Dear Colgate-Palmolive Shareholders

Our 2025 performance highlights the resilience of our business model and the strength of our brands. In an operating environment characterized by consumer uncertainty and a global slowdown in category growth, Colgate-Palmolive people operated with determination and focus. We delivered net sales growth, organic sales growth and, on a Base Business basis, increases in gross profit and earnings per share, while generating record operating cash flow to invest in the business and drive total shareholder return. Net sales grew 1.4%; organic sales* also grew 1.4%, on top of strong 7.4% organic sales growth in 2024, led by strength in oral care and pet nutrition, excluding private label as we have exited that non-strategic business. We strengthened our balance sheet and our Board of Directors authorized an increase in the quarterly cash dividend. This was our 63rd consecutive year of dividend increases and our 131st consecutive year paying a dividend.

Despite the many challenges we faced, including sluggish category growth, significant raw material inflation and the impact of incremental tariffs, our strategy is working and delivering strong performance. We have grown our company significantly over the last five years, driving consistent top and bottom-line growth as we look to deliver peer-leading total shareholder return. While we expect the difficult operating environment and slower category growth to continue in the short term, the fundamentals of our business-healthy brands, strong market shares and a diverse global footprint-position us well to deliver peer-leading performance in the long term.

Launching Our 2030 Strategy

2025 marked a pivotal moment for our company as we completed our 2025 strategic plan and introduced our 2030 strategy to the entire organization. Our 2025 strategy drove significant progress, adding $5 billion in net sales. Our 2030 strategy does not call for wholesale changes; rather, we are building on the strong base we created in the 2025 plan to accelerate the rate of change as we adapt to a more complex and dynamic environment. Our 2030 strategy focuses resources on the areas that will deliver the greatest value, including the following key pillars: leveraging the global reach and penetration of our brands; building the incremental benefit of superior, science-based innovation supported by an agile and resilient supply chain; harnessing the power of best-in-class omni-channel demand generation; leading in capabilities like data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) and evolving our high-impact, inclusive culture.

Accelerating Science-Led Innovation

Innovation remains a key priority for our company. Over the last five years, we increased our percentage of sales from innovation by nearly 600 basis points, but we believe we need to step that up further. To accelerate our innovation, we are focusing on people-centric insights, utilizing new innovation models to accelerate discovery and incubation and scaling our innovation efficiently across markets. We are deploying proprietary AI tools to analyze deep consumer insights and generate new concepts, images and copy. We are even utilizing "digital consumer twin" panels to test and validate ideas rapidly, giving us a probability of success score before a product ever hits the shelf. This approach allows us to test, iterate and refine products faster than ever as we focus on delivering perceivable superiority with innovations that solve real problems and create value.

We are seeing the success of this approach across our portfolio. In Europe, our elmex franchise is driving record toothpaste market shares with premium, science-driven offerings in the therapeutic oral care segment. In Asia Pacific, Colgate Optic White Purple toothpaste and serum is fueling growth in the whitening segment. In Pet Nutrition, Hill's continues to outperform the category by staying disciplined and true to its science-based positioning, gaining share in key fast-growing segments like cat and wet pet food. Moving forward, we will continue to invest to accelerate innovation, particularly in geographies like the U.S. and key emerging markets.

Driving Omni-Channel Demand Generation

A central pillar of our 2030 strategy is a shift toward what we call omni-channel demand generation, or ODG. The days of relying on television networks and 30 second commercials are far in the past; today, we must understand the "moments that matter" in the path to purchase journey where consumers are discovering and shopping for products both offline and online, often simultaneously.

ODG requires us to behave and process inputs differently to execute more effectively on the ground. We need to seamlessly integrate our commercial spend across the organization to ensure our communication and creative content truly address consumer needs to drive awareness, consideration, purchase and loyalty. As part of this effort, we are leveraging AI and working with our agency partners to create a global content supply chain that allows us to iterate creative assets efficiently, satisfying the high-speed, multi-format requirements of today's digital landscape.

Leading in Data, Analytics and AI

A critical enabler of our 2030 strategy is further enhancing our use of data and technology. Over the course of our 2025 strategy, we have built and scaled foundational capabilities in digital, data and analytics. A great example of this is how we are advancing our revenue growth management capabilities. We have moved from descriptive analytics to predictive models. This advanced technology allows us to ingest billions of data points, from volume and sales to margin inputs, and receive recommendations in minutes on how to optimize pricing and promotion. This shift allows us to make smarter, faster decisions that drive value for both Colgate-Palmolive and our retail partners.

Now, under our 2030 strategy, we are integrating AI across our enterprise as a transformative driver of growth and productivity. AI will enable our teams to accelerate our innovation discovery and testing and provide the ability to generate on-brand content at scale to fuel our ODG initiatives. On the efficiency side, we have deployed advanced AI tools to the entire organization to upskill the team and allow them to create new use cases to drive better outcomes in every function. We will also seek to disrupt our own legacy processes and reconstruct them using the power of AI tools, with humans in the loop, to drive enterprise value.

Strategic Growth and Productivity Program

To deliver the productivity and efficiencies necessary to drive future growth, support our 2030 strategy and drive margin expansion, we announced a new productivity program, the Strategic Growth and Productivity Program (SGPP), in 2025. This program is in addition to our ongoing funding-the-growth productivity initiatives. The SGPP is a catalyst that will help us optimize our global supply chain and simplify and streamline our organizational structure to drive effectiveness in areas like innovation, ODG, AI, data and analytics. To succeed in today's omni-channel environment, we are organizing ourselves differently for truly integrated collaboration as we work to deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time. Importantly, the SGPP also provides the funding to invest back into the business, to support our brands and further advance the capabilities I have outlined. By optimizing our organization today, we are securing the resources necessary to drive sustainable, profitable growth longer term.

Reimagining a Healthier Future for All

As we advance our financial and strategic goals, we remain united by our purpose: Colgate-Palmolive is a caring, innovative growth company that is reimagining a healthier future for all people, their pets and our planet. Our commitment to sustainability and social impact is integrated into our business strategy with a focus on value creation and resilience for the long term. We have evolved and streamlined our Sustainability & Social Impact Strategy with fewer, more measurable key targets designed to drive value, while remaining focused on three areas where we lead: oral health with our Colgate Bright Smiles, Bright Futures program; eliminating plastic waste as we continue our journey to make all toothpaste tubes recyclable; and our impact on climate change through our net zero commitments.

We are excited about the journey ahead. We have a clear strategy, a clear purpose and a high-impact inclusive culture aligned behind our 2030 priorities. I would like to thank all Colgate-Palmolive people around the world for their energy, resilience and unwavering commitment to achieving our goals, and express appreciation for our consumers, customers, suppliers, shareholders and Board of Directors.

We are operating from a position of strength, and we are confident that the changes we are making should enable us to deliver consistent, compounded earnings per share growth and drive value for all our stakeholders in 2026 and beyond.

Sincerely,

Noel Wallace
Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer