Hindustan Unilever

Hindustan Unilever Ltd

Type	Public (BSE: 500696)
Industry	Fast-moving consumer goods
Founded	1933
Headquarters	Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Key people	Harish Manwani (Chairman), Nitin Paranjpe (CEO and Managing Director)
Products	Home & Personal Care, Food & Beverages
Revenue	19,401 crore (US$3.88 billion) (2010-2011)
Net income	2,305 crore (US$461 million)
Employees	16,500 (2011)
Parent	Unilever Plc (52%)
Website	www.hul.co.in

Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) (BSE: 500696) is India's largest fast-moving consumer goods company based in Mumbai, Maharashtra. It is owned by the British-Dutch company Unilever which controls 52% majority stake in HUL.

HUL was formed in 1933 as Lever Brothers India Limited and came into being in 1956 as Hindustan Lever Limited through a merger of Lever Brothers, Hindustan Vanaspati Mfg. Co. Ltd. and United Traders Ltd. It is headquartered in Mumbai, India and has an employee strength of over 16,500 employees and contributes to indirect employment of over 65,000 people . The company was renamed in June 2007 as “Hindustan Unilever Limited”.

Lever Brothers started its actual operations in India in the summer of 1888, when crates full of Sunlight soap bars, embossed with the words "Made in England by Lever Brothers" were shipped to the Kolkata harbour and it began an era of marketing branded Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG).

Hindustan Unilever's distribution covers over 2 million retail outlets across India directly and its products are available in over 6.4 million outlets in the country. As per Nielsen market research data, two out of three Indians use HUL products .

Brands

HUL Brands-Taken from website

HUL is the market leader in Indian consumer products with presence in over 20 consumer categories such as soaps, tea, detergents and shampoos amongst others with over 700 million Indian consumers using its products. Seventeen of HUL’s brands featured in the ACNielsen Brand Equity list of 100 Most Trusted Brands Annual Survey (2011). The company also happens to have the highest number of brands in this list, with six brands featuring in the top 15 list.

The company has a distribution channel of 6.3 million outlets and owns 35 major Indian brands. Its brands include:

Food brands:

• Annapurna salt and atta
• Bru coffee
• Brooke Bond (3 Roses, Taj Mahal, Taaza, Red Label) tea
• Kissan squashes,ketchups, juices and jams
• Lipton tea
• Knorr soups & meal makers and soupy noodles
• Kwality Wall's ice cream
• Modern Bread, ready to eat chapattis and other bakery items

Homecare Brands

• ActiveWheel detergent
• Cif Cream Cleaner
• Comfort fabric softeners
• Domex disinfectant/toilet cleaner
• Rin detergents and bleach
• Sunlight detergent and colour care
• Surf Excel detergent and gentle wash
• Vim dishwash

Personal Care Brands:

• Aviance Beauty Solutions
• Axe deodorant and aftershaving lotion
• LEVER Ayush Therapy ayurvedic health care and personal care products
• Breeze beauty soap
• Clear anti-dandruff hair products
• Clinic Plus shampoo and oil
• Close Up toothpaste
• Dove bar & skin cleansing, hair care range,lotions & Creams and anti-perspirant deodorants
• Denim shaving products
• Fair & Lovely - fairness products
• Hamam
• Lakmé beauty products and salons
• Lifebuoy soaps and handwash range
• Liril 2000 soap
• Lux soap
• Pears soap
• Pepsodent toothpaste
• Pond's talcs and creams
• Rexona soap
• Sunsilk shampoo
• Sure anti-perspirant
• Vaseline petroleum jelly, skin care lotions

Leadership

HUL has produced many business leaders for corporate India, including Harish Manwani,, the non-executive chairman of HUL and currently the Chief Operating Officer of Unilever. He is also a member of Unilever Leadership Executive team (ULE), which comprises the company’s top management and is responsible for managing Unilever’s profit and loss, and delivering growth across its regions, categories and functions . Nitin Paranjpe has been the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the company since April 2008. He is also Executive Vice President, South Asia, Unilever and is also the executive head of the South Asia cluster for Unilever.

HUL's leadership-building potential was recognized when it was ranked 4th in the Hewitt Global Leadership Survey 2007 with only GE, P&G and Nokia ranking ahead of HUL in the ability to produce leaders with such regularity.. A study conducted by Aon Hewitt, The RBL Group and Fortune in 2011, ranked the company number six in the list of ‘Top Companies for Leaders 2011 Study Results’. The company was awarded the CII- Prize for Leadership in HR Excellence at the 2nd CII National HR Conclave 2011 held on October 2011 .

Awards and Recognition

HUL was one of the eight Indian companies to be featured on the Forbes list of World’s Most Reputed companies in 2007.

In 2011, HUL was named the most innovative company in India by Forbes and ranked 6th in the top 10 list of most innovative companies in the world .

HUL was ranked 39th in The Brand Trust Report (2011) published by Trust Research Advisory . Seven HUL brands also featured in the list: Lux, Pond’s, Dove, Lakme, Axe, Sunsilk and Pepsodent .

HUL emerged as the top ‘Dream Employer’ as well as the top company considered for application in the annual B-School Survey conducted by Nielsen in November 2010. This was the second successive year that HUL has been rated as the top ‘Dream Employer’ in India . HUL has also emerged as the top employer – employer of choice – among the top six Indian Institutes of Management (IIM C, A, B, L, K and I).

HUL bagged three awards at the 'CNBC Awaaz Storyboard Consumer Awards’ in 2011 - Most Recommended FMCG Company of the Year; Most Consumer Conscious Company of the Year and Digital Marketer of the Year .

The company was felicitated in April 2010 for receiving the highest number of patents in the year 2009 at Annual Intellectual Property Awards 2010 .

In 2007, Hindustan Unilever was rated as the most respected company in India for the past 25 years by Businessworld, one of India’s leading business magazines. The rating was based on a compilation of the magazine's annual survey of India’s most reputed companies over the past 25 years.

HUL is one of the country's largest exporters; it has been recognised as a Golden Super Star Trading House by the Government of India.

==Research facilities==

Unilever R&D Center in Bangalore

The Hindustan Unilever Research Centre (HURC) was set up in 1967 in Mumbai, and Unilever Research India in Bangalore in 1997. Staff at these centres developed many innovations in products and manufacturing processes. In 2006, the company's research facilities were brought together at a single site in Bangalore.

Sustainable Living

Unilever launched Sustainable Living Plan in on November 15 2010 at London, Rotterdam, New York and New Delhi simultaneously .

The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan has three major goals, which Unilever aims to achieve by 2020:

• Help more than one billion people improve their health and well-being
• Halve the environmental impact of their products
• Source 100% of their agricultural raw materials sustainably

The plan also sets out over 50 social, economic and environmental targets .

India Water Body

In May 2011, the company launched the India Water Body, an initiative aimed to address the challenge of water scarcity in India . HUL has been working in the area of water conversation for more than a decade and has initiated projects in several states across India with the aim to create capacity towards conserving more than 50 billion litres of water in the next four years (by 2015).Water conservation has been a focus area for the company across its value chain. The company has not only reduced water consumption in its operations but also developed product innovations such as Surf Excel quick-wash that helps consumers use less water while washing clothes.

Plastic Recycling Project

In July 2011, HUL and Bharti Retail started a three month campaign called “Go Recycle” to promote plastic recycling among consumers in the National Capital Region (NCR) in 2011. Consumers were encouraged to bring empty plastic bottles and pouches, for which they were given discount coupons in return.

Creating financial Inclusion

The company joined forces with the State Bank of India (SBI) to introduce banking services to people from low-income groups in rural areas . The project was piloted in the states of Maharashtra and Karnataka.

HUL also renders services to the community, focusing on health & hygiene education, empowerment of women, and water management. It is also involved in education and rehabilitation of underprivileged children, care for the destitute and HIV-positive, and rural development. HUL has also responded to national calamities, for instance with relief and rehabilitation after the 2004 tsunami caused devastation in South India.

Project Shakti

Project Shakti is a rural distribution initiative of Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) that targets small villages populated by less than 5000 individuals .

Project Shakti benefits business by enhancing HUL’s direct rural reach, and by enabling HUL’s brands to communicate effectively in media-dark regions. It also impacts society by creating livelihood opportunities for underprivileged rural women. Project Shakti consists of the Shakti Entrepreneur program which creates livelihood opportunities for underprivileged rural women.

Shakti Entrepreneur

This is a sales and distributive initiative which recruites village women as sales persons called Shakti Amma and trains them to communicate and sell HUL products in villages. The idea is to be able to reach those villages which do not have good road connectivity and where the penetration of media is poor. The Shakti Entrepreneur (SE) program recognises that while micro-credit plays a key role in alleviating poverty, its ability to do so depends on the availability of investment opportunities. Shakti contributes by creating profitable micro-enterprise opportunities for rural women. Armed with micro-credit, rural women become Shakti entrepreneurs: direct-to-home distributors in rural markets. This micro-enterprise offers low risks and high returns. The products distributed are some of the country’s most trusted brands of consumer goods, and include a range of mass-market products especially relevant to rural consumers. Moreover, HUL invests its resources in training the entrepreneurs, helping them become confident, business-savvy professionals capable of running their own enterprise. The Shakti Entrepreneur is also called as ‘Shakti Amma’ – ‘Shakti’ means ‘Power/Empowered’ and ‘Amma’ means ‘Mother’ in Telugu the language spoken in Andhra Pradesh where Project Shakti was first piloted in 2000.

The project started in a few pilot villages in Andhra Pradesh in 2000. In 2002 it expanded to two states and by the end of 2004 had grown to over 13,000 Shakti women entrepreneurs in 12 states. Today there are about 45,000 Shakti Ammas across 15 states in India.

Shakti Vani now covers 15 states in India with over 45,000 women entrepreneurs covering over 100,000 villages and 3 million households every month. On an average, a Shakti Amma sells Rs 10,000–15,000 worth of HUL products providing her a regular income of Rs 700-1,000 every month. Shakti distributors now account for 15 percent of the company's sales in rural India.

Shaktimaan

In 2010, HUL rolled out the Shaktiman initiative through Project Shakti. Through the Shaktimaan initiative, men in the Shakti Amma families distribute HUL products to villages adjoining the respective Shakti village. Through the GIS (Geographical Information System), villages around the 'Shakti' families are tracked and based on this they are allotted five to six villages. They go to these villages and sell HUL products. The Shaktimaan have also been given bicycles to ensure smooth travelling between villages. HUL now has over 26,000 Shaktimaans (through the Project Shakti network) across the country now. The revenue earned by the Shaktimaan further augments the household income of the 'Shakti' family. Shaktimaans covering about five to six villages adjoining the Shakti village.

Marketing Initiatives

Khushiyon Ki Doli

The company launched a multi-brand rural marketing initiative called Khushiyon Ki Doli , in 2010 in three states – Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Through this initiative more than 10 million consumers were contacted directly in more than 28,000 villages across these three states. Through this initiative, the company also reached out to 170,000 retailers in these villages.

Various personal care and home care brands of HUL have participated in this initiative including: Wheel, Surf Excel, FAL, Sunsilk, Vim, Lifebuoy and Closeup.

The module follows a three-step process, starting with awareness, moving on to consumer engagement and finally retail contact. The first step of spreading awareness is achieved through a team of promoters who head to each village and invite the villages to what is known as ‘Mohallas’ to make them aware of the company and its products. In every village, there are about 4-5 teams that conduct these events in local language for small focused groups so that it allows for greater engagement and involvement for the consumers. During this activity, brands are introduced with the help of TVCs that are played continuously. And the promoters by way of ‘live’ demonstrations bring alive the hygiene benefits of using such brands and improving the quality of daily life. To increase the ‘fun’ element and enhance involvement, promoters also conduct simple quizzes and games around the brands and daily hygiene habits. As part of this activation,the comapny offers schemes both for the participating consumers and also local retailers for generating trial among consumers as well enhancing availability at retail. Post the ‘mohalla’ activity, the promotes go home to home and conduct consumer home visits to generate trial where they offer attractive promotions to the consumers. Similarly, there is another team which visits all the shops in the village which ensures improved availability and visibility of HUL brands. Technology has been used to highlight the benefits of HUL’s brands in a simple and engaging manner. At the same time, traditional symbols have also been used to create more acceptance. For example, the brand films and hygiene messages are shown to the consumers through the use of Palki.

Lessons in Marketing Excellence

The company tied up with CNBC TV18 in 2009 to launch a television show titled, ‘Lessons in Marketing Excellence’, a marketing case-study competition for management students in India. Some of the participating institutes include: IIM Calcutta, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, IIM Indore, XLRI, Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies, SP Jain Institute of Management and Research and National Institute of Industrial Engineering.

The show is currently in its third season .

Perfect Stores

The ‘Perfect Stores’ initiative was launched by HUL in May 2010 with the aim to improve the availability and visibility of its products in retail stores across the country. In May 2010, four thousand HUL employees from across functions launched the initiative through ‘Project Bushfire’ and created 16,000 ‘Perfect Stores’ in 130 towns in India in a span of 6 days. The employees not only laid out various products on the stores’ shelves but also dusted them, thereby transforming the whole look of the stores. The company is constantly increasing the number of stores it covers under the Perfect Stores programme. Technology has played a key role in this initiative. The company’s salesmen have been provided with a hand held terminal called iQ, which gives customised recommendations for each store – which products to sell, when to sell them and in what quantity. The salesman just has to sync the iQ device when visiting the distributor and download data from the centre to retrieve information on the market. To strengthen this initiative, HUL launched POPeye - an initiative that puts the power of iQ in the hands of the employees. When an HUL employee visits an outlet and finds the company’s product out of stock, he can log stock calls either by logging on to the POPeye site , or report the information by phone or email.

Headquarters

HUL's present headquarters in Mumbai

Hindustan Unilever’s corporate headquarters is located at Andheri (E), Mumbai. The campus is spread over 12.5 acres of land and houses over 1600 employees. Some of the facilities available for the employees include a convenience store, a food court, an occupational health centre, a gym, a sports & recreation centre and a day care centre .

The campus uses green and energy efficient building features such as rainwater harvesting, optimal use of glass and use of ‘zero-waste’ water recycling concepts.

The campus received a certification from LEED(Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold in ‘New Construction’ category, by Indian Green Building Council (IGBC), Hyderabad, under license from the United States Green Building Council (USGBC)

The company’s previous headquarters was located at Backbay Reclamation, Mumbai at the Lever House, where it was housed for over 46 years .

Direct Selling Division

HUL also runs Hindustan Unilever Network (HULN), a direct selling business arm. Under HULN, health products are marketed by Ayush Therapy in collaboration with Arya Vaidya Pharmacy, Coimbatore; beauty products by Aviance; home products by Lever Home; and male grooming by D.I.Y. There are also premium products for beauty salons and others.

Controversy

Mercury pollution

Main article: Kodaikanal#Mercury_pollution

In 2001 a thermometer factory in Kodaikanal run by Hindustan Unilever was accused of dumping glass contaminated with mercury in municipal dumps, or selling it on to scrap merchants unable to deal with it appropriately.

Skin lightening creams

Hindustan Unilever's "Fair and Lovely" is the leading skin-lightening cream for women in India. The company was forced to withdraw television advertisements for the product in 2007. Advertisements depicted depressed, dark-complexioned women, who had been ignored by employers and men, suddenly finding new boyfriends and glamorous careers after the cream had lightened their skin. In 2008 Hindustan Unilever made former Miss World Priyanka Chopra a brand ambassador for Pond's, and she then appeared in a mini-series of television commercials for another skin lightening product, White Beauty, alongside Saif Ali Khan and Neha Dhupia; these advertisements were widely criticized for perpetuating racism.

Triclosan

Several academic papers have pointed out the firm's continued use of the antibacterial agent Triclosan ('Active B') in India because it is under review by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

See also

• Hindustan Unilever on Wikinvest

External links

• Official website of Hindustan Unilever Limited
• Official website of Hindustan Unilever Network, direct selling multi-level marketing business