Procter & Gamble Hygiene and Healthcare (PGHH) and Gillette India (GI), both listed entities of Procter & Gamble (P&G) India, said in their investor calls on Thursday that they remained “cautiously optimistic” about fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) demand in FY26 amid shifting consumption trends. While non-food inflation continued to be within the RBI’s target range of 4%, food inflation was a key monitorable, the companies stated. Also, the companies would keep a close watch on evolving global trade policies to understand its impact on inflation and demand.
“Rural demand is showing signs of healthy recovery while urban India continues to face challenges,” PGHH and Gillette India leadership said in the calls led by MD and CEO of P&G India V Kumar.
“We continue to hold a cautiously optimistic outlook for the future. With steady government and private investment as well as economic indicators of tax collections and foreign reserves continuing to be healthy, there are reasons to be optimistic,” PGHH CFO Mrinalini Srinivasan said. PGHH is best known for making Whisper sanitary pads and Vicks cough drops in India.
Gillette India’s CFO Srividya Srinivasan said that the company would remain committed to driving “sustained and balanced growth” in a dynamic market environment.
“While the Indian economy has done better than its peers globally, there has been a sharp slowdown (in FMCG) recently versus the last three years. Though the government has announced interventions in the Budget, we expect the impact of these on urban consumption to take some time,” Srinivasan of Gillette India said. Besides male grooming, Gillette is also known for oral care brands such as Oral-B.
The companies also said their US parent was yet to develop market-level plans after recently announcing it would undertake 7,000 job cuts over two years. The companies have also switched to an April-March reporting year from a July-June accounting period in India. The Cincinnati-based P&G crossed the $2-billion sales mark in India in the fiscal year ended March 2024, more than three decades after entering the country. P&G India competes with Unilever’s local unit Hindustan Unilever, which is over three times its size. P&G has four units in India, including PGHH and Gillette India as well as unlisted P&G Home Products and pharmaceutical arm P&G Health.
Both PGHH and Gillette India have seen mid-single-digit sales growth in the last 10 years, their CFOs said. Profit growth, meanwhile, has varied, with PGHH seeing about 8% bottom-line growth and Gillette India seeing around 19% profit growth in the last decade. P&G also controls more than half the market for Whisper, Vicks and Gillette (razors), having consistently gained shares in these segments over the years, experts said.
PGHH and Gillette India management also said that e-commerce and quick commerce were becoming important platforms for the companies, prompting them to co-create consumer communication, engagement and special packs for these channels to tap into exponential growth.
While the feminine hygiene, health care and grooming categories had grown over 100 times in the last three decades, the runway for growth was significant, the companies said.
“The competent landscape has evolved in the last few years, and more players have entered the category. The direct-to-consumer, unorganised and small sector has witnessed growth in niche channels. At a national level, they cumulatively still represent less than 10% of the domestic feminine hygiene market,” Srinivasan of PGHH said.
The companies have also put in place robust productivity measures, which has seen PGHH achieve cost savings of over Rs 93 crore in the nine-month period of July 2024 to March 2025 while Gillette India achieved cost savings of over Rs 40 crore in the period under review.