By Natalie Grover and Maggie Fick
LONDON (Reuters) – Haleon, the world’s biggest standalone consumer health business with brands such as Sensodyne toothpaste and Advil painkillers, on Thursday forecast 4-6% organic revenue growth in 2023.
The company was created last July when British drugmaker GSK spun off its consumer health business in the biggest listing in Europe for more than a decade.
In its first full-year results, CEO Brian McNamara said Haleon had navigated a highly volatile environment.
Players in the consumer health field, like other sectors, have had to contend with sharp cost increases across the business, including raw materials, transport and energy linked to the war in Ukraine and lingering COVID-19 disruptions.
Rivals with consumer health operations, such as Bayer and Reckitt, have charged higher prices to partly offset broader falls in sales volumes.
“Our organic (full-year) revenue growth … was well balanced between volume and price, with two thirds of the business gaining or holding share,” McNamara said.
The London-listed company comprising health assets previously owned by GSK and Pfizer reported organic revenue growth of 9% last year, just ahead of the 8-8.5% increase it had predicted for 2022.
Haleon’s respiratory health unit saw organic growth of 32.6% to 1.6 billion pounds in 2022, helped by a strong cold and flu season with sales significantly above 2019 levels in North America and Europe in the fourth quarter, the company said.
Respiratory viruses have returned with a vengeance in the Northern hemisphere in the first winter free of COVID-19 restrictions since the start of the pandemic.
GSK in June had estimated Haleon would see annual organic revenue growth of 4% to 6% over the next three to five years, exceeding some expectations, given a typical industry average of 3% to 5%, according to Barclays.
On Thursday, the company affirmed its medium term guidance, saying it expects to incur 150 million pounds in restructuring costs in 2023 and 2024 to generate savings of about 300 million pounds over the next three years.
As of December, Haleon cut its debt to about 9.9 billion pounds, from roughly 10.7 billion pounds three months earlier.
(Reporting by Natalie Grover and Maggie Fick in London; Editing by David Goodman and Alexander Smith)
