London, March 11, 2026, 16:53 (GMT)
Reckitt Benckiser has kicked off the third leg of its £1 billion buyback, moving to repurchase £540 million in shares just days after releasing annual results. According to a filing on Wednesday, the company snapped up 127,000 shares on March 10 at an average price of 5,489.76 pence. London Stock Exchange figures put Reckitt’s stock down 10.6% for the week ending March 10. 1
Timing is key here, as investors are wrestling with what sort of profits Reckitt might deliver now that Essential Home is off the books. On March 10, a London Stock Exchange/FTSE Russell tearsheet pegged the stock at £54.82. Over the previous week, shares trailed the FTSE 350 by 9.9 percentage points. 2
Reckitt posted a 5.2% lift in core like-for-like sales for 2025, using its constant-currency gauge for underlying growth, after reporting fourth-quarter group like-for-like sales up 5.4%. Still, the company pointed out some pressure ahead: a softer start to the year for cold-and-flu products, ongoing market challenges in Europe, and an EPS hit tied to the Essential Home divestment. 3
Chief executive Kris Licht called 2025 a “strong year” and expressed confidence about Reckitt’s outlook. The company stuck to its 2026 target for 4% to 5% core like-for-like growth, adding that its Fuel for Growth savings programme is expected to mostly cancel out stranded costs—leftover overheads after a business sale—from the separation. 4
That goes some way toward making sense of last week’s market move. According to Reuters, shares dropped over 6% on March 5—the steepest single-day fall in nearly a year—as investors zeroed in on cloudy margin prospects, a heavier tax burden, and currency headwinds. The same report noted Reckitt, along with Unilever and Nestle, has been pivoting its portfolio to target faster-growing brands. “The margin benefit from the divestiture of essential home is being offset by stranded costs and FX,” said Chris Beckett, consumer staples analyst at Quilter Cheviot. Licht, meanwhile, described emerging markets as “must-win” for Reckitt, with growth in developed markets still stuck in the slow lane. 5
The buyback forms part of a broader cash return strategy. This latest tranche comes after previous rounds totaling £250 million and £206 million. Reckitt reported returning roughly £0.9 billion to shareholders via buybacks in 2025, and paid out a special dividend of about £1.6 billion in February, following the sale of Essential Home at the end of 2025. 1
There’s a risk here: cash returns might not turn around the operating story fast enough. Reckitt flagged that non-core Mead Johnson Nutrition will likely post only low-single-digit like-for-like growth this year. The company sees a drop in the first quarter, mid-single-digit, as last year’s U.S. retailer restocking no longer boosts the comparison. Over-the-counter seasonal products aren’t helping much either—flu demand has stayed soft. 3
What matters now isn’t just the size of Deutsche Bank’s buybacks for Reckitt. The bigger question is whether Europe and seasonal health lines rebound fast enough to shore up margins and earnings per share at the leaner firm. Buybacks send cash back to shareholders, but that alone won’t resolve market doubts around post-sale earnings quality. 1
