Henkel’s Consumer Business Grew 0.5% Without Hair Care.

The Headline Says 3.2%.

H1 2026: group organic growth of 3.2%, ahead of the 2.5% consensus. Adhesive Technologies grew 4.5%. Consumer Brands grew 1.7%. Strip hair care out of the consumer division and what is left grew 0.5% in Q1. That last number is the one an FMCG operator should be reading.

Henkel is reported as a consumer goods company. It behaves as an industrial adhesives company that owns a consumer division.

The Acceleration Everybody Cheered Was Industrial

The quarterly sequence exposes it. In Q1 2026, the two divisions were genuinely balanced. Adhesive Technologies grew 1.7% organically. Consumer Brands grew 1.8%. Group organic growth came in at 1.7%, split 1.0 points of volume and 0.7 points of price. On those numbers, Henkel looked like a company recovering on both engines at once.

Then the half year landed at 3.2%, and the two engines separated. Adhesive Technologies reached 4.5% for H1. Back out Q1, and the implied Q2 figure is somewhere near 7%. Consumer Brands reached 1.7% in H1, implying a Q2 close to 1.6%. The consumer business did not accelerate at all. It decelerated slightly while the industrial business roughly quadrupled its growth rate.