How HUL Got Its Mojo Back
Sanjiv Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director of the Rs35,218 crore Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), has been a Unilever globe trotter and trouble shooter for the past 25 years. He started his stint with the FMCG multinational as part of the team setting up the business from scratch in Dubai, had stints as chairman of Unilever Bangladesh (which was in the throes of an anti MNC sentiment), in Africa and again as chairman of Unilever operations in the Middle East (right in the middle of Arab Spring), with postings at the London headquarters in between.
In 2013, Unilever offered Mehta the chance to take over as CEO and managing director of HUL (in July 2018, he took over as chairman after Harish Manwani retired). It was not just a reward posting to his home country towards the end of a long and illustrious career. Unilever was probably looking at Mehta applying some of the unconventional and contrarian thinking he is known for in the Unilever network. (During Arab Spring, he told his Egypt country head to dramatically increase spending on marketing and distribution even as rivals were slowing down. Unilever gained massively as things settled down. In fact, it continued growing at double digits even during the peak of the trouble).
HUL was not really in trouble when he took over. You can't call an FMCG leader that clocked revenues of Rs28,019 crore and net profits of Rs4,799 crore in trouble. But there was a feeling that HUL needed to do something different. It was not reacting quickly to smaller, nimbler rivals like Patanjali which were popping up. It was not rolling out new products or hitting new markets rapidly enough. E commerce was taking off in a big way but HUL had not taken advantage of the new retail channel. It had perhaps become too big to be as innovative as smaller competitors. It needed a reinvention. On top of it, the country's overall economic growth had slowed, and that affected most FMCG players especially big, organised ones as consumers in rural areas traded down to buy from smaller, unorganised rivals who were selling cheaply.
Even before he landed in
