Procter & Gamble Co said it had completed a multiyear restructuring effort and would therefore stop reporting two sets of results, one including restructuring charges and another without them.
"P&G can sustain growth without special restructuring charges by staying focused on the strategic choices that got us back on track," said AG Lafley, the company's chairman and chief executive.
P&G, which makes popular consumer products like Tide laundry detergent and Pampers diapers, has been criticized by some investors and analysts because its financial reports since 1999 have included restructuring charges for each quarter.
Such charges, when not counted against revenue, make results look better and make it more difficult to determine a company's true performance, some analysts say.
"That's hard to decipher," said Howard Choe, an analyst for Standard & Poor's.
P&G's moving away from two sets of numbers, he said, "definitely improves the transparency of the earnings."
Thursday's announcement was unrelated to such criticism or to the spate of accounting scandals in the last year, said Vicky Mayer, a P&G spokeswoman.
The company's reorganization, which was scheduled to end in 2004 but was concluded early, was the reasonfor including the charges, she said.
More and more companies have announced plans to simplify their financial reports, shifting away from the frequent use of so-called pro forma results that were popular in the 1990s stock market boom, analysts said.
The moves are the result of increasing investor concern about the difficulty of understanding companies' financial disclosures, said Jim Gingrich, the personal products company analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, a research firm unaffiliated with an investment bank.
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