A Decade of Organizational Change at Unilever

Multinational corporations can be divided into three broad groups according to the configuration of their production facilities:

(b) diversified its product portfolio; extend target customers and meet the variable needs of customers.

Unilever will want to regenerate their product so that they will be able to be the market leaders for the product again, this is going to be essential for some products where they rely on the business being a good market leader for most of their products. The shareholders will want to know about the business as they will want to have the business sot be the market leader for the company and they will also want to have the product regenerated as quick so that sales are not hit too effectively. They will also want the product to review and test why it has become a decline in sales to make sure that they are going to stop it from happening to other

Operation of Unilever around the world starts fragmenting, but Unilever continues to expand globally and investment made in R&D is increased.

This report aims to analyse the financial position of Unilever PLC within its daily operating activities and it also compares the company’s performance with its key competitor, the Proctor and Gamble Company (P&G). The report also includes background of both the companies and an industry overview. To better understand the performance of both the companies, the segmental analyses have been done for both region and products. Due to the global crisis, Unilever and P&G both are facing price rise and inflation pressures, also instability in the Eurozone. All these factors are strongly impacting their operation activity and long-term growth decision plan. Finally After a careful examination of the financial ratios of both the companies, we recommend Unilever as a good company to invest as compared to P&G .The reasons for the following can be seen in the report below.

Unilever currently has three manufacturing plants in South Africa, located in Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg. The factories manufacture a range of personal care and food products, such as ice cream, tea, and margarine spread. The country’s logistic infrastructure and ports are very well developed; in fact, 98% of its imports come in through port terminals. The roads in

In 2000, Unilever decided to reduce 1,600 brands down to 400 and then select a small number of them to serve as “Masterbrands”. One of the reasons to have fewer brands is to decrease control issues. It is harder to manage so many brands, especially when each one has its own particularities. As Deighton pointed, Unilever’s brand portfolio had grown in a relatively laissez-faire manner. In other words, the company’s brands were created without large interference.

Change management is relevant as though the research finds that change is taking place at an ever-increasing pace, the evidence suggests that most change initiatives fail. For example, recent CIPD research suggested that less than 60% of re-organisations met their stated objectives which are usually bottom line improvement. This is consistent with other published research.

The Unilever Group’s report on ice cream stated that they saw volume growth and share gains in most markets. Specifically they saw a strong performance in Western Europe, Mexico, Indonesia and Australia. Much of this growth was due to the Magnum Gold acquisition and the marketing of this product in these markets. Product quality improvements helped their Klondike line achieve strong results in the U.S.A. The Unilever Group maintained a negative price growth in ice cream. The negative price growth reflected slightly lower gross margins, at constant currency, with commodity costs higher.

Kirkham’s strategy was to integrate the different systems of each division into an “all-inclusive” product and also to involve all the divisions together with regards to product development, instead of letting each division be responsible for just products within that division. Mr. Donaldson chose Kathleen Quinn, Vice-President of R&D, to be responsible for coordinating the development of new products. This proved to be quite a challenging task considering that each managing director (of each division) still retained responsibility for the turnover and profitability of their respective decisions and also for the strategies to achieve the goals of their divisions. In addition, regardless of the trend of their customers in purchasing integrated systems, the majority of each division’s turnover came from the sale of stand-alone products.

Building on its success with the strong regional organization in Europe, P&G replaced its International Division with four regional Entities that assumed responsibility for profitability:

Deriving from this structure, with regard to separate businesses, each division demanded standardization and had an overall "Frankfurt is Orlando" mindset. However, it was recognized that each division was very different than the next and had varying distribution and selling methodologies. Hence, each division would have its own instance of the system to manage the customer fulfillment process, and a decentralized approach to implementation details (such as each division choosing its own partners). This minimized the risk of having the relative requirements of one organization driving the practices of another.

Abstract. This paper focuses on leadership competencies in multinational companies. It displays culture-contingent nature of effective leadership and reviews the lessons learned from Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) research that are applicable to the multinational companies. The authors analyze Unilever’s

As known every company key goal is to expend and double the size of the business while reducing the production cost, which means make more profit. For Unilever their goals are to make more profit ,also reduce the environmental footprint and increase their social positive impact. And innovation is the core ,the key to those

Global markets: goods and services for global marketplace. They have to decide which country to enter, how to enter, has to have a fit the cultural practices etc.