By Eva Mathews
(Reuters) -Advil-maker Haleon (LON:HLN) missed market estimates for third-quarter revenue on Thursday, as it grappled with retailer destocking and weak demand for its painkillers and vitamin supplements in North America.
Shares in the world's largest consumer healthcare firm, spun off last year from drugmaker GSK, were down 2.4% at 322.9 pence by 1007 GMT, making it one of the top losers on London's blue-chip index.
Consumer health firms and their essential, daily-use products are typically the last to face impact on demand in an economic slowdown, and Haleon has steadily raised prices without a real dent to demand.
However, competition among painkiller brands, destocking of its digestive health products and cooling demand for Emergen-C, a vitamin supplement that benefited from robust pandemic sales, hurt volumes in North America for the three months to September.
Revenues in the region declined by 7.5% on a reported basis.
For the quarter, the Sensodyne toothpaste-maker reported a 5% organic increase in revenue to 2.79 billion pounds ($3.40 billion), but it came slightly below analysts' expectations of 2.83 billion pounds in a company-compiled consensus.
Cost-cutting pushed up quarterly adjusted operating profit by 8.8% at constant currencies, compared to analysts' expectations for growth of 5.8%.
Analysts said the firm's power brands, or popular household products such as Panadol tablets and Otrivin nasal spray, would continue to drive growth outside the United States and keep margins intact in the long term as its operating margins also beat market estimates for the quarter.
CFO Tobias Hestler said the company was not seeing consumers shift to private label brands, despite a cost-of-living squeeze, while emerging markets such as Asia-Pacific and Latin America were driving growth.
Haleon stuck to full-year profit and revenue forecasts but flagged a hit of about 3.5% on revenue and about 6% to 6.5% on adjusted operating profit due to the effect of currency swings.
($1=0.8215 pounds)