Over two-thirds of urban Indians face financial stress, slowing demand for Oral Care products: Colgate-Palmolive CEO Prabha Narasimhan
Colgate-Palmolive India
managing director and CEO Prabha Narasimhan on Thursday said more than two-thirds of urban Indian consumers are facing financial stress, leading to a slowdown in overall consumer demand, including for oral care products.
While 30% urban consumers are resilient, the rest are delaying purchases of daily household and personal products, she said.
"The bottom 70% of urban India...are under pressure, and that pressure is leading to an impact on oral health volumes, as much as it is leading to impact on various other categories (and) FMCG volume," Narasimhan told analysts at an earnings call after the firm's March quarter results.
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She expects a revival in the second half of FY26. "Rural (India) continues to look like a real bright spot. So, we see this getting sequentially better, and particularly towards the back half of this year," she said.
The company behind the eponymous toothpaste brand controls half the oral care segment in the country.
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Consumers are still not shifting to lower-priced products and are instead extending their product usage a little longer, Narasimhan told analysts.
"Consumers don't stop buying or using toothpaste. The way to adjust how much you spend on this category is actually by adjusting how much toothpaste you put on your toothbrush, and therefore the titration downwards of that usage is what leads to a decline in volume," she explained. "We are not actually seeing downtrading in the market, and the reason for the slowing volume growth is actually consumers titrating the amount of toothpaste that they use. So, it's not that consumers drop out of the category. The overall penetration of the toothpaste category remains at its near universal level. It doesn't wobble."
Narasimhan expects the macro indicators and the company's interventions through new innovations to help reverse the slowdown in demand.
Colgate-Palmolive on Wednesday reported a 2% year-on-year fall in its revenue for the quarter ended March, while its net profit declined 7%. Demand for daily groceries and other household and personal products worsened to a two-year low during the March quarter, indicating delayed turnaround for India's fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector.
Global research firm Kantar said FMCG volume sales growth in the January-March quarter was 3.5%, slowest since the 2023 March quarter.
A year ago, the market had grown 5.5% during the same quarter.
Earlier this year, Colgate had said India was the most prominent market globally to experience fierce competition among consumer goods companies, marked by steep discounting to attract urban shoppers.
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