a game end we are extremely excited for what it can bring to outran to buyers of [indiscernible] On your second question, I mean, the deans market in Lat Am and particularly in Brazil is struggling. But it's also like beauty market, also driven by innovation. And we must say that some of our competitors has done a pretty good job, even being able to launch some pretty premium offer with a nice concept. We are coming with Derma control now. We have very good feedback from retailers. We have big, big display campaign advertising. So we believe that it will help us making a better job. It's also better gross margin. So all of that is making us more optimistic, but still it's a difficult market. And we don't have an extremely beautiful P&L with this category in Latin America and particularly in Brazil.

When you look at China on e-commerce, I think e-commerce today is close to, I think, 10% of our sales in China. I'm talking LaPrairie and it's growing. It's growing. So I don't know how far we can go. As you know, we are not doing any promotions. So we are not driven by the big 50% or 80% discount that you can find with other competitors. So it will never be 40%, 50% of the business. But today, 10% could be tomorrow, 20%. I think we are very happy with the way we have been able to work in this segment, having the different offers also for JD for Tmall for TikTok, allowing us also to recruit younger buyers also allowing us to recruit people based in Tier 3 and 4 cities where we do not have a brick-and-mortar counter.

So it's a very good addition. And how far can we go with e-commerce, we'll see so far, so good, and the products which are coming now will also help us growing this part of the business. And while developing travel retail outside Anan, and then is still difficult. And while also developing the business in brick-and-mortar, we continue to open stores. We are extremely -- we have a small distribution in China. We have only one in stores, which is very small in comparison with the industry. Every year, we'll continue to open 2 to 10 stores depending on the locations and where we believe we have potential to grow.

And the next question is from Tom Sykes of Deutsche Bank.

Just again, on the longer-term profitability. I think if you look at the consumer margin guidance for this year, it's down about 170 basis points, something like that versus, say, 2018 to pre-COVID presume of the resets. Your organic growth over that time period in consumer is going to be 45%. Your gross margin is actually going to be above probably depending on what happens in H2, above where you were in 2018. So where is the biggest -- what's happening to profitability?

Why are we not getting this leverage? And is it just La Prairie or do you see it as other profit pools within the consumer business just whether it be competition or increased cost of doing business is just not happening. And then secondly, on the whole kind of H2 launches, everybody is talking about launches being higher in H2. I wondered whether you -- is that something you also do believe that the launch activity is going to be much higher? And ultimately, isn't this just a retailer decision?

Like if they want to restock your launches will be successful. If they don't want to restock. They won't be successful because they're as under pressure, and we're not hearing very many people talking about restocking at the moment.

Tom, I will take your first question related to longer-term profitability. Look, there is a few, I would call them bigger impacts why we are not better than we are, as you mentioned. One is we clearly, with our strategic reset a few years ago said we needed to catch up in strategic areas and overinvest to ensure we close the gap that unfortunately was there in the prior period. And we've spoken about that many times. But really across a number of areas where we really needed to catch up, obviously, on e-commerce, digitalization, digital marketing and so on. We really need sustainability.

So there are a number of areas that we have invested heavily to catch up. And I think we've made real progress and closed many of those gaps completely. So that's a really great place. But that has obviously cost money. On gross margin, you have to remember, we have seen significant cost increases over that period of time as well. So we've been able to absorb that. But unfortunately, that's not really delivered a whole lot on top. And then I think the last point is as you've mentioned, to be honest, we were hoping to have a luxury business that would be significantly bigger than it is right now.

We have made some midterm planning just a couple of years ago and again, updated last year, where when you look back, we were hoping to have a much larger business there and given the margins, the profitability profile of that business, at least in the past, we would have been at a very different place now. So the good news is we've been able to mostly absorb that with the remainder of the business. So I'm quite happy with that. But obviously, that is getting harder, as you can imagine.

On your second question, Tom, it's -- the question of destocking is no longer something that retailers are using. They display your product if it's selling out. I can give you an example of Ulta, which is putting you at the bottom of the shelf in the beginning and then if you sell more, you go up and up and up. That's the way it works. So there is no emotions linked to a launch. I mean we had discussions with mass retailers since February, in fact, when we started to show the results of [indiscernible] I can tell you that the support of all retailers across the world has been absolutely phenomenal. They are -- they just look at the figure, they say we have to do that.

When you come, when we came with Derma control and we said we have this unique opportunity to combine the expertise we have in the loans and the fact that we are the best skin care company. That's obviously something where we got a lot of support. So stocking, destocking is something that you use in sun care because you are always hoping to have a great season. And the good news for us is that because we have a fantastic performance, we'll have no issue of returns of destocking, but not really in other categories. So what we have today is a desire of retailer to bet on the big launches I was mentioning before, starting in September, [indiscernible] campaign. This is already in terms of selling the biggest ever launch of Biosev.

Again, we have the orders. We have everything is planned. We have no consumer customer retaliations. We have a lot of media support behind those launches. This is why we feel pretty optimist. And then as always, the second moment of tools will be the sellout and the third moment of truth the repurchase. And I think I gave you the figures of us. It makes us super optimistic.

Sorry, could I ask one follow-up. Just I think you said before that around 50% of NIVEA would be renovated or have some kind of newness, et cetera, attached to it. How much of that -- how much was that in H1, please?

Something like 20% because with the big renovation are coming -- coming in the second semester. It's mostly on the body, the Nivea body line and other deodorants, they run [indiscernible] and others. So the majority of the renovation is coming also in the second semester. But that's -- you see that's not as big as a breakthrough innovation. And it's just being sure that we bring new news that we're able to come with a new story, a new advertising campaign, new formula in some cases. It doesn't have the same strength are the breakthrough launch like thermal control and the selling.

And the next one is [indiscernible] from Dow Jones.

Just one second. Yes, I want to elaborate a little bit on the tariffs. I haven't heard so much from -- by us about additional costs expected from the various new import tariffs. Croft Gamble said something they would be expecting USD 1 billion per year. And Trump will next week announce sector import tariffs also on the pharma industry. How could this affect you? How could this affect by asset for elaborating a little bit on that.

Thanks a lot for your question. Look, it's a bit of a moment in time since there is not enough certainty yet on all the tariffs. But as we stand at the moment, the impact on Beiersdorf pretty small. We produce what we sell in the U.S. A very large portion of that is produced either in Mexico or the U.S., very large portion currently, as things stand right now, Mexico, our products fall under USMCA so are covered and would not be impacted by tariffs, but of course, that could also change.

But at the moment, that's not impacted. And then it's what we produce here in Europe. Yes, we do have a little bit of production in Europe and then some production in Switzerland. And certainly, we don't like any impact. We would rather obviously use this money differently invested behind our brands. But at the moment, it is still quite a small impact. And especially this year because we have, of course, mitigated as much as we can by shipping earlier to the U.S. over the last few months. So far, so good,

but let me -- have you counted a little bit more? I mean that's what you already said for the first quarter and also you transfer a little bit upfront. But is -- have you done a little bit more of a math that you could quantify, give some figures to us today?

Yes, we have, of course, done the math, but again, the math changes all the time. So we don't like to put numbers out that could be, again, obsolete tomorrow. But as I said, it is a pretty small impact at the moment.

And then the next question in line is from Michal Mana of BNP Pariba.

Michele I have 2, please. So first, on this pricing dynamic and delistings. I was just trying to understand how did your competition respond to those potential demands from retailers from -- for price reductions. I'm trying to understand whether some of them agreed for price reductions and then you may find it a bit more difficult to maintain your volume share in the coming months? And one housekeeping question. If I look at the other financial results, we have a negative number of around EUR 8 million. It was a positive EUR 15 million in H1 last year. Could you please help us how to think about the full year number in this line?

I'll take the first question. We -- I will, of course, not comment what competitors did in terms of price increase. Well, I know that if I look at our main competitors. The price increase we did on EV is much, much higher than what happened for the other brands. Some of them decreased prices, some of them increase -- did not increase prices. We increased prices. We wanted cover the increased cost of goods. Again, we've been through that was painful. But as of now, we are good to go only a few remaining local retailers, but the other ones we signed a deal, which is not deflation, which is helping us improving further our gross margin and finding means to invest on our brands.

Your second question, we had a positive gain and some investments in the prior year. And we, unfortunately, have a negative revaluation related to a long-term loan in China. Happy to have the team through that later just because it is a bit more technical in nature, but that difference is what the swing is based on.

And then we have one last question from Matthias Inverati from Reuters.

Another question on tariffs, if I may. Ladies based in Switzerland will all be hit from Trump tariffs on Switzerland as it's based there and what is extent is it would be it?

Yes, that is part of, obviously, the news we did not care very much for this last week, 39% on Swiss products, obviously, that would have an impact at the moment. that said not necessarily for this year. We have already stocked for La Prairie in the U.S. So we are good there, and very much hope, obviously, that the negotiations that we know are furiously going on right now between Switzerland and the U.S. would produce a better picture because our products are made in Switzerland. It does say that on our La Prairie products. So we would then need to really reflect that in consumer pricing to obviously offset.

Thank you. Thank you. It looks like that was the last question. This concludes our first half year earnings call. Beiersdorf's next Investor Relations event will be the release of our third quarter results on October 23, 2025. We appreciate your interest in Beiersdorf. Have a great remaining summer, and we look forward to seeing you back again here in October. Thank you very much.

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