Finance and liquidity

Unilever aims to be in the top third of a reference group including 20 other international consumer goods companies for Total Shareholder Return, as explained within the Financial review under Total Shareholder Return. The Group's financial strategy supports this objective and provides the financial flexibility to meet its strategic and day-to-day needs. The key elements of the financial strategy are:

• appropriate access to equity and debt capital;
• sufficient flexibility for acquisitions that we fund out of current cash flows;
• A1/P1 short-term credit rating;
• sufficient resilience against economic turmoil; and
• optimal weighted average cost of capital, given the constraints above.

Unilever aims to concentrate cash in the parent and finance companies in order to ensure maximum flexibility in meeting changing business needs. Operating subsidiaries are financed through the mix of retained earnings, third-party borrowings and loans from parent and group financing companies that is most appropriate to the particular country and business concerned. Unilever maintains access to global debt markets through an infrastructure of short-term debt programmes (principally US domestic and euro commercial paper programmes) and long-term debt programmes (principally a US Shelf registration and euromarket Debt Issuance Programme). Debt in the international markets is, in general, issued in the name of NV, PLC, Unilever Finance International BV or Unilever Capital Corporation. NV and PLC will normally guarantee such debt where they are not the issuer.

Unilever has been unaffected by the credit issues prevalent in some financial markets and we have been able to raise debt as required to fulfil our capital requirements.