The growth model isn’t under pressure. It’s broken.

FY 2025 made it undeniable. Organic sales growth across the world’s largest listed FMCG companies slowed to just 2.3 % — down from 3.6% in FY 2024 — with every single vertical decelerating: Food & Beverage, Alcoholic Drinks, Beauty & Personal Care, Household, and Consumer Healthcare. No vertical was spared.

66 % of the world’s largest FMCG companies missed profit expectations in Q4 2025, not just top-line. Up from 29 % a year earlier. 61 % remain below pre-COVID EBIT margins. The margin recovery story from 2023–24 has stalled or reversed.

Stock prices collapsed on Q4 earnings day — Beiersdorf −17 %, Estée Lauder −17 %, Diageo −13 %. In a single session. 39 % of top FMCGs saw their stock fall around results. The market is no longer giving the benefit of the doubt.

Volume declines got worse into Q4, not better. 50 % of the top 42 listed FMCGs saw volume decline in Q4 2025, up from 40 % in Q3. In Alcoholic Drinks, 100 % of companies saw volume fall. Consumer Healthcare is shrinking. Household basically stopped growing.

Since 2019, the industry pushed pricing up ~36 %. Volume grew +3.7 %. Consumers are paying more. They’re just not buying more.

The sector that used to be the bond market of equities — safe, counter-cyclical — is now the place where earnings surprises go to die. The fortress FMCG narrative is over. The sector’s market capitalisation eroded 4 % over 2023–March 2025, decorrelating from the broader financial market even in periods of instability. Unprecedented.

What remains is a widening chasm between a handful of quality compounders and a long tail of large, slow, overpriced assets that no longer meet the bar of a listed company. The gap between winners and losers isn’t closing. It’s widening.

2026 will force a reckoning across three fronts: scalable organic growth models (the largest gap in current strategy), a dramatic acceleration in M&A (large divestitures, scale deals, and bolt-on acquisitions), and accelerated cost-cutting to secure EPS guidance as operational

deleverage bites. Yet there is no forum where the industry’s most senior growth leaders can confront these realities together — without filters, without sponsors, and without corporate PR. No event exists that is independently convened, exclusively FMCG, C-level only, and focused solely on the one question that matters: how do you outperform in diverging times?

The FMCG Growth Summit exists to fill that void.