Resources
Our brands
We have a strong and well differentiated portfolio of global and regional brands, which are positioned to meet the needs and aspirations of our consumers across a variety of price points, segments and channels, allowing us to compete effectively in our key categories and countries.
Twelve of our brands have global turnover in excess of €1 billion. These are Knorr, Hellmann's, Lipton, Becel/Flora (Healthy Heart), Rama/Blue Band (Family Goodness), Wall's/Algida (Heart brand), Omo, Surf, Dove, Lux, Rexona (including Sure and Degree) and Sunsilk (including Seda and Sedal).
We manage our brands under the following four category headings: savoury, dressings and spreads; ice cream and beverages; personal care; and home care.
Savoury, dressings and spreads includes soups, bouillons, sauces, snacks, mayonnaise, salad dressings, olive oil, margarines, spreads and cooking products such as liquid margarines, and some frozen foods. Our key brands here are Knorr, Hellmann's, Becel/Flora (Healthy Heart), Rama/Blue Band (Family Goodness), Calvé, Wish-Bone, Amora, Ragú and Bertolli.
Ice cream and beverages includes ice cream sold under the international Heart brand, including Cornetto, Magnum, Carte d'Or and Solero, Wall's, Kibon, Algida and Ola. Our portfolio also includes Ben & Jerry's, Breyers, Klondike and Popsicle. This category also includes tea-based beverages, where our principal brands are Lipton, Brooke Bond and PG Tips. This group also includes weight management products, principally Slim•Fast, and nutritionally enhanced products sold in developing markets, including Annapurna and AdeS/Adez.
Within these groups, we also include sales of our Unilever Foodsolutions, which is a global food service business providing solutions for professional chefs and caterers.
In Personal Care, six global brands are the core of our business in the mass skin care, daily hair care and deodorants product areas – Dove, Lux, Rexona (including Sure and Degree), Sunsilk (including Seda/Sedal), Axe and Pond's. Other important brands include Suave, Clear, Lifebuoy and Vaseline, together with Signal and Close Up in oral care.
Our Home Care ranges include laundry products, such as tablets, traditional powders and liquids for washing of clothing by hand or machine. Tailored products including soap bars are available for lower-income consumers. Our brands include Omo ('Dirt is Good' platform), Surf, Comfort, Radiant, Skip and Snuggle. Our household care products include surface cleaners and bleach, sold under the Cif, Domestos and Sun/Sunlight brands.
Corporate venture activities
Unilever has allocated €350 million to its venturing activities in order to create new business opportunities that have the potential to help build our core brands and business interests in Foods and Home and Personal Care. These activities include:
- Unilever Ventures, an early-stage business development fund for businesses from both inside and outside Unilever;
- Langholm Capital, an independent fund investing in private European companies with above-average longer-term growth prospects; and
- Physic Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund investing in technology driven, consumer-directed health, wellness and sustainable living companies.
Our employees
Our One Unilever programme is already streamlining the business by creating single operating companies for each country and outsourcing parts of our IT, HR and Finance functions. In 2007 we announced plans to accelerate our change programme further by developing more multi-country organisations (MCOs) – clusters of countries with a single centralised management and shared functions. MCOs reduce duplication and free up resources to focus on customers and consumers. All regions announced or continued to implement MCOs in the year. The newly announced MCOs include Benelux; Germany, Austria and Switzerland; UK/Ireland; and Central Africa.
Our leaders make diversity a top business priority. Signalling this commitment, the Global Diversity Board draws together 15 leaders from all business functions and is chaired by Group Chief Executive Patrick Cescau. The board focuses on driving the diversity agenda into our business processes and tracking the progress of diversity initiatives. It also champions new ways of working to boost employees' personal vitality.
The Senior Executive Seminar, our pioneering leadership development programme, was led this year by leading business academic C K Prahalad. The event brought together 28 of our top leaders to examine key business issues, with a particularly strong external focus. They concentrated on developing and emerging markets, visiting more than 50 companies and 20 NGOs to gain insights into global trends and practices for opening up opportunities at the 'bottom of the economic pyramid'. The group's findings have been shared with the Unilever Executive and Board of Directors, and are helping to shape further our approach in these markets.
Our Standards of Leadership programme is a set of behaviours aimed at ensuring that every manager takes personal responsibility for delivering Unilever's agenda through excellence in strategy execution. During the year, the framework was rolled out globally to an enthusiastic response. In Asia the process was particularly effective, with managers across 15 countries attending interactive workshops. Individuals made personal commitments to 'live the behaviours' and to model them in their daily working lives.
We aim to offer our people stimulating ways to broaden their skills and experience while at the same time giving something back to the community. Salvatore Lucia, a Supply Chain Manager from Italy, was one of the Unilever specialists seconded to the World Food Programme (WFP) as part of their professional development. He is helping WFP Ghana deliver its school feeding and nutrition programme – and learning valuable skills to bring back to the business.
We are committed to finding fresh ways of working that improve business effectiveness, enhance work-life balance and benefit the environment. We created four 'Telepresence' video-conferencing rooms: in Englewood Cliffs, Rotterdam, London and Singapore. Telepresence uses high-definition video screens with life-size images around a single 'virtual' table, to replicate as closely as possible a face-to-face meeting. It is also the first technology of its kind to be certified by the CarbonNeutral Company. A further eight rooms will be added in 2008.
Our total employee numbers over the last five years were as follows:
| Year end in thousands | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Europe | 43 | 44 | 49 | 52 | 55 |
| The Americas | 43 | 45 | 47 | 47 | 50 |
| Asia Africa | 88 | 90 | 110 | 124 | 129 |
| Total | 174 | 179 | 206 | 223 | 234 |
The total reported numbers included approximately 26 000 part-time or seasonal employees in both 2007 and 2006.
Diversity
Diversity in Unilever is about inclusion, embracing differences, creating possibilities and growing together for better business performance. We embrace diversity in our workforce: this means giving full and fair consideration to all applicants and continuing development to all employees regardless of gender, nationality, race, creed, disability, style or sexuality. Diversity plays a vital role in ensuring we understand consumers' needs.
The commitment to diversity is set right at the top of our business. It is driven by the Global Diversity Board, chaired by Group Chief Executive Patrick Cescau, who has emphasised that “diversity is critical to our business competitiveness and long-term sustainability”.
Unilever is one of the world's most culturally diverse companies, with 21 different nationalities represented among our top level group of 113 managers worldwide.
In 2007 we worked to embed diversity even more firmly into our day-to-day business decisions, via our talent management and people processes, from appointments to development. As part of the Human Resources planning process our businesses units are also developing specific diversity plans that are aligned to the priorities and needs of their regions and categories.
We continue to carry out quarterly measurement and tracking of diversity against our objectives, using the HR Strategy in Action tool. Gender remains an important priority and is reviewed by the Unilever Executive team (UEx).
Information technology
Unilever Information Technology is a global function, headed by a global Chief Information Officer, with a strategy to deliver competitive and cost effective IT solutions to support the business.
A common technology framework and standards for architecture, key technologies, processes, information and services allow Unilever to leverage its scale in IT. For example, this approach is supporting the setting up and the operation of regional shared services centres for 'back-office' operations, notably in Finance and Human Resources, which in some cases are outsourced.
The IT function is a key enabler for the One Unilever change from a multi-local to a globally aligned business through:
- strategic alliances and partnerships with key global suppliers;
- improving IT capabilities and processes;
- improving overall IT infrastructure and service value; and
- strategic outsourcing in selected key areas.
The implementation across the Group of a world-class harmonised ERP system in each region in support of the One Unilever programme is progressing well. The Americas implementation has already been completed across the region, while two-thirds of our European business is now on a single instance ERP system with full implementation expected to be largely completed by the end of 2008. In Asia Africa, a phased implementation towards 2010 has seen the first four countries completed in 2007.
Unilever partners with a few major suppliers to develop the minimum number of non-overlapping IT systems needed to deliver the business objectives. This promotes radical simplification with flexibility and agility, faster implementation and reduced costs.
Intellectual property
We have a large portfolio of patents and trademarks, and we conduct some of our operations under licences which are based on patents or trademarks owned or controlled by others. We are not dependent on any one patent or group of patents. We use our best efforts to protect our brands and technology.
Property, plant and equipment
We have interests in properties in most of the countries where there are Unilever operations. However, none is material in the context of the Group as a whole. The properties are used predominantly to house production and distribution activities and as offices. There is a mixture of leased and owned property throughout the Group. There are no environmental issues affecting the properties which would have a material impact upon the Group, and there are no material encumbrances on our properties. Any difference between the market value of properties held by the Group and the amount at which they are included in the balance sheet is not significant. Please refer also to the schedule of principal group companies and non-current investments and to details of property, plant and equipment in note 10. We currently have no plans to construct new facilities or expand or improve our current facilities in a manner that is material to the Group.
