Colgate-Palmolive Company has reported sales of $3.884 billion (–3 percent) with operating profit of $879 million and net income of $22 million in the first quarter 2019.
Colgate-Palmolive has lost sales revenue despite achieving 28 percent growth in e-commerce channels in the first quarter. Colgate-Palmolive achieved strong e-commerce business in North America. But Colgate-Palmolive’s e-commerce business in Asia was flat.
Gross profit margin was 58.9 percent in first quarter 2019 versus 60.2 percent in first quarter 2018.
Colgate-Palmolive’s advertising investment increased 3 percent to $429 million versus $416 million in the year ago quarter. Colgate-Palmolive does not reveal its IT budget or investment in technology efforts. Colgate-Palmolive CIO Mike Crowe is heading its digital transformation initiatives.
Colgate-Palmolive revealed that Cloud and e-commerce delivered strong toothpaste growth.
Elta MD and PCA Skin care businesses are delivering very strong growth across a number of channels, including Professional, DTC and e-commerce in North America.
Colgate-Palmolive sales in Asia-Pacific fell 8 percent, driven by 2.5 percent drop in volume, and flat pricing. Colgate-Palmolive’s Oral Care business faces challenging conditions in China due to shift into e-commerce.
Colgate-Palmolive’s Hills business has achieved strong growth led by the United States with particularly strong growth in e-commerce, pet specialty, and farm and feed.
Colgate-Palmolive said it is expanding the availability of its products through distribution and new markets. Michael A Corbo is the chief supply chain officer of Colgate-Palmolive.
Colgate-Palmolive in 2015 launched a 5-year-long supply chain transformation strategy called Global Supply Chain 2020, aimed at boosting supply chain innovation, agility and operational excellence, research firm Gartner said.
Colgate-Palmolive will simplify processes and structures. Colgate-Palmolive is revamping its innovation process to reduce the time to market.
Colgate-Palmolive is already using Google Cloud and G Suite with the help of Google Cloud partner SADA Systems, Colgate-Palmolive migrated to G Suite within six months, reveals
Google Cloud.
Colgate-Palmolive will enhance the use of data and will be looking to digitize organization very differently.
Colgate-Palmolive will focus on digitization us to drive productivity across the organization.
“We know that data can enable faster growth and faster decision-making. Data drives further ROI in media, and data-driven marketing is far better return-on-investment than the way we are spending today. We can use data to improve assortment in e-commerce,” said Colgate-Palmolive CEO during an earnings call.
Colgate-Palmolive has decided to change its SAP system deployed in 1994 to SAP S/4HANA in order to simplify processes significantly, drive more standardization and better reporting and decision-making.
Technology major IBM earlier said Colgate-Palmolive Pakistan has upgraded its SAP ERP applications and migrated to the SAP HANA database, powered by IBM Power Systems servers.
Rajani Baburajan
