Proctor and Gamble 2007 Annual Report Download - page 19

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P&G’s competitive go-to-market advantage comes from the strength of
our customer relationships, our supply-chain innovation leadership and
our organizational structure that simultaneously enables global scale and
local responsiveness. In addition, we are combining P&G and Gillette
brand portfolios and best practices to make this strength even stronger.
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P&G’s Go-to-Market Reinvention (G2MR) program is focused on making
step-change improvements in our supply chain efciency, our ability to
create in-store demand, and data systems that support business planning.
With the addition of Gillette, P&G’s increased importance to retail
customers in countries such as India and Brazil should continue to result in
improved sales growth. We also expect increased sales of Gillette brands in
developing countries such as China, Russia and Mexico, where P&G has
already established a deep distribution network. In total, we expect
G2MR to account for 2% points of sales growth over the next four years.
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P&G’s competitive advantages include cost advantages that result in
superior value for consumers, value creation for retail customers and
superior returns for shareholders. We purchase materials and media
at best-in-class costs. We are market leaders in nearly every category
where we compete. We have tremendous knowledge scale in consumer
understanding, research and development, and marketing. And we
are always nding new ways to reap benets from P&G’s scale.
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We are better leveraging global purchasing scale to reduce the cost of
global business services as a percentage of sales. For example, we are
applying professional buying approaches to indirect spending pools such
as ofce supplies. We are also working to improve knowledge transfer
from category-to-category and market-to-market to ensure our leading-
edge work processes are being applied consistently and thoroughly
across the Company.
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With our combined portfolio of category-leading
brands and go-to-market best practices, Gillette
has helped P&G extend these critical competitive
advantages. We are now working on the next
generation of improvement efforts to help P&G
create more value jointly with retail customers
and for P&G’s shareholders.
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The Procter & Gamble Company 17