Photo: Household products on an Israeli supermarket shelf (archive photo) / Rakoon, Wikimedia Commons / CC0
The Kotex and Lily products on Israeli store shelves are getting a new owner from an unexpected place: Turkey.
Turkish company Dilek Gida is set to buy Kimberly-Clark’s feminine-care business in Israel, including the Kotex and Lily brands, as part of a purchase covering 11 countries — Turkey, Israel and nine European countries, Calcalist reported. No price was disclosed.
The sale is a condition Israel’s competition regulator set this week when it approved the local side of Kimberly-Clark’s combination with Kenvue — the deal that put Tylenol and Kleenex under one roof on Monday. Regulators wanted the feminine-care brands sold so the merged company would not control too much of that market.
A boycott problem, and a possible local partner
Here is where the story gets complicated. Turkey’s boycott has pushed Turkish companies to stop selling to Israel. But under the regulator’s terms, Dilek Gida is required to keep the brands selling in Israel, Calcalist reported. The buyer can decide how to run the business and how to serve Israeli customers — and one option is licensing a local Israeli company to distribute the products.
One possibility raised by Calcalist is Shestowitz, the Israeli distributor that stands to lose its rights to Kenvue brands — including Carefree, o.b., Johnson’s Baby and Neutrogena — as those products fold into Kimberly-Clark. That is only a possibility for now, not an arrangement.
What is actually changing hands
Israel’s feminine-care market is worth real money. Sales grew 5.2% last year to 421 million shekels, according to Storenext figures cited by Calcalist, though the first nine months of this year slipped about 1% to 313 million shekels. Procter & Gamble leads with 57.8% of sales through its Always and Tampax brands. Kimberly-Clark holds 28% through Kotex and Lily — the brands it is now parting with — and in their place takes on Kenvue’s Carefree and o.b., which hold only 9% of the market.
The reshuffle follows another Kimberly-Clark move in Israel: its paper brands, including Kleenex, Lily, Molet, Nikol and Shmorat Teva, were folded into Arvex, a company it formed with Brazil’s Suzano, in which it keeps a 49% stake. Once the Kenvue integration is complete, Kimberly-Clark’s Israeli operation, led by Rinat Efrima, will focus on health and quality-of-life products — Huggies, Titulim, Shkama and Depend diapers — plus the Kenvue lines moving over from their current distributors, Calcalist reported.
For shoppers, the practical answer is that Kotex and Lily are not disappearing from Israeli shelves — the regulator’s condition requires them to stay. What may change is the name of the company standing behind them, and possibly the local partner delivering them to stores.
JBizNews Desk | Jerusalem
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