Reckitt Benckiser Group plc (RKT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Welcome to Rekits Q1 Trading Update. I'm Nick Ashworth, Head of Investor Relations here at Rekits, and I am here with our CEO, Chris Licht, and our CFO, Shannon Eisenhardt, who will take you through some prepared remarks before we then take your questions. Before we start, I would like to draw your attention to the usual disclaimer in respect to forward-looking statements contained on page 7 of our R&S published this morning. I'll now hand over to Chris. Thank you, Nick. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. core record delivered 1.3% like-for-like net revenue growth in Q1. This was impacted by the end of a very weak season, a competitive environment in Europe, and particularly in the auto dish category, as well as geopolitical disruptions. Excluding the seasonal business, core record delivered 3.1% like-for-like growth. This was led by high single-digit growth in emerging markets, with China and India both delivering double-digit growth, and Dettol continuing to perform strongly in both countries, driven by innovation. Our North American non-seasonal business was strong, with Lysol up double digits in the quarter ahead of the spring cleaning season, and continued strong performance with Lysol air sanitizer and Lysol laundry sanitizer. In Europe, Autodish remains a very competitive category, but the actions we've been taking to improve our market share performance have led to Finnish regaining leadership across our largest seven markets. But we have clearly seen headwinds in Q1. We've just closed on one of the weakest seasons on record. As an example, incidence levels across our categories in North America were down around 10% versus the prior season. we have seen similar dynamics across all our regions impacting seasonal performance. Europe category ...