Unilever to focus on volumes and margins, after growth of 3.7% | Progresiv
Unilever has said that it will concentrate on driving volume growth and improving its operating margin in the year ahead, after reporting underlying sales growth of 3.7% in its full-year returns. 
Sales across the entire business rose by 4.3% and emerging markets grew by an even faster rate – at 6.5% – Unilever said. But the company’s prices were up 5.4%, in part due to a 1% increase in volumes and in part because of cost pressures prompted by the UK’s decision to leave the European Union (EU).
Unilever’s food business recovered, sustaining its return to growth with good performance in dressings, driven by easy-squeeze packs and the release of new organic varieties. Hellmann’s and Knorr both delivered another year of strong growth by successfully modernising their ranges, with extensions into organic variants with packaging that highlighted the naturalness of their ingredients.
Hellmann’s has made the switch to using exclusively cage-free eggs for its mayonnaise and mayonnaise-based dressings in the US – three years ahead of schedule.
Sales in spreads declined, as modest growth in emerging markets was offset by the continued but slowing decline in developed markets.
Despite strong performance in emerging market, Unilever said that ‘the economic crisis in Brazil and removal of 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation in India presented significant additional headwinds’.
In all, Unilever’s group-wide free cash flow was 4.8 billion euros, in line with ‘very strong’ performance in the previous year.
Commenting on the results, Unilever CEO Paul Polman said: “We have delivered another good all-round performance despite severe economic disruptions, particularly in India and Brazil, two of our largest markets. This further demonstrates the progress we have made in transforming Unilever into a more resilient business. We have again grown ahead of our markets, driven by strong innovations that support our category strategies.“Our priorities for 2017 continue to be volume growth ahead of our markets, a further increase in core operating margin and strong cash flow. The tough market conditions which made the end of the year particularly challenging are likely to continue in the first half of 2017. Against this background, we expect a slow start with growth improving as the year progresses.” (www.foodbev.com)
