The document outlines the history and evolution of Reckitt Benckiser, detailing its origins in the mustard and household products industries, and the merger of various companies into a major global player. It highlights significant acquisitions, product innovations, and strategic expansions that positioned the company as a leader in household cleaning and personal care products. Furthermore, it discusses the company's financial growth and market strategies over the years, underlining its focus on high-margin categories and brand strength.

2. History & Origin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Early Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Global Expansion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Modern Business . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Company Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Recent Efforts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Company DNA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Social Media Accounts . . . . . . . . . . . 23
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3.  Jeremiah Colman, a miller by training, who man-aged a mill in Norfolk,
England before buying his own mill in 1803
 In 1814, he bought a mustard business and added the crushing of
mustard seeds to that of wheat kernels
 By 1829, he had extended his reach to London
 By 1854, three years after Jeremiah’s death, Colman’s had
constructed Britain’s first mill dedicated entirely to mustard.
 Jeremiah’s nephew James (Jeremiah being childless) had taken over
the firm
 Having been co-opted as a partner in 1823 and, clearly sharing his
uncle’s partiality for asset-driven expansion into new categories, he
took the firm into the manufacture of starch, laundry blue and corn
flour, all leveraging the company’s investment and expertise in milling.
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4.  Entry into the starch category brought Colman’s into competition with
another trained miller, Isaac Reckitt
 Isaac Reckitt’s mill, after twenty years of unsuccessfully running a series
of flour milling businesses and losing all his capital, borrowed enough
from his obviously loving relatives to rent a starch works in the north of
England
 There he yet again failed to make his mark, until his four sons,
including a chemist and a salesman, took over the key roles
 For the first seven years, the business lost money and it was only when
the product range was extended beyond starch that the business
became viable
 It took the business a full eighteen years to pay back Isaac’s relatives,
whom he only outlived by four years.
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5.  The third 19th-century industrialist involved in the genesis of Reckitt
Benckiser was Johann Adam Benckiser, who founded an industrial
chemicals manufacturing business in Pforzheim, Germany in 1823
 In 1851, Johann co-founded a chemical plant with chemist Ludwig
Reimann
 Seven years later relocating the business to Ludwigshafen, where it
also began the production of phosphates, citric acid and other
commodity chemicals.
 This unlikely trio of mustard cook, household products manufacturer
and chemical industrialist would bring something different to the
Reckitt Benckiser party
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6. 6
 The mustard maker’s great nephew would be one of 19th-century
Britain’s most innovative advertisers, building leading-edge
marketing skills in selling a product half of which was scraped off
plates uneaten at the end of meals.
 The household products maker’s sons recognised that a huge
business could be built on the insight of making the homemaker’s
life easier, and embarked on a late-19th-century acquisition spree
of all kinds of household goods brands while internationalising the
business as early as 1864
 The German industrialist’s descendants, who would spend well
over a century in the commodity chemicals sector, were
exceptionally astute business strategists who knew how to
revolutionize a business

7.  The two firms finally buried the hatchet in 1913 when they formed a
joint company
 The two companies combined all their overseas businesses in order to
generate the critical mass to run manufacturing operations in
Australia, Canada and South Africa
 Dettol had begun as a project in 1929, to develop an antiseptic
disinfectant that could be safely applied to open cuts and wounds
 The deal catapulted Reckitt & Colman into the top four globally, but
to fund it the company had to sell off the bulk of the food side of the
business
 The iconic Colman’s mustard brand itself, sold to Unilever in 1995 for
£250 million
 The Benckiser was now a relative minnow with annual sales of only
$250 million
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8.  Benckiser continued to acquire strong local brands, such as Italy’s
Mira Lanza and Panigel together with Spain’s leading detergent
company, S.A. Camp Group
 Benckiser competed with the multinational giants such as Unilever
and P&G
 The company significantly increased its US presence with the
acquisition of SmithKline Beecham’s North American household
products division for $106 million in 1990
 The company buy the Margaret Astor and Lancaster cosmetics
business from Smithkline
 The Benckiser set about expanding its new cosmetics arm picking up
Jovan, Germaine Monteil, Bogner Cosmetics and Joop! Perfumes
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9. 9
 Benckiser became US market leader in mass-market cosmetics with
the $400 million purchase from Pfizer of the Coty business
 Exclamation, Lady Stetson, L’Effleur, Sand & Sable and Wild Musk; this
pushed the share of total company sales of $3.4 billion coming from
cosmetics and fragrances
 The Benckiser now has over $3 billion annual sales
 Benckiser organized all its businesses into one single holding company
called Coty Inc.

10.  Reckitt was selling its products in some 180 countries and had
operation in 60 countries
 In 2003 sales were split by region
 Western Europe – 47%
 North America – 27%
 Asia-Pacific – 12 %
 Latin America – 4%
 Rest of world – 10%
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11.  On the 27th July 1999 the merger of Reckitt & Colman and Benckiser
created a business with sales of more than £3 billion
 The world’s fourth-biggest manufacturer of household cleaning and
personal care products
 Reckitt Benckiser had three overriding priorities: To focus the brand
portfolio and to reduce costs
 Deploying the Benckiser strategy and operating style on the Reckitt &
Colman brand portfolio
 The remit of Squeeze was to look at the detailed design of products
and find ways to squeeze out costs without adversely affecting the
utility or efficacy
 The X-trim team focused on saving costs elsewhere in the business
 A disproportionate focus on brands that were either number one or
two in categories with above-average growth prospects
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12.  Grow categories and brand share via an unrelenting program of
incremental improvement innovations, executed with great speed,
and above-average marketing spends
 Focus was mainly on organic growth
 Acquisitions, as had been the case soon after the merger, would only
be considered if targets had a great strategic fit
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13.  Reckitt Benckiser began life in 1999 with a regional management
structure in which country managers reported into regions or sub-regions
 In 2003, the company got a handle on the different issues in the
different markets, it moved to a hybrid regional/market development
structure
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14. 14
2004
 Reckitt Benckiser celebrated five years of unbroken success since its
formation with 10% growth in the year at constant exchange rates
 The growth was fairly evenly spread around the world with Europe
growing by 8%, North America & Australia by 9% and Developing
Markets by 16%
 Operating margins expanded a full 1.3 percentage points up to 19.6%
 The company having almost tripled its annual operating profit since
1999
 The increase in margins came from increases in gross margin, up from
an industry-trailing 46.4% in 1999 to an industry-leading 54.8%

15. 2005
 Reckitt Benckiser’s sales grew by 8% but only by 6% at constant
exchange rates
 New to the elite club was Bang, sold under the Cillit brand in Europe
and Easy Off in the rest of the world.
 Reckitt Benckiser had been looking for a major acquisition within OTC
healthcare, which conformed to the specification for outstanding
long-term growth prospects in an ageing populations
 The largest acquisition in the company is that of Boots Healthcare
International for £1.9B
2006
 In eleven months of BHI sales in 2006 Overall revenues grew by 18% to
a shade under £5 billion
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16.  Reckitt Benckiser owned and had the US distribution rights for, and its
related drug Subutex, which grew by 30% in to £165
 The European bias of BHI further increased the area percentage of
Reckitt Benckiser sales up to 53%
2007
 Seven percent increase in reported revenues whilst 10% on a like-for-like
basis gave the eighth consecutive year of above-average
industry growth
 The product sales grew by 10% in the first full year of Reckitt Benckiser
ownership
 The excellent start in a year when all but one of the eighteen Power
brands gained market share
 The new improved Reckitt Benckiser now had 75% of its revenues from
brands that were number one or two in their markets
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17. 17
 The company was now worldwide number one or two in several
categories
 Reckitt Benckiser had substantially increased its sales infrastructure
and received an immediate payback sales rising by 42%, delivering a
staggering 56% margin the area average for all other products was
just 21%
2008
 The Adams acquisition not only added to the top line but grew by 12%
in the eleven months
 The company posted a 25% increase in sales to £6.5 billion, its core
business having grown by 13% and its power brands by 17%
 The company yet again increased its gross margin by a full
percentage point to 59.3%

18.  This increase is driven by better-than-average performances by the
higher-margin categories, continued ‘Squeeze’ cost savings.
 The continued explosive growth of the now renamed
Pharmaceuticals Unit, whose sales increased another 45% up to £341
million, delivering an eye-watering £193 million operating profit which
added nearly two whole percentage points to the entire company’s
operating profit margin
2009
 With over 80% of sales coming from developed markets, the company
was more vulnerable than many to the slowdown
 The company grew by an impressive 18%, 8% at constant exchange
rates, to reach £7.8 billion – a top-class performance in the economic
circumstances
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19. 19
 The company had deliberately added some areas of the portfolio in
recent years specifically to protect against economic downturn as
well as to make money in healthier times
 Savings had pushed the gross margin over 60% for the first time in the
company’s 10-year history, an increase of almost fifteen percentage
points over the period
2010
 Another 9% on the top line took sales to nearly £8.5 billion, like-for-like
growth of 6% and still a respectable 5%, excluding pharmaceuticals
 Once again, Health & Personal Care performed strongly, helped by a
good piece of cross-category innovation with the Surface Care
brands Dettol and Lysol each launching the No-Touch Hand Soap
System
 Coming a year after the H1N1 scare Home Care increased by 8%

20. 20
 RB Pharmaceuticals sale rise to £737 million
 The RB Pharmaceuticals sales had also been boosted by the
company’s £100 million re-purchase of the European distribution rights
 Reckitt Benckiser was now most definitely in pharmaceuticals; business
the unit contributed 9% of the year’s total sales
 The addition of SSL would increase the size of the Health & Personal
Care category by 36% and add two new brands to the power brand
list
2011
 The Reckitt Benckiser’s M&A strategy had got the company into
higher-margin categories
 Reckitt Benckiser had been far more focused on taking more power
brands into existing markets than in opening up new markets for all
the company’s brands

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2012
 The machine they’re using had adjusted well to its new settings.
 Top-line sales were up by barely 1% to £9.6 billion – all coming from RB
Pharmaceuticals – this masked a more robust like-for-like increase of
4% when exchange rates were factored out
 Health grew by 6%, helped by the Durex brand increasing its reach in
China, a growth rate matched by Hygiene in which Dettol Daily Care,
Lysol No-Touch Kitchen System and the Quantum brand all made
significant gains
 RB Pharmaceuticals put on an additional 10% revenue with strong
volume growth in the key US market, tempered by the switch from
Suboxone tablets to lower-margin film
 RUMEA was up by 8% primarily because of Russia and the rest of the
CIS

22.  Reckitt Benckiser had been the most consistently managed of all
the world’s major packaged goods companies
 Reckitt Benckiser strategy is to focus on the brands that were
advantaged in both profitability and growth prospects
 The key elements of the company’s DNA are Consumer Focus,
Speed and Creative Tension
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23.  Reckitt Benckiser has been one of the biggest consumer goods
success stories of the early 21st century
 During their first twelve years its share price increased five times more
than Unilever’s
 The company has been the subject of countless case studies in its
approach to innovation, not surprising, as it has set new benchmarks
for the level of innovation sustainable by a large packaged goods
company
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24. Website: www.rb.com/home
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/reckitt-benckiser
Facebook: www.facebook.com/ReckittBenckiser.
Twitter: www.twitter.com/discoverRB
Youtube: www.youtube.com/user/RBworldwide
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