Kimberly-Clark will split the combined business it forms with Kenvue into four separate segments once the acquisition closes in the second half of the year, with Australia and New Zealand to fold into a US $4.3 billion Asia Pacific unit alongside Greater China, South Korea and Indonesia. It comes as the Dallas-based giant behind Kleenex, Huggies and Cottonelle named the full leadership team for all four regions on Wednesday.
Under the new model, North America will be the largest of the four business units, with annual sales of around US$18 billion and more than three times the size of the next-largest segment, EMEA, at US$ 5 billion. Asia Pacific Focus Markets and Enterprise Markets sit at US$ 4.3 billion each, with the latter encompassing Latin America, India, Southeast Asia, and Japan under a single president.
Mike Hsu will remain as Chairman and Chief Executive roles across the group, with Russ Torres elevated to Group President and Chief Operations Officer and Nelson Urdaneta retaining the Chief Financial Officer post. Four regional presidents take day-to-day control of the business units, with John Carmichael running North America, Katy Chen running Asia Pacific Focus Markets and Carlton Lawson running EMEA, each reporting directly to Hsu. Anindya Dasgupta leads Enterprise Markets and reports to Torres, making him the only regional chief outside Hsu’s direct line of reporting.
The four-segment model extends Kimberly-Clark’s two-year-old Powering Care strategy, with more than 30 integration workstreams running against growth and efficiency targets under Torres’s Integration Management Office ahead of completion. Hsu said the restructure was designed to “bring our global might to the local fight,” a formulation he used to frame the four-region model as a deliberate break from Kimberly-Clark’s previous international organisation.
The combined portfolio places Kenvue’s Listerine, Band-Aid and Tylenol franchises alongside Kimberly-Clark’s Kleenex, Scott and Huggies, producing 10 billion-dollar brands inside the new four-segment perimeter and lifting combined annual sales above US$31.6 billion. Torres, who leads the Integration Management Office alongside his operations remit, said the workstreams had already mapped the biggest growth and efficiency priorities and would “hit the ground running” once the deal closed.
The restructuring reshapes global pulp and fibre buying at Kimberly-Clark, one of the world’s largest consumers of softwood kraft and bleached eucalyptus pulp, enabling regional fibre decisions to be made through four dedicated presidents rather than a single international organisation. That change puts Australian and New Zealand tissue converters on the same regional desk as Chinese, Korean and Indonesian suppliers from completion.
Kimberly-Clark targets a second-half 2026 close on the Kenvue deal, subject to regulatory clearance, with Chen, Carmichael, Lawson and Dasgupta taking operational control of four regional businesses that together carry the group’s US$31.6 billion fibre and brand footprint.
