UNILEVER PLC

Unilever Plc

Unilever Plc

Introduction

One of the world's leading suppliers of fast-moving consumer products in the food, home and personal care categories, Unilever's portfolio includes some of the leading and best-known brands. Knorr is Unilever's biggest food brand, with €3 billion in sales per year and a strong presence in more than 80 countries. Knorr's product range includes a wide variety of soups, sauces, bouillon, noodles and complete meals. Packing and selling dried soup mixes since 1873, the early Knorr Co. created the bouillon cube, among many other key prepared-food developments.

So that Unilever drives business, productivity, compliance and protection for this top brand as well as for the many other brands in its mix, the corporation began a new global productivity initiative called One Unilever. The initiative was designed in 2004 to eradicate duplication, leverage its scale and make improvements in its focus on consumers, customers and the marketplace.

Unilever is headed by two separate British and Dutch companies--Unilever Ltd. (PLC after 1981), and Unilever N.V. (NV was incorporated under the name Naamlooze Vennootschap Margarine Unie in the Netherlands in 1927. PLC was incorporated under the name Lever Brothers Limited in Great Britain in 1894). On Jan 1, 1930 Unilever was officially established. Since then, NV and PLC, together with their group companies, have operated, as nearly as is practicable, as a single entity. They have the same Directors, adopt the same accounting principles, and are linked by a series of agreements. NV and PLC are holding and service companies. Their businesses are carried out by their group companies around the world. They have different sets of shareholders but identical boards of directors. There were two head offices--in London and Rotterdam--and two chairmen. Through an equalization agreement, they operate as a single unit with the same board of Executive Directors and the same set of Advisory Director

Discussion

With 2006 net sales of $50 billion in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Unilever is a truly global enterprise. The corporation has a presence in 150 countries around the world with some 179,000 employees, and offers a product portfolio that spans the grocery store with well-known trademarked brand names in categories like spreads (I Can't Believe It's Not Butter), sauces (Ragu), dressings (Hellmann's and Wish-Bone), beverages (Lipton teas), ice cream (Good Humor and Breyers), frozen food (Bertolli dinners) and personal care products (Dove, Suave, and Axe).

In North America, Unilever's supply chain strategies have steadily evolved over the decades and followed industry trends in tandem with the retailers that it sells to. Twenty years ago, the company's supply chain was essentially thought of as little more than a required path from the factory to the retailer's warehouse. Under this philosophy, Unilever was able to focus on manufacturing and marketing while retailers made the sale. Barcode scanners were coming into wide use at the time, leading to a focus on enterprise resource planning, whereby the retailer would feed data back to its own distribution centers for replenishment of most products (Bright ...