Mike Read: Good afternoon. My name is Mike Read, I lead our International and our SPD business. So, let me just start with the international story. As Rick mentioned earlier, we have upgraded our Evergreen model, so what used to be 6% organic growth, we now moved to 8% organic each year. So, an exciting step for the division. If I break that down a bit, we’re about $1 billion in size. There’s kind of two parts to it. We have six subsidiary markets that go direct to retail. It’s about 63% of our total business, Canada, UK, Mexico, Australia, France, and Germany. The remaining 37% is through our Global Markets Group. So, we operate in about 100 different countries. We partner with 400 value distributor partners around the world.
So, our Global Markets business has been our fastest growing over the last few years and will continue to do so. And just to make that kind of point, if you go back to 2009, the international division has tripled in size. And during that time, the Global Markets Group has doubled in importance. So, we see that trend continuing well. While we’ve had strong growth in our subs, we do expect GMG to continue to outpace that. If I just give a summary of 2023, a very strong year. We had a breakout quarter in Q1, almost 12% growth, followed by 6.1% in Q2, 7.3% in Q3, and we finished strongly with 9.0% in Q4. So, a full year organic of 8.5%. We had strong growth across all our subsidiary markets and double-digit growth across our GMG region as well.
So, across the board, really strong results. And that just shows the 6% to 8% Evergreen model change. If you look back over a number of years, other than the sort of setback from last year, we’ve had pretty consistent growth across a number of years and pitching above 8% in 2023 at 8.5%. I think the good news is relative to our peers, we’re still very much underdeveloped. So, we have about 17% of our sales as a company comes from international. We are very much in growth mode. Many of our peers are in the 59% to 60% range, so a long runway ahead. But what’s most encouraging about that runway is we’ve got a portfolio that travels extremely well as do our acquisitions. So, we’ve got a combination of US power brands like ARM & HAMMER, OXICLEAN, VITAFUSION that travel very well, and that’s complemented with a strong personal care and OTC portfolio headlined by BATISTE, STERIMAR and FEMFRESH.
So, brands that aren’t necessarily commercialized in the US that are playing important roles for the International division. I think most notably though is acquisition has been a really big part of the growth story within International. If you go back to a few years back with the acquisition of WATERPIK, that’s one of our biggest brands internationally. And we’re thrilled with the addition of THERABREATH and HERO. So, just rolling both those brands out globally, both are on track and actually making a big splash already with lots to come. So, we’re really excited about adding those two pieces to the portfolio. If I just sort of summarize sort of three key things to think about from an international perspective, Rick talked about some of the investments that we’re making, particularly in our GMG group, but we are putting a lot of infrastructure process, IT to just shore up and be able to support the growth that’s coming from our Global Markets Group.
We’ve also added a lot of capabilities around portfolio strategy, revenue growth management, and as Surabhi mentioned, just really upskilling our digital e-commerce capability. And certainly, the acquisition additions and just getting on the front foot on both those acquisitions are the focus areas for international. All right. So, over to Specialty Products. So, the Specialty Products division, we are holding our Evergreen model at 5% growth. If you just break that into kind of two main parts, we have an Animal Nutrition business, which is about two-thirds of the business. You see sort of the impact of MEGALAC. The rest is Specialty Chemicals is about a $320 million business. If you kind of unpack that a little bit, a tough year in 2023, we’re down minus 8%.
Most of that is MEGALAC-driven. So if you take MEGALAC out, we’re actually in positive growth, and the Animal Nutrition business was in stronger growth than that. Most importantly is, we’re still very focused on building out our portfolio and supporting prebiotics, probiotics, nutritional supplements across a wide range of species, dairy, cattle, swine, poultry. So nothing really changes. MEGALAC’s coming out but the rest of the portfolio is strong. We have high growth ambitions for it. And most notably, we’re focused on international similar to the consumer side. So if you go back to kind of 2015, we are less than 6%. We’re now at 17%, which is in the parallel of our consumer business, last year, grew 25%. So, really strong growth internationally as well.
So with that, I’ll pass back to Matt Farrell.
Matt Farrell: People who are long-term shareholders have a pretty good handle on this. You understand the brands and the growth rates and the margins and all that kind of good stuff. But the long-term shareholders have, I think, a better understanding of the importance of the culture in the company. And the culture of Church & Dwight is described in our Annual Report, and it’s — you can read it. It says, we’re a blue-collar organization. That doesn’t mean — that’s not a dress code thing. This is — we’re just gritty people. A lot of high aptitude people. There’s a lot of people that join our company that come from big CPG, and get kind of tired of the big company thing and want to go small and we consider us so small. As we say, we’re blue-collar, we’re high aptitude and we’re underdogs.
There’s a lot of the people we compete with that are much bigger than we are. But beyond that, for the last five years, we’ve been getting into predictive analytics. So, we go — you’re sitting in meetings at Church & Dwight, everybody wants to know, what are the facts, get the facts. The next thing is Surabhi described is we becoming digitally savvy. We’ve embraced that, and it’s throughout the company. And one of the things we said in our release and today is that, hey, we’re going to be putting more money into this, that we’re going to spend more money in e-commerce, both people but also technology. And just to kind of round out what our culture is like, we do embrace diversity. That’s a super important and teamwork is super important. And finally, we’re risk takers, because as companies get bigger, they often want to pull back and you make decisions in groups and consensus, and that slows things down.
