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Unilever

Three shifts, seven growth priorities, From 2025

Deliver absolute profit growth in line with top 1/3 total shareholder return
Unilever’s value creation ambition

Three shifts, seven growth priorities

Unilever is turning itself into a company of beauty, wellbeing, personal care, and home care. It demerged its ice cream business in December 2025 and agreed in March 2026 to combine its foods business with McCormick. Its strategy has three shifts, seven growth priorities, and four sustainability priorities underneath.

Brands

Desire at Scale

  • SASSY brands: science, aesthetics, and sensorials, brands that people share, young in spirit and part of the culture.
  • A frontline machine: excellent marketing and selling wherever consumers and customers meet the brands.
  • Power Brands, 78% of turnover, grew 6.0% in the first half of 2026, with 5.4% from volume.

People

Play to Win

  • A winning culture, where performance is rewarded.
  • Uncompromising on talent: the best people in the roles that create the most value.
  • 84% of Unilever’s 96,000 people said they were satisfied with it as a place to work in 2025.

Organisation

Fit for AI Age

  • AI and technology behind creativity, growth, and margin across the business.
  • Productivity and simplicity: a simpler, faster, and more agile organisation.
  • The €800 million productivity programme launched in 2024 was completed ahead of plan in the first half of 2026.

Seven growth priorities

BeautyWellbeingPersonal Care
Categories
Premium
Proposition
Digital Commerce
Channels
United StatesIndia
Geographies

Underpinned by sustainability

  • Climate
  • Nature
  • Plastics
  • Livelihoods

From five Business Groups to three

With ice cream gone and foods leaving, Unilever becomes a home and personal care company.,

Five Business Groups, with turnover of €60.8 billion.

    • Cash from the separation and trading are expected to support €6 billion of share buybacks from 2026 to 2029.
    • 3.7 billion people use Unilever products every day.

    Growth led by volume

    Underlying sales growth was 5.8% in the second quarter of 2026, and 5.5 points of it came from selling more. For 2026, Unilever expects growth within the range, with around 3% from volume.

    2025

    Q4 2025

    H1 2026

    Q2 2026

    VolumePriceMulti-year guidance: underlying sales growth of 4% to 6%.,

    1. Unilever decided what the company would be first.

      Before setting growth priorities, Unilever chose which businesses belong in it: ice cream and foods leave, and beauty, wellbeing, personal care, and home care stay. We recommend deciding what the company will be at the end of the plan, and planning the moves that get it there, before setting goals for each part.

    2. The growth priorities say where growth comes from.

      The seven priorities are three categories, a proposition, a channel, and two countries. Anyone can tell whether a piece of work serves one of them. We recommend priorities that name the products, customers, channels, or places growth will come from.

    3. Volume and price are reported apart.

      Every result splits underlying sales growth into volume and price, so growth from selling more can be told apart from growth from charging more. We recommend splitting a growth target into its parts, so a strong total cannot hide a weak part.

    Sources

    1. 1. Unilever PLC (2026). Unilever Annual Report on Form 20-F 2025. Annual report, 12 March 2026. sec.gov
    2. 2. Unilever PLC (2025). Full year 2024 results. Results announcement, 13 February 2025. sec.gov
    3. 3. Unilever PLC (2026). Full year 2025 results. Results announcement, 12 February 2026. sec.gov
    4. 4. Unilever PLC (2026). Unilever Foods and McCormick: investor call. Transcript filed with the SEC, 31 March 2026. sec.gov
    5. 5. Unilever PLC (2026). First half 2026 results. Results announcement, 28 July 2026. sec.gov

    Headwater is not connected with Unilever PLC, The Magnum Ice Cream Company, or McCormick & Company. Unilever, Dove, Sunsilk, and Vaseline are trade marks of their owners. Updated 28 September 2026.

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