Unilever Plans Cost Cuts and Focus on Personal Care

Unilever has announced a strategic plan to save 1 billion euros, equivalent to 1.12 billion dollars, by the end of 2029. The company intends to reshape its global operations to ensure more consistent sales growth in the future.

The group is separating its food and ice cream businesses to concentrate efforts on beauty, personal care, and home cleaning products. The food operation will be integrated into a new company with McCormick, while the ice cream division, which includes the Magnum brand, has become an independent publicly traded entity.

CEO Fernando Fernandez stated that the company seeks greater agility by focusing on categories that share scientific foundations and common distribution channels. The organizational structure will now be divided into three main pillars to optimize resource allocation.

The company's goal is to achieve underlying sales growth between 4% and 6% per year in the medium term. Market analysts note that reaching these volume levels consistently represents an operational challenge for the group's new structure.

Restructuring large global conglomerates can reduce exposure to volatile sectors, which tends to lower the risk premium required by the market for defensive consumer assets.