Unilever, one of the leading FMCG companies globally, said that its overall yearly performance was levered by a premium detergent brand which was launched in India. “In fabric sensations, the performance was supported by ongoing market development-driven growth in India, where we also launched premium detergent brand Love & Care,” the maker of Lipton tea and Dove soap said in its yearly earnings review. Overall, Unilever’s growth was led by the Home Care category’s strong performance. However, due to price reductions in India, Unilever’s price growth decelerated in the fourth quarter of the calendar year 2019, the company added.
Unilever had launched the premium Love & Care brand of detergent in mid-2019 when most of the FMCG companies were in the middle of a demand slowdown. Priced at almost double the rate of its liquid Surf Excel detergent range, the Love & Care brand of detergent is targeted at rising affluent classes. Earlier, Financial Express Online had reported that companies tend to launch costlier products in the instances of a demand slowdown because the wealthy still have the money to experiment. In fact, Unilever’s own launch in the detergent category came after the gap of 30 years, an analyst at Euromonitor International said in October 2019.
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“We saw strong growth from emerging markets and our Home Care division. Overall growth was slightly below our guided range for the year due to the slowdown we saw in the fourth quarter,” Alan Jope, chief executive officer, Unilever said in a statement. The company now looks to ramp up its “fundamental drivers of growth” i.e, brand awareness and availability, implementing innovation programme, performance in faster-growing channels, driving purpose into brands and fuelling growth through cost savings, he added.