International Company Strategy for Unilever

Unilever

Unilever is a multinational corporation that has been growing rapidly ever since its foundation in 1930. It is based in two nations: England (London) and Netherlands (Rotterdam.) The company offers a wide range of product lines divided into three different areas: food, including brands such as Knorr, Hellmann’s or Lipton; home care, including Radiant or Cif; and personal care, with brands that are known worldwide, such as Axe, Vaseline or Dove.

The company is a very important international competitor. It is considered the third largest consumer products company, only surpassed by Procter & Gamble and Nestlé (which are its main international competitors.) (Unilever)

Products & Services

Food brands:

Home care brands:

Personal care brands:

The potential joint venture in Morocco that is being analyzed will be applied to the food product line. Unilever has an extended variety of brands in this product line, including: Lipton, Flora, Hellman’s, Knorr, Slim-Fast, Bertolli and Heartbrand among others. Unilever food brands have been very successful around the world (they can be found in more than 180 countries.) The opportunities and challenges of taking this particular product line to Morocco will be discussed in later sections.

Employees

At the end of 2010, Unilever had 167,000 employees. The top tier managers come from 22 different nationalities. The Chief Executive Officer at present is Paul Polman. In October of 2008, he got the position of Executive Director to the Boards of Unilever PLC and Unilever NV. It was the first time the company chose an external candidate to develop this role. Jean-Marc Huët is the Chief Financial Officer since February of 2010.

Locations

Unilever products are sold in 180 countries. As a multinational company, Unilever does business with countries spread over all the continents in the world. Moreover, the company is a dual-listed company, since there are two headquarters in two different...