Incontinence Products

Offering and market position

Essity offers a broad range of incontinence products under the globally leading brand TENA. TENA is a ”billion-dollar brand”, meaning a brand with annual sales exceeding USD 1bn. Essity’s offering of both products and services improves the quality of life for consumers and reduces costs for institutional customers, such as nursing homes. Essity’s offering also includes an assortment of skincare products, wet wipes and wash gloves. Through TENA Solutions, Essity helps nursing homes provide the best care by offering procedures, analysis tools and training. The advantages include improved well-being for the care recipients, a better workplace environment for the caregivers, less resource consumption and lower overall costs. Essity is the global market leader in the market for incontinence products with a global market share that is about twice the size of the second largest player. Essity is the market leader in Europe, Asia (excluding Japan) and Latin America. In North America and Asia (including Japan), Essity is the fourth largest player.

Strategy

Essity is prioritizing activities to strengthen TENA’s global market-leading position by driving profitable growth and expanding at a faster rate than the market. Growth is expected to be achieved by increasing market shares and penetration and by broadening the customer offering by increasing sales in such segments as skincare products and wet wipes. Essity’s strategy is to increase online sales of incontinence products to consumers. For the consumers, the benefits are easy-to-access information about incontinence and the opportunity to simply and discreetly order incontinence products from one of Essity’s e-commerce partners or one of TENA’s 21 webshops worldwide. Innovation activities are important and involve understanding customer and consumer needs in order to continuously enhance products and services and develop the offering to further increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

By launching innovative products and solutions, the TENA brand and market positions are strengthened. During the year, Essity launched eight innovations, including TENA Lady Pants Discreet, TENA Lady Discreet and TENA Men Active Fit Pants.

In North America, the situation for Essity’s TENA brand has been more challenging and the priority has been to improve profitability. Actions have been taken to reduce costs, discontinue unprofitable product ranges and focus on fewer but more profitable products, which led to enhanced profitability during 2017.

Since incontinence is still surrounded by social stigma in many regions of the world, it is important to raise understanding and acceptance of the condition to enhance the quality of life of people suffering from incontinence. We do this by:

• working actively to remove the stigma surrounding incontinence and continuing to invest to increase market penetration. A central part of this is providing information and arranging marketing activities, training and global forums. Focusing in the retail trade on information, advertising and the development of increasingly discreet, comfortable, easy-to-use and effective products, always with customer and consumer benefits in mind.
• arranging seminars and educational programs for nurses and professional caregivers within the scope of the health and medical care systems in various countries.
• working with decision-makers and governments in different countries to help establish sustainable reimbursement systems.