The maker of Durex condoms and Lysol disinfectants has been struggling for months with fallout from a collapse of its business in South Korea and a failed Scholl product launch last year.

But on June 27, it became one of several major companies to be blindsided by the NotPetya virus, which hobbled systems for everything from manufacturing to shipping. It cut its full-year sales forecast earlier this month from growth of 3 percent to growth of 2 percent.

"I see this as a challenging target," Chief Executive Rakesh Kapoor said on Monday. "We are experiencing tougher market conditions, and we still have work to do on addressing the

full implications of the recent cyber-attack."

The majority of its systems and key manufacturing sites are now producing near full capacity, but Reckitt said it had not yet returned to normal operations everywhere. Most issues will be resolved during the current third quarter.

Like-for-like sales fell 2 percent in the second quarter, as the company had warned earlier this month.

Excluding the attack and tax changes in India, sales would have been flat, as they were in the first quarter, which was Reckitt's weakest in 15 years.

Reckitt's shares were down nearly 2 percent at 0819 GMT, with analysts saying results were disappointing, even if expected.

"This does not stop it being a very poor performance - the worst in the history of Reckitt Benckiser - from a company that has previously set the benchmark for topline growth," said analysts at Bernstein.

For the first six months of the year, like-for-like revenue fell 1 percent to 5.02 billion pounds ($6.5 billion), the company said.

Adjusted net income rose 14 percent and earnings per share rose 15 percent to 124.9 pence.

Reckitt has said that performance in the second half of the year will improve, as comparisons ease.

TRANSACTIONS

Reckitt's shares got a boost last week when it announced the sale of its North American food business to McCormick for $4.2 billion, which is nearly 20 times the unit's EBITDA.

Reckitt sold the business in order to pay down debt from its purchase of baby formula maker Mead Johnson. It said it closed the Mead Johnson deal a quarter ahead of expectations and therefore expects to realise cost-savings more quickly than it initially laid out.

The company said margins in that business fell 500 basis points in the second quarter, due to higher milk powder costs and marketing spending. It expects second-half revenue for that business to be somewhere between flat to down 2 percent in the second half.

Reckitt also said it was taking a provision of 318 million pounds related to ongoing investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice into Indivior, which Reckitt spun off in 2014.

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(Reporting by Martinne Geller; editing by Louise Heavens and Jason Neely)

By Martinne Geller