Procter & Gamble restructuring plans: Buyouts, brand sales and a CEO shakeup

Looking to reinvigorate growth, Procter & Gamble has vowed to slim down, cutting 7,000 jobs by mid-2027.

Here's what might happen.

A closer look at the Cincinnati-based consumer giant’s disclosures and its past restructuring offer insights into where it's eyeing cuts, the pressures to get leaner, and the hazards it might face if its sales don’t bounce back.Dawn dishwashing liquid, a brand owned by Procter & Gamble, is seen for sale in a store in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., June 29, 2022.

The last time P&G did a major restructuring, most of the jobs reductions were buyouts. Likely targets: Generation X, those born between 1965 and 1980. So far, P&G has indicated it wants to make trims. Its last round of cuts started small but then got deeper after earlier rounds failed to achieve a turnaround. Further change will likely occur at the top with a new incoming CEO and other management shifts. The company said some brands might go, but it's not clear how many or which ones.

Here’s what to look out for:

Recap: What P&G has revealed so far

P&G first announced plans to cut jobs on June 5 at an investor conference in Paris after more than a year of posting declining sales growth.

The cuts represent 6.4% of the Cincinnati-based consumer giant’s 109,000 employees worldwide. The specter of pending job cuts weighs heavily on its hometown, where it employs 10,000 people, mostly office workers who are the target of the planned reductions.

It’s not difficult to see why P&G is cutting jobs:  Slowing sales create enormous pressure for P&G. In the past, the company was targeted by activist hedge fund investors who demanded cost cuts, brand divestures and even floated breaking the company apart to jumpstart growth.

A key metric called organic sales (which excludes the impact of foreign exchange and mergers and acquisitions) has grown a meager 1% or 2% per quarter since the spring of 2024. Sales have slid as consumers cut back spending amid lingering worldwide inflation and Trump’s trade war in 2025.

In June, P&G said it had a plan: it was confident it could accelerate sales with new product innovations in its pipeline but would need to find money from cuts to invest in them.

“The need to accelerate investment in growth accelerated the need on productivity,” incoming CEO Shailesh Jejurikar, told investors.Shailesh Jejurikar, P&G's next CEO starting 2026.

So far, P&G has disclosed the cuts will target “nonmanufacturing roles,” sparing workers in the company’s 99 factories worldwide, including 24 in the U.S. But the company said it will reduce jobs outside of plants by 15%.

P&G said the cuts would include cutting back some product offerings and possibly even selling off brands. But in its July update, P&G only disclosed that included narrowing the variety of its feminine pads in Asia and trim some overseas product offerings for the company's Oral Care, Fabric Care and Grooming businesses.

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Remembering the last time P&G restructured

June’s announcement recalls the last time P&G announced a major restructuring at an investment conference in Boca Raton, Florida in February of 2012.

At that conference, P&G officials announced plans to cut 5,700 workers or a little more than 4% of 129,000 employees.

But P&G’s plans underwhelmed at least one investor: Pershing Square Capital head, Bill Ackman, who months later acquired nearly $3 billion worth of the company stock, decried P&G as “bloated” and demanded bigger changes.Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital, speaks at the Wall Street Journal Digital Conference in Laguna Beach, California, U.S., October 17, 2017. A supporter of President Donald Trump, Ackman is warning of an "economic nuclear winter" if he goes ahead with tariffs.

After months of maneuvering, then-CEO Bob McDonald retired in the spring of 2013 and P&G brought back his predecessor, A.G. Lafley, to make sweeping cuts. In 2014, Lafley announced a succession of major brand divestitures: Iams pet food, Duracell batteries and in 2015, more than 40 beauty brands that were spun off into another company.

When sales didn't bounce back, P&G cut deeper

Still, P&G continued to cut as its sales struggled to improve.

In 2017, Nelson Peltz, the head of Trian Partners, decried P&G's "suffocating bureaucracy" before leading one of the biggest proxy fights in corporate history, demanding cuts and a “flatter” organization with fewer management layers. The company shed thousands more jobs, down to 92,000, becoming the slimmest since at least the early 1990s.

The company ultimately cut 37,000 jobs from buyouts and divestitures between 2011 and 2018.Trian Partners CEO Nelson Peltz, right, and other attendees walk into the Procter & Gamble headquarters for the annual shareholders meeting on Oct. 10, 2017, in Cincinnati. Peltz is seeking a board seat at Procter & Gamble after the company rejected his request for one after months of meetings.

Mostly buyouts? Generation X will get the axe

A closer look at P&G’s previous restructuring during the 2010s reveals that nearly two-thirds of job reductions were buyouts: money paid to employees to leave voluntarily. As is typical, the offers were based on salary and service period. The company spent more than $2.5 billion to say goodbye to nearly 22,000 workers for an average of more than $110,000 per employee.

Could P&G achieve the 7,000 job cuts it’s seeking mostly through buyouts? Its last round of restructuring suggests it’s possible: the more than 20,000 workers got paid to leave the company over seven years, about 3,000 a year.

Workers born between 1965 and 1980, employees from Generation X, who are aged 45 to 60, will be prime candidates for buyouts because they’re higher paid and closer to retirement.International flags fly outside of Procter & Gamble's downtown Cincinnati offices on Thursday, March 27, 2025.

P&G looks at its markets, products and brands

P&G has raised the possibility of selling off brands, but so far stuck with trimming products or “simplifying the portfolio” as current CEO and chairman Jon Moeller described it.

Specifically, the CEO noted P&G is reviewing individual markets and considering exiting “some categories, brands and product forms.” That indicates P&G is looking at its map of countries with sluggish or disappointing sales.

International markets will likely be heavily scrutinized for cuts, since P&G revealed its core markets of the U.S., China, Japan, Canada and Western Europe saw organic sales growth of 2% last year versus “enterprise markets” lagged growing just 1%. P&G has exited whole countries before: last year it shut down operations in Argentina and Nigeria in 2023.

Also getting a close look: P&G’s brands and categories with the slowest sales. When P&G announced the cuts, it noted disclosed organic sales performance by all 10 product categories for the first nine months of the 2025 fiscal year.

Among the categories where P&G is seeing stalled growth were: its baby care business (which sell Pampers diapers), which saw sales slide 2%; its skin & personal care unit (deodorants, soap and moisturizer) had flat sales.

Could brands get sold off?

So will P&G’s cuts lead to selling a household brand?

While P&G has chopped big brands from its roster in the past, not all divestitures are flashy or affect the company's worldwide customer base. In June, P&G officials alluded to the company's previous sale of its Vidal Sassoon business in China in 2024 as an example of a smaller-scale divestiture.

For now, analysts are waiting for more details before making any predictions.

In a July 29 note to investors, Morningstar analyst Erin Lash characterized P&G's restructuring as “surgical.”

“P&G disclosed its intentions to surgically rationalize select areas of its product/geographic mix … and alter the makeup of its organizational structure,” Lash wrote. “We view each of these efforts as an opportunity to enhance its focus.”International flags fly outside of Procter & Gamble's downtown Cincinnati offices in March.

There will be a leadership shuffle as talent at all levels depart

P&G’s missing expected specifics on its restructuring were overshadowed in late July by the announcement a day before of the company’s succession plans for the CEO.

P&G said its next No. 1 executive would be its current No. 2: Shailesh Jejurikar, 58. He starts in January.

But when P&G names a new CEO, the company inevitably sees an exodus of senior executives, many near retirement age, whose prospects of nabbing the top job may have dimmed.The Procter & Gamble world headquarters in downtown Cincinnatiin June.

Sure enough, on Aug. 12, Alexandra Keith, 57, the CEO of P&G’s beauty business – and once a potential future leader of the whole company, announced her retirement in early 2026.

Freddy Bharucha, the current president of the personal care division within beauty, has been tapped to succeed her.

More retirements among P&G’s top executives could be on the way soon.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Procter & Gamble restructuring explained: See what's being cut

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