HINDUSTAN UNILEVER LIMITED

Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) (BSE: 500696) is India's largest fast moving consumer goods company owned by the European company Unilever. The AngloDutch company Unilever owns a 52% majority stake.

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 15,000 employees and contributes to indirect employment of over 52,000 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 1 million retail outlets across India directly and its products are available in over 6.3 million outlets in the country, nearly 80% of all retail outlets in India. The company claims that two out of three Indians use its many home and personal care products, food and beverages.

Brands
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. Sixteen of HULs brands featured in the ACNielsen Brand Equity list of 100 Most Trusted Brands Annual Survey (2008).[4] According to Brand Equity, HUL has the largest number of brands in the Most Trusted Brands List. It has consistently had the largest number of brands in the Top 50, and in the Top 10 (with 4 brands).

The company has a distribution channel of 6.3 million outlets and owns 35 major Indian brands.[5] Its brands include Kwality Wall's ice cream, Knorr soups & meal makers, Lifebuoy, Lux, Pears, Breeze, Liril, Rexona, Hamam and Moti soaps, Pureit water purifier, Lipton tea, Brooke Bond (3 Roses, Taj Mahal, Taaza, Red Label) tea, Bru coffee, Pepsodent and Close Up toothpaste and brushes, and Surf, Rin and Wheel laundry detergents, Kissan squashes and jams, Annapurna

salt and atta, Pond's talcs and creams, Vaseline lotions, Fair and Lovely creams, Lakm beauty products, Clear, Clinic Plus, Clinic All Clear, Sunsilk and Dove shampoos, Vim dishwash, Ala bleach, Domex disinfectant, Modern Bread, Axe deosprays and Comfort fabric softeners. Leadership HUL has produced many business leaders for corporate India; one of these, Harish Manwani,[6] has become a member of Unilever's Executive (UEx).

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.[7][8][9]

Other awards

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.[3]

In 2007, Hindustan Unilever was rated as the most respected company in India for the past 25 years by Businessworld, one of Indias leading business magazines.[10] The rating was based on a compilation of the magazine's annual survey of Indias most reputed companies over the past 25 years.

HUL was one of the eight Indian companies to be featured on the Forbes list of Worlds Most Reputed companies in 2007.[11]

HUL is the most innovative company in India by Forbes list and 6th in the top 10 list of most innovative companies in the world. [12]

HUL was ranked 39th in The Brand Trust Report (2011) published by Trust Research Advisory. Fair and Lovely creams also was listed in the same report.

Research facilities

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.[13]

Community services

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.[3]

Project Shakti In 2001, the company embarked on a programme called Shakti. It collaborated with the rural self-help groups in order to educate rural women and make them a part of the company's marketing network as direct-to-home distributors. The major objective of this initiave as a whole remains to create livelihood opportunities for underprivileged rural women. The programme is broadly divided into three components:

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. 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.[15] On an average, a Shakti Amma sells Rs 10,00015,000 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.[16]

Shakti Vani This is a social awareness program where rural women work as 'Vanis' and communicate with the village people by delivering lectures on health, hygiene and education. These are conducted in schools, SHG meetings, village

gatherings, etc. Shakti Vani also includes awareness programmes on health and hygiene, education, etc.

Shakti This is a community portal launched in November 2004, first in Andhra Pradesh. It has set up interactive kiosks in villages with internet-linked computers which provide all forms of information to village people. Villagers register as users and surf the internet. HUL has worked with Tata Consultancy Services to enable this programme.

Shaktimaan Model To further expand its reach to far off rural areas, HUL recently brought in its new Shaktimaan model where the village men work as distributors of HUL products. They head out on their bicycles, provided by the company, in order to sell the subsidized HUL products to nearby villages. They earn 10 percent of their total sales in a month. As of 2011 there are about 10,000 men signed up for the system.

This strategy has worked out well for the company as it successfully integrates its business with social responsibility. This plan has helped them in achieving economies by reducing the distribution cost. It has also enabled them to access the interior and rural population of the country which results in a substantial increase in their sales coverage.

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

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.[18][19][20]

Skin lightening creams

Hindustan Unilever's "Fair and Lovely" is the leading skin-lightening cream for women in India.[21] 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.[22] In 2008 Hindustan Unilever made former Miss World Priyanka Chopra a brand ambassador for Pond's,[23] 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.[24]

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).