Recent acquisitions such as Paula’s Choice supported strong growth of our Prestige beauty business.
We are Unilever
Our purpose is to make sustainable living commonplace.
A truly global business
We make household brands used by 3.4 billion consumers every day.
Read more about our business
Powered by our people
We are 148,000 people working in factories, labs, offices and homes around the world.
Read more about our people
Purpose-led, future-fit
We are determined to prove that our purpose-led, future-fit business model delivers superior performance.
Read more about our business model
Our strategic choices for growth
The Unilever Compass is our strategy to deliver growth that is consistent, competitive, profitable and responsible.
1. Develop our portfolio into high growth spaces
Our Functional nutrition portfolio grew through the strength of brands such as Horlicks, Olly, Liquid I.V. and Onnit.
We continued to step up our plant-based offering through the Vegetarian Butcher, Hellmann’s and our ice cream brands such as Magnum.
2. Win with our brands as a force for good, powered by purpose and innovation
Our innovation programme helped to deliver €1 billion in incremental turnover.
Product superiority in tests versus our competition is now over 70% of tested turnover.
We have 13 brands – also among our most purposeful – with sales in excess of €1 billion which make up over half of our total turnover.
3. Accelerate in USA, India, China and key growth markets
The US grew 3.7%, supported by breakthrough innovations from our purposeful brands and scaling our recently acquired brands.
India grew 13.4%, building scale in new categories and through market development and premiumisation.
China grew 14.3%, by transforming our portfolio into high growth spaces and increasing sales through eCommerce channels.
4. Lead in the channels of the future
We’re increasingly organising our business for eCommerce – sales grew by 44% and now represent 13% of our turnover.
We’re capitalising on the trend for quick commerce. Our Ice Cream Now platform for instant ice cream delivery grew by 60%.
We’re using digital sales platforms, such as Shikhar in India and Compra Agora in Brazil, to grow sales with our retail customers.
5. Build a purpose-led, future-fit organisation and growth culture
Purpose is at the heart of our culture, helping us attract the best people. We’re the number one FMCG employer of choice for graduates and early career talent in over 50 markets.
We’re rethinking how we work as an employer. Our AI-powered internal talent marketplace, Flex, helped us redeploy over 110,000 hours to around 1,300 critical projects.
We’re upskilling and reskilling our people for jobs of the future. Our people accessed the Degreed learning platform over 4.2 million times.
Our 2021 performance highlights
Driven by our strategic choices, we delivered good financial performance in a challenging operating environment. Alongside this, we made encouraging early progress against our Compass sustainability commitments – many of which run to 2025 and beyond. Our Annual Report contains further commentary on our performance.
Unilever Group
€52.4 bn Turnover 2020: €50.7bn
4.5 % Underlying sales growth 2020: 1.9%
18.4 % Underlying operating margin 2020: 18.5%
€6.4 bn Free cash flow 2020: €7.7bn
Improve the health of the planet
-64 % Reduction in our operational GHG emissions since 2015
79 % Proportion of key agricultural crops sustainably sourced
-16 % Reduction in our use of virgin plastic since 2018
53 % Percentage of our plastic packaging that is reusable, recyclable or compostable
Improve people’s health, confidence and wellbeing
41 % Percentage of our portfolio that delivers positive nutrition
63 % Percentage of our portfolio meeting WHO-aligned nutritional standards
89 % Percentage of our packaged ice creams containing <22g of sugar per serving
686 m People reached through our brands to improve health & wellbeing, and equity & inclusion
Contribute to a fairer, more socially inclusive world
€445 m Spend with diverse businesses owned by under-represented groups
7 % Percentage of employees reskilled or upskilled
Downloads
- Annual Report and Accounts 2021 (PDF 4.96MB)
- Annual Report and Accounts 2021 - ESEF tagged (ZIP 19.28MB)
- Annual Report and Accounts 2021- ESEF tagged-Netherlands specific audit opinion (ZIP 19.28MB)
- Annual Report on Form 20-F 2021 (PDF 4.25MB)
- Directors’ Remuneration Report 2021 (PDF 420KB)
- Unilever charts 2012 to 2021 (PDF 411KB)