COMPANY ANALYSIS

Company Analysis

Company Analysis

The current era is the period of globalization, innovation, competitiveness and progress. The businesses have embarked upon large scale restructuring and reengineering processes in order to cope up with the changing environment and customer needs. The customer preferences are shifting at a more brisk pace and the companies have to guarantee a timely delivery of products and services to the incrassating demands without creating a supply gap. In order to ensure such effectiveness and perfection in the operations, the organizations undertake to analyze their environmental and functional capabilities on a regular basis. This paper will examine Unilever as the basic company. It will look into the company profile, the current situation, environmental factors and other related elements of the company.

Unilever: Company Profile

Unilever is a multinational based on the British-Dutch origin and deals in the consumer goods segment. The company engages in the production a provision of beverages, foods, personal care products and cleaning agents as its major product lines. Unilever is the third-largest consumer goods company across the globe inn terms of its 2011 revenues and is followed by Nestlé and Procter & Gamble; it is also the largest ice cream maker in the world (The Associated Press, 2009).

The company, Unilever, was established by Samuel van den Bergh, Antonius Johannes Jurgens, and William Hulme Lever on January 1, 1930. It was the merger of the business activities of Dutch margarine producer Margarine Unie and a British soap maker Lever Brothers which formulated a sound business sense, because margarines, and soaps, both involved the palm oil as their primary raw material and it could possibly be imported in more efficient manner in bulk amount.

During the year 1930s, the business of Unilever expanded and new business ventures opened up in Latin America and Africa. By the year 1980, edible fats and soap alone generated 40% of revenues for the company, and these had declined from the original 90%. During 1987, the company made itself stronger in the markets of skin care products, and in order to do that, it acquired the maker of Ragú, Pond's, Chesebrough-Ponds, Cutex Nail Polish, Aqua-Net, and Vaseline (Glenn Collinsnew, 1996). In the year 2011, Unilever announced entering into a binding agreement for selling Colgate-Palmolive the Sanex brand to for €672 million. Moreover, it also acquired the brands of laundry detergent belonging to Colgate-Palmolive in Colombia for US$215 million.

Unilever conducts its operation and has it research laboratories on every continent (except Antarctica) and including Vlaardingen in the Netherlands; Connecticut, Trumbull, and Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey in the United States; Bangalore in India, Port and Sunlight Colworth in England, and Shanghai in China. The product line of Unilever comprise of beverages, foods, personal care products and cleaning agents. Unilever possesses over 400 brands, though 25 of the largest brands of company generate more than 70% of its total sales. The basic brands of Unilever include Radox/Lux, Surf/Omo, Wish-Bone, Ben & Jerry's, Lynx/Axe, Sure/ Sure, Knorr, Tea and many other tea and detergent ...