LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Unilever
built 215 days ago
Although Unilever's growth until the mid-1940s was a result of expanded product lines and plant capacities, its greatest achievements between 1945 and 1965 were its adaptation to new markets and technology. The decade following World War II was a period of recovery, culminating by the early 1950s in rapid economic growth in much of the Western world. Until 1955 demand continued to rise and competition was not a major issue. Afterward... profit margins dropped, competition in Europe and North America sharpened, and success was less assured. Unilever's strategy was to acquire companies in new areas, particularly food and chemical manufacturers. Among the postwar acquisitions were U.K. frozen foods maker Birds Eye (1957) and U.S. ice cream novelty maker Good Humor (1961).
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Unilever is an international consumer products giant selling tea, ice cream, fabric softener, and much more. In attaining its current status, Unilever has engaged in a range of abuses nearly as broad as its production line. Child labor, unsustainable terms of trade, and corporate influence are among the most troubling offenses carried out by the company. Unilever is the world's largest tea supplier and has been targeted for profiting richly from the hardship of Indian tea farmers. The company fails to apply fair trade principles to the tea trade, forcing farmers deeper into poverty as tea prices continue to drop. Additionally, Unilever has been known to employ bribery to gain privileged market access in developing countries.
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Unilever has strong ties to the Third World thanks to the operation of plantations and the agricultural experiments it has carried out on the behest of, or in co-operation with, national governments. Unilever’s Third World operations often have higher profit margins than its European and North American operations, not surprisingly of course, since capital-rich multinationals can easily enforce access to cheap raw materials, land and low-paid workers in the South. Many of Unilever’s consumer products originate in the South, e.g. tea (see paragraph on market domination). Multinational corporations usually take the major part of the profit-cake, and leave the crumbs for the small producers/farmers in the Third World. It is of course the latter that are providing the real core value of a product (although in this age of commercialisation and commodification off all things, including ideas and images, brands are increasingly being considered as the core value of a product).
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[A]nd most important, Unilever had distinctive strengths in management. Unilever invested heavily in its management. It recruited some of the best available graduates in each generation, not only from its home economies, but in many other countries .... Its early "localization" policies opened up the most senior positions within operating companies to nationals, enabling Unilever to tap high-quality staff all over the world. Unilever managers were given extensive training, and their career development was watched over carefully. A strong corporate culture, which coexisted with numerous subcultures, helped turn Unilever's management into the central binding force of the company, preventing it from becoming a "conglomerate" even at its most diversified.
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The Unilever companies originally moved into overseas territories for two reasons: They wanted to sell their products everywhere and they wanted to secure raw material bases. However, once a unit was established somewhere, it tended to be interested in all manner of businesses. A prime example was the fabled United Africa Company (UAC), which William Hesketh Lever began building in 1910 when he bought W. B. Maclver, a Liverpool trading company operating in Nigeria. In the next nineteen years trading company after trading company in West Africa fell into the hands of Lever Brothers, culminating on March 3, 1929, nine months before the merger with the Margarine Union, in the amalgamation of the Lever-controlled Niger Company with the African and Eastern Trade Corporation. The formation of the new Lever subsidiary, United Africa Company, was announced from the Savoy Hotel in London. Subsumed in UAC were activities of more than a dozen trading companies, most of them of British origin, one of whose histories went back three hundred years to its days as a slave trader.
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Unilever and Procter & Gamble (P & G) began battling again in 1994, this time for supremacy in the European detergent sector. Unilever aggressively went after P & G's market-leading brand, Ariel, with a new soap marketed under the names Persil Power, Omo Power, and Skip Power. Unilever spent $175 million developing the product and another $292 million marketing it during 1994. The product included a manganese complex molecule that Unilever claimed cleaned clothes better at lower temperatures than rival products. P & G conducted tests on Persil Power... which indicated that the detergent resulted in abnormal wear after as few as 15 washings. When P & G publicized its findings, Unilever sued the company for slander.
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