Procter & Gamble — known for diapers like Pampers and Luvs, as well as products like Tide, Bounty and Pantene — said Thursday that its new high-end Pampers Amore diaper line has been an early success in the U.S. Chief Financial Officer Andre Schulten said during P&G’s quarterly earnings call that the gains were helped by “insights that fewer babies in each household means parents spend more per baby.” That trend, he said, is one of the biggest future growth drivers for the baby-care space writ large, and it’s already taking shape worldwide. Kevin Rudd: Altman Must ‘Lift His Game’ after OpenAI Data Breach Play video: Kevin Rudd: Altman Must ‘Lift His Game’ after OpenAI Data Breach “It holds true in the U.S., it holds true in China,” Schulten said.
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The CFO said that catering to “premium” customers via safer ingredients and higher-quality materials — P&G says the Amore diaper offers a “cashmere feel” — has been a winning formula for the company, as inflation makes customers more selective about what they buy. Amore, he said, is expected to bring in more than $100 million in sales within its first year. In China, Pampers Prestige diapers, which are made with silk materials, have been growing at a midteens rate over the past eight quarters, according to P&G.
Midtier diaper offerings are “effectively nonexistent” in the nation, Schulten noted. P&G did not immediately respond to questions about inflation’s role in the higher spending and whether the trend had emerged in its other businesses. But the momentum helped lift the company’s stock by 5.6% on Thursday, as investors cheered its better-than-expected first-quarter results.
Organic sales in the P&G’s baby-care segment rose by the “mid-single digits” over that period, driven by higher volumes — a measure of the amount of product sold — and “favorable premium product mix,” it said. The stock’s move higher made P&G the best performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday, and marked its biggest percentage gain since March 26, 2020, when the stock rose 6.4%. P&G shares are up 15.6% so far this year, but off highs reached in 2024.
The U.S. birth rate continues to fall from previous decades. The nation’s general fertility rate fell 1% last year when compared to 2024, and has fallen 23% since 2007, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consumer-goods companies have tried to roll out higher-quality fare to stand out among increasingly cautious shoppers and compete with retailers’ store brands.
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