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HomeOrganizationsHindustan Unilever

Organization · Company

Hindustan Unilever

Hindustan Unilever Limited is the largest fast moving consumer goods company in India and the Indian arm of Unilever. It sells everything from Lifebuoy soap and Surf Excel detergent to Red Label tea, Lakme cosmetics and Horlicks health drinks through the widest distribution network in the country. In the 2020s it has been shrinking on purpose, spinning off its ice cream business and buying its way into premium beauty and nutrition.

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Last edited 16 October 20262 revisions12 sourcesReading time 26 min
Hindustan Unilever

Hindustan Unilever

Entrant since 2026 · Organization · Company · Awaiting verification

Summary details for Hindustan Unilever
Full nameHindustan Unilever Limited
Founded1933
as Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Company; named Hindustan Unilever in June 2007
HeadquartersAndheri, Mumbai, Maharashtra
ParentUnilever holds about 61.90 per cent
Managing director and chief executivePriya Nair
from 1 August 2025, the first woman to lead the company
SectorFast moving consumer goods
SegmentsHome care, beauty and personal care, foods and refreshment
Key brandsSurf Excel, Rin, Wheel, Lifebuoy, Lux, Dove, Lakme, Pepsodent, Close Up, Sunsilk, Red Label, Bru, Knorr, Kissan, Horlicks and Boost
RevenueAbout 69,400 crore rupees
year ended March 2026
Net profitAbout 151 billion rupees reported, including the ice cream demerger gain
year ended March 2026
EmployeesAbout 26,667
2025, including about 18,465 workers
ReachSold through millions of retail outlets across India
Research centreBangalore, consolidated at one site in 2006
Listed onBSE and NSE
part of the Sensex and the Nifty 50
DivestedIce cream business demerged into Kwality Wall's India in 2026
AcquisitionsHorlicks and Boost in 2020, Minimalist in 2025, OZiva completed in 2026
Websitehul.co.in

Timeline

  1. 1888Lever Brothers starts exporting Sunlight soap to Indiasoap arrives in India before the company is built here
  2. 1931An Indian vanaspati business is started and incorporated in 1933 as Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Company
  3. 1933Lever Brothers India Limited and United Traders Limited are incorporated alongside itUnilever's official founding year for the Indian company
  4. 1956The three companies merge into Hindustan Lever Limitedthe first time the Dutch and British interests in India sit in one entity
  5. 1956Hindustan Lever's shares begin trading on the Bombay Stock Exchange
  6. 1977Under foreign exchange rules Unilever reduces its holding in Hindustan Lever to 51 per cent
  7. 1993Hindustan Lever absorbs Tata Oil Mills Company, then the largest merger in Indian corporate history
  8. 1996Brooke Bond Lipton India is merged into Hindustan Lever, bringing tea and the Kwality Wall's frozen dessert business
  9. 1998The company buys Lakme from the Tata group and enters the cosmetics business
  10. 2000Hindustan Lever buys Modern Foods from the government, the first privatisation of a public sector food company
  11. 2001The Kodaikanal thermometer factory is shut after mercury contaminated glass scrap is sold to a scrap dealer
  12. 2001Project Shakti begins in Andhra Pradesh with women distributors selling HUL products in villages
  13. 2007The company is renamed Hindustan Unilever Limited in June
  14. 2010The corporate headquarters moves from Lever House at Backbay Reclamation to a campus in Andheri
  15. 2013Sanjiv Mehta takes charge as chief executive and managing director
  16. 2014HUL is ranked first on the Forbes list of the world's most innovative companies
  17. 2016An out of court settlement with former Kodaikanal workers closes the main civil claims from the mercury case
  18. 2018HUL agrees to buy the consumer healthcare business of GlaxoSmithKline in India for 3.8 billion dollars in an all share deal
  19. 2019A Red Label advertisement set at the Kumbh Mela draws accusations of insensitivity and a boycott call
  20. 2020The GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare merger is completed in April, bringing Horlicks and Boost into the company
  21. 2020Fair & Lovely is renamed Glow & Lovely after years of criticism of fairness creams
  22. 2023Rohit Jawa takes over as managing director and chief executive
  23. 2024HUL sells its Pureit water purification business and buys a majority of the beauty brand Minimalist
  24. 2025Priya Nair becomes managing director and chief executive, the first woman to lead the company in 92 years
  25. 2025Shareholders approve the demerger of the ice cream business, with a record date of 5 December
  26. 2026Kwality Wall's India lists on the stock exchanges in February after the demerger
  27. 2026HUL buys the remaining 49 per cent of Zywie Ventures, the company behind OZiva, for about 824 crore rupees

What it does

Hindustan Unilever Limited is the largest fast moving consumer goods company in India and the Indian arm of Unilever. It sells food and refreshment products, home care products and beauty and personal care products, and its brands include Surf Excel, Lifebuoy, Lux, Dove, Rin, Vim, Pepsodent, Close Up, Clinic Plus, Sunsilk, Red Label tea, Bru coffee, Knorr, Kissan, Horlicks and Boost. It is a subsidiary of an Anglo-Dutch parent, a subsidiary of a global parent that traces its Indian roots to the 1880s.[1]

The company's own description of its reach is that nine out of ten Indian households use at least one HUL product, and that its brands reach consumers through a distribution network that touches millions of tiny shops where most of India still does its shopping. It operates in about twenty consumer categories, from soap and detergent to tea, toothpaste, shampoo, skin care, packaged food and health drinks.[1]

The business model is simple to state and hard to copy. HUL buys or makes a product at a factory, puts a brand on it, advertises that brand on television and increasingly on digital video, and pushes it through distributors, wholesalers and shopkeepers until it sits on the shelf where a customer will see it. Everything that makes the company formidable is in the last part of that sentence: the ability to get a packet of detergent into a shop in a village of a few thousand people, on the same day, everywhere in the country.[1]

History

Unilever's connection with India began in 1888, when Lever Brothers started exporting Sunlight soap to a country it had never manufactured in. The company sold imported soap for four decades before it began making products here. In the early 1930s three separate Indian companies were set up to hold the businesses: an Indian vanaspati business that was incorporated in 1933 as Hindustan Vanaspati Manufacturing Company, Lever Brothers India Limited, and United Traders Limited. In 1956 the three were merged into a single company, Hindustan Lever Limited, which is the event Unilever treats as the founding of the Indian company.[1]

The early business was built on soap and on vanaspati, a hydrogenated vegetable fat that was the ancestor of cooking oils. Brands such as Lifebuoy and Lux made the company a household name in the years after independence, and Dalda, its vanaspati brand, became one of the first mass market food brands in India. The 1970s changed the ownership structure. Under India's foreign exchange regulations, Unilever reduced its shareholding in Hindustan Lever to 51 per cent in 1977, which turned a foreign owned subsidiary into an Indian company with a minority foreign parent and put Indian shareholders in the register for the first time.[1]

The 1990s were the decade of acquisitions, and they are the reason the company looks the way it does today. In 1993 Hindustan Lever absorbed the Tata Oil Mills Company, at the time the largest merger in Indian corporate history, which brought brands and factories and a large presence in soaps and detergents. In 1996 Brooke Bond Lipton India was merged into the company, bringing Red Label and Taj Mahal tea, Bru coffee and the Kwality Wall's frozen dessert business. In 1998 it bought Lakme from the Tata group and became a serious cosmetics company. In 2000 it bought Modern Foods from the government in the first privatisation of a public sector food company, and later sold it on. In a single decade the company moved from soap and vanaspati into tea, coffee, detergents, cosmetics, packaged foods and ice cream.[1]

The name changed last. The company was renamed Hindustan Unilever Limited in June 2007, in a transition that its managers described at the time as smooth, and the head office moved from the Lever House at Backbay Reclamation, where it had been for more than 46 years, to a campus in Andheri that opened in 2010 and houses more than 1,600 people.[1][2]

The most recent chapter, and the one that matters most for a reader looking up the company today, is a deliberate shrinking of the portfolio. Between 2018 and 2026 HUL bought its way into consumer healthcare with the Horlicks business, into premium beauty with the acquisition of Minimalist, and into nutrition and women's health with OZiva, and at the same time it spun off the ice cream business into a separately listed company and sold smaller businesses such as Pureit. The company that emerges from that is narrower and more focused than the conglomerate of brands that existed in 2015.[3]

Founders and leadership

HUL does not have a founder in the way an Indian family business does. It was created by a merger of three subsidiaries of a foreign parent, and the parent has been the controlling shareholder from the beginning. What the company has instead is a long line of professional managers, mostly Indians, who ran it as an independent listed company with its own board while Unilever held the majority.[1]

The current leadership reflects how recently that changed. Priya Nair became managing director and chief executive on 1 August 2025, the first woman to run the company in its 92 year history, after a career inside Unilever in India and abroad that included running the beauty and personal care business. She took over from Rohit Jawa, who had led the company from 2023, and before him Sanjiv Mehta, who ran HUL from 2013 to 2023 and is the executive most associated with the Horlicks acquisition and the sustainability agenda of the 2010s.[1]

Below the chief executive sits a management committee of functional and category leaders, and below that a structure of regional sales heads, factory managers and brand teams that is unusually deep for an Indian company. HUL's own managers have said in interviews that grooming people is in the company's genes, and the record supports it: a striking number of consumer goods chief executives in India and abroad, including several who went on to run Unilever businesses in other countries, began their careers in the HUL sales and brand organisation.[4]

The board is chaired separately from the executive role, which is part of a deliberate governance structure in which Unilever appoints the majority of directors but the company is run and audited as an Indian listed company with its own independent directors, audit committee and shareholder meetings.[1]

Brands and products

HUL's portfolio is organised into three segments that a reader will recognise from the supermarket shelf. Home care covers detergents and cleaning products: Surf Excel, Rin, Wheel, Sunlight, Comfort, Vim, Domex, Cif and Love & Care. Beauty and personal care covers soap, shampoo, skin care, oral care and deodorants: Lux, Lifebuoy, Hamam, Pears, Liril, Dove, Ponds, Vaseline, Sunsilk, Clinic Plus, Clear, TRESemme, Lakme, Glow & Lovely, Indulekha, Elle 18, Close Up, Pepsodent, Axe and Rexona. Foods and refreshment covers tea, coffee, packaged food and health drinks: Red Label, Taj Mahal, Taaza and 3 Roses teas, Bru coffee, Kissan, Knorr, Hellmann's, Horlicks and Boost.[1]

The brands that matter most are the ones that dominate a category. Surf Excel is the largest detergent brand in the country and one of the largest in Unilever's global portfolio. Lifebuoy is one of the oldest soap brands in India and has been used as the vehicle for handwashing campaigns that the company runs with public health partners. Red Label is the largest tea brand in India. Lakme is the market leading cosmetics brand and also runs salons. Horlicks, acquired with the GlaxoSmithKline deal, is the leader in the health drink category.[1]

A few of those brands came into the company through acquisitions and a few were built in house, and the difference shows in how they are marketed. Acquired brands such as Lakme, Horlicks and Boost came with loyal consumers and a defined position, so the job was to keep them and extend them. In house brands such as Wheel and Glow & Lovely were created to fill a price point or a segment, and the job was to reach scale quickly.[1]

The company has been recognised repeatedly for the way it manages those brands. Sixteen of its brands were in the Nielsen Brand Equity list of India's 100 most trusted brands in the 2014 survey, and it ranked first on the Forbes list of the world's most innovative companies in 2014, with the same survey having placed it sixth in 2012 as the highest ranked fast moving consumer goods company on the list.[5]

The Horlicks deal and the move into health foods

The largest acquisition in the company's modern history was announced in December 2018, when HUL agreed to buy the consumer healthcare business of GlaxoSmithKline in India, and the rights to the Horlicks and Boost brands globally outside a few markets, in a deal valued at about 3.8 billion dollars. The transaction was structured as an all share merger at a ratio of one GlaxoSmithKline Consumer Healthcare share for every 4.39 HUL shares, which meant GSK's shareholders became HUL shareholders rather than receiving cash, and it was the way the parent Unilever ended up with a larger effective stake in its Indian subsidiary.[6]

The brands that changed hands were the core of the Indian health drink market. Horlicks, a malted milk drink sold since the 1930s, had been one of the most trusted consumer brands in the country for generations, and Boost and Maltova came with it. For HUL the deal was a way into a category where it was weak, with a brand that was strong, in a segment where changing consumer habits around nutrition and protein were starting to create new demand.[6]

The human side of the deal was messier. Because the merger was a share swap, roughly 3,800 employees of the acquired business faced uncertainty over their jobs, and HUL said at the time that the scheme carried no clause requiring it to retain them. That absence was reported and criticised, and the integration of the acquired sales force and factories into HUL's own network took years rather than months.[7]

The completion came in April 2020, after all approvals and legal procedures were finished, at the worst possible moment for a consumer company, three weeks into India's national lockdown. The merged business was integrated through that year, and Horlicks became the anchor of a foods and nutrition portfolio that HUL has been building ever since.[1]

The ice cream demerger and the portfolio reset

The clearest statement of HUL's strategy in the 2020s is the decision to shrink. In 2025 the company announced that it would demerge its ice cream business, built around Kwality Wall's, Cornetto and Magnum, into a separate listed company, and shareholders approved the scheme in August 2025 with a record date of 5 December 2025 for the transfer. Ice cream is a seasonal, cold chain heavy business that shares almost nothing with HUL's soap and tea operations, and Unilever had decided globally to separate the category so that each business could be run on its own terms.[3]

The demerged company, Kwality Wall's (India) Limited, listed on the stock exchanges in February 2026 at about 29.80 rupees a share, roughly 26 per cent below the price at which the market had valued it before listing, and The Magnum Ice Cream Company, the new global ice cream entity, completed the acquisition of about 61.9 per cent of it by the end of March 2026. The demerger produced a one time accounting gain for HUL, which is why the company's reported profit in the December 2025 quarter more than doubled to about 6,607 crore rupees even though underlying sales grew by about 5 per cent.[3]

The same logic has been applied at the small end. HUL sold its Pureit water purification business in 2024, and it has been reviewing the smaller brands in its portfolio with an eye to what it can run as a global priority and what it cannot. The result is a company that is deliberately narrower than it was a decade ago, with fewer brands and more money behind each of them, which is the opposite of the strategy that built the portfolio in the 1990s.[3]

For a reader trying to understand the numbers, that distinction between reported profit and underlying growth is the most important thing on the page. A demerger gain is a paper item that appears once and never repeats, so a year in which profit doubles because of a one time gain tells you almost nothing about how the soap and tea business performed, and HUL's own quarterly commentary separates the two.[3]

Beauty, wellbeing and the direct to consumer pivot

The acquisitions of the last few years point in one direction: premium and health, bought rather than built. In January 2025 HUL agreed to acquire a majority stake in Uprising Science, the parent company of the skincare brand Minimalist, and completed the purchase of about 90.5 per cent in April 2025 for about 2,706 crore rupees. Minimalist was a direct to consumer brand built on clinical claims and ingredient transparency, with a young urban customer base that HUL's mass market brands did not reach.[3]

The company had already made a smaller bet on the same theme in 2023, when it bought stakes in two young Indian businesses in the health and wellbeing space: Zywie Ventures, which owns the brand OZiva, and Nutritionalab, which owns Wellbeing Nutrition. In February 2026 it bought the remaining 49 per cent of Zywie for about 824 crore rupees and sold its holding in Nutritionalab, which turned OZiva into a fully owned part of the company and closed the other bet.[3]

Health drinks, plant protein, vitamins, women's health and clean label skincare all sit in the same commercial space, and the reason a soap company wants them is margin and growth. Mass market soap and detergent are mature categories where volumes grow with the population and prices move slowly, while premium skin care and nutrition grow faster and earn more per rupee of sales. Buying a young brand with a following is cheaper and faster than building one, but it also means paying for growth that has to continue after the acquisition.[3]

The pattern to watch in those deals is the sequence. HUL typically buys a controlling stake, leaves the founders to run the brand, and then buys the rest a few years later. It did that with OZiva, taking a first stake in 2023 and the remainder in 2026, and the same route is available with any of the brands in which it holds a partial interest.[3]

Distribution and reach

HUL's distribution network is the machine that makes everything else work, and it is best understood by following a single bar of soap. The bar leaves a factory and goes to a company depot or a redistribution stockist, from where it travels to a wholesaler, then to a sub stockist, and finally to a shop in a town or a village. HUL reaches into that chain at every level, directly to thousands of large distributors and indirectly, through them, to several million retail outlets across the country.[1]

The company began going around the traditional chain in 2001 with Project Shakti, a programme in which women in villages became micro distributors of HUL products in their own communities. It started in Andhra Pradesh with a few dozen women and grew into a network that at its peak covered a very large part of rural India, with the additional effect that the women running it earned an income of their own. Shakti became one of the most copied rural distribution models in Indian business, and other consumer companies built versions of it.[1]

That reach has been extended digitally. HUL's sales force carries hand held devices that log every visit and every order, which gives the company the nearest thing the industry has to real time demand data at the level of a shop in a small town, and it has built ordering apps for small retailers so that a shopkeeper can place an order without waiting for the next visit from a salesperson. In a business where the brand owner and the consumer never meet, that visibility is the asset.[1]

The same network carries the company's newer categories. When HUL buys a direct to consumer brand such as Minimalist, the brand keeps its own online channel but gains access to the largest retail distribution system in the country, which is usually the strongest argument for selling to HUL in the first place.[3]

Employers, people and the HUL way

HUL is one of the most sought after employers in Indian management education, and that reputation is itself a business asset, because it lets the company hire the best graduates before its rivals see them. In a 2015 Nielsen campus track survey of business school students it was among the top employers of choice, and it has been called a dream employer for B school applicants in India. In 2013 the same Nielsen work placed it first among employers of choice for business school students.[8][9]

The internal culture is a deliberate construction. Managers join as brand or sales executives, spend years in the field running distributors, and then move between categories and functions, which is how the company grows general managers rather than specialists. Senior HUL executives have gone on to run Unilever businesses in other countries and, in some cases, to become chief executives of other Indian consumer companies, and the company treats that flow as evidence that its training works rather than as a loss.[4]

The workforce itself is large and is mostly not in the head office. HUL reported about 26,667 employees in 2025, of whom about 18,465 were workers in factories and warehouses. Beyond its own payroll sits a much larger population of people who earn from HUL products without working for HUL: the distributors, the shopkeepers, the hundreds of thousands of women in the rural distribution network, and the farmers and suppliers upstream.[2]

Research and development

HUL's own research centre was set up in Mumbai in 1966, and Unilever Research India followed in Bangalore in 1997. In 2006 the company brought its research facilities together at a single site in Bangalore, which is now one of Unilever's largest research sites anywhere in the world and works on products for India and for export markets that share its conditions.[2]

The research that matters commercially is not usually the discovery of a new molecule. It is reformulation: making a detergent work in hard water without raising the cost, making a shampoo that survives the Indian climate, making a tea blend that tastes the same in every packet across the seasons, or cutting the energy a soap factory uses. Small changes in a formula that ships in hundreds of millions of units a year are worth more than a patent, and much of the Bangalore centre's work is aimed at exactly that.[2]

The company's technical work also shows up in its products in less visible ways, from water saving formulations in home care to the salt and sugar reduction work it has done in its packaged food brands to keep ahead of both regulation and consumer preference. HUL's sustainability reporting treats those reformulations as product innovation, which is the honest way to describe them in a food and home care business.[2]

Revenue and financials

For the year ended 31 March 2026, HUL reported revenue of about 694 billion rupees, which is roughly 69,400 crore rupees, with operating income of about 150 billion rupees and a net profit of about 151 billion rupees. The profit line is inflated by the one time gain from the ice cream demerger, and that is the single most important caveat in reading the company's accounts.[1]

The quarterly pattern makes the same point. In the quarter ended December 2025 the company reported revenue growth of about 6 per cent and a net profit of about 6,607 crore rupees, more than double the previous year, driven by the demerger gain and by about 5 per cent underlying sales growth. In the quarter ended March 2026 the consolidated net profit was about 2,992 crore rupees, up about 21 per cent from a year earlier, with revenue up about 8 per cent, and the board recommended a final dividend of 22 rupees a share.[3]

Those are good numbers for a mature consumer business and they are not spectacular ones, which is exactly what a company in this position should produce. Indian fast moving consumer goods is a slow growth, high certainty industry: volumes rise with the population and with income, prices rise with inflation, and the money comes from being the volume leader in a category rather than from finding a new one. The one time items, the demerger gain, the price of an acquisition, and the cost of restructuring, are the noise around that steady line.[3]

HUL has also been one of the largest exporters in the country and has been recognised as a Golden Super Star Trading House by the government, a status that reflects the value of the tea, coffee and processed food it ships abroad.[5]

Shareholding and ownership

Unilever holds about 61.90 per cent of HUL, which makes it a subsidiary of a foreign parent and, at the same time, one of the most widely held Indian companies, with the rest of the register made up of institutions and retail investors. The company's shares are part of the Sensex and the Nifty 50 and have traded on the Bombay Stock Exchange since the 1950s.[1]

The size of the free float has consequences. Because Unilever's stake is large enough to control the company but small enough to leave about 38 per cent in public hands, HUL answers to both its parent and to the market, and it is the parent's largest listed subsidiary by market value. Unilever has changed its holding only rarely, and the last big change was the mechanical one caused by the Horlicks share swap and by buybacks rather than by any decision to sell.[3][10]

For a reader asking who owns HUL, the answer is Unilever plc, the consumer goods group listed in London and Amsterdam, which holds the stake through its subsidiaries. There is no Indian promoter family and no founder shareholding. The company is, in the plainest sense, a multinational's Indian arm with a public listing.[1]

Employees, plants and headquarters

HUL's headquarters is in Andheri in Mumbai, on a 12.5 acre campus that houses more than 1,600 employees and was designed by the Mumbai architecture firm Kapadia Associates. Before the move the company had been at Lever House at Backbay Reclamation for more than 46 years, and employees still refer to the old building as the company's first real home.[2]

The manufacturing base is much larger than any single figure suggests. HUL and its contract manufacturers run factories making soap, detergent, shampoo, toothpaste, tea, coffee, packaged food and health drinks, spread across the country, and the majority of the people who work for those plants are not on the head office payroll. The company reported about 26,667 employees in 2025, including about 18,465 workers, and a much larger number of people work on HUL products through suppliers, distributors and contract manufacturers.[2]

Outside the plants, the employment that HUL generates is in the trade. The distributors, stockists, wholesalers, shop assistants and the women who run the Shakti network are not HUL employees, but their income depends on HUL products moving, which is why the company's social programmes concentrate on the retail chain rather than on charity.[9]

Awards and recognition

HUL's award shelf is a record of a company that has been good at two things: innovation and social programmes. In 2014 it received the Porter Prize for Creating Shared Value from the Institute for Competitiveness in India, and in the same year it ranked first on the Forbes list of the world's most innovative companies globally. In 2013 it was named Conscious Capitalist of the Year at the Forbes India Leadership Awards, and the same year's Business World survey placed Unilever fourth among the most respected companies in India.[5][11]

The innovation rankings are the ones the company cites most often. In 2012 Forbes put HUL sixth on its list of the world's most innovative companies, the highest position held by any fast moving consumer goods company that year, and in 2014 it went to the top of the global list. Rankings of that kind reward companies that grow profitably from existing products rather than companies that invent new technologies, which is the right frame for a soap and tea business.[5]

The employment and social work has been recognised separately. Nielsen's campus track work repeatedly placed HUL among the most preferred employers for Indian business school graduates, and its sustainability and rural distribution work has been written up by Forbes India among others as an example of a large company tying its business interests to a social outcome.[9][11]

Controversies and criticism

The most serious controversy in HUL's history is the Kodaikanal mercury case. In 2001 it emerged that a thermometer factory the company ran in Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu had dumped glass contaminated with mercury and sold it to scrap merchants, who then handled it without protection. Campaigning by local non governmental organisations and by Greenpeace led to the factory being shut in March 2001, and the issue turned into a decade and a half of regulatory, legal and public confrontation. The main claims were settled in 2016 through an out of court settlement between the company and the former workers, but the contaminated site and the safe disposal of the waste it held remained a subject of litigation and official scrutiny after that settlement.[12][1]

The second controversy is about advertising. In 2019 HUL faced sustained criticism over a Red Label tea advertisement set at the Kumbh Mela, in which a son was shown leaving his elderly father at the pilgrimage, prompting a boycott campaign on social media and accusations that the company had portrayed a Hindu religious gathering as a place where old people are abandoned. HUL withdrew the advertisement and apologised.[1]

The third is about fairness creams. For decades the company was a leading seller of skin lightening products, including Fair & Lovely, which was the market leader in the category. Criticism of the product's premise, and of advertising that appeared to tie a woman's prospects to lighter skin, grew through the 2010s, and in 2020 the company renamed the brand Glow & Lovely and dropped the word fair from its marketing while keeping the product itself on sale. Campaign groups have continued to argue that a change of name is not a change of business.[1]

Beyond those cases, the criticisms that follow large consumer companies in India apply here too. HUL is a party to the long debate about the environmental cost of palm oil, which is an input into soap and shampoo and is linked to deforestation in producing countries. It has faced complaints about the treatment of workers and suppliers in its value chain, and about the effect of price competition on small retailers. The company answers with supply chain policies, sustainability reporting and the argument that its distribution network, including hundreds of thousands of women earning a living from it, is itself a development programme. Those answers are contested, which is why the controversies stay in the record rather than being closed.[1]

Reading the numbers

The first rule of reading HUL's accounts is to separate the business from the events around it. Revenue follows a slow line, driven by volume growth in soap, detergent, tea and packaged food, with price increases added when costs rise. In the year ended March 2026 the company's revenue was about 69,400 crore rupees and its underlying sales growth in the December quarter was about 5 per cent, which is a healthy figure for the Indian market and would be an unremarkable one almost anywhere else.[1][3]

The second rule is to be careful with the profit line in a year of corporate actions. A demerger gain, an acquisition or an impairment can move reported profit by a large multiple without saying anything about how many packets of detergent the company sold. HUL's December 2025 quarter profit doubled on a demerger gain that will never repeat, and its March 2026 quarter profit rose about 21 per cent on a normal trading basis. Only the second number describes the business.[3]

The third rule is that this is a company whose value comes from a moat rather than from growth. Its brands lead their categories, its distribution reaches almost every shop in the country, and its products are cheap enough that the market is the entire population. That combination produces steady cash and high returns on capital rather than fast growth, and it explains why the company is valued on the reliability of its earnings and why changes at the top, a new chief executive or a big acquisition, move the shares more than a quarter of ordinary trading does.[1][3]

Related entries

OrganizationMaricoAnother Indian consumer goods company competing for the same shelf space and the same shopper.OrganizationITCThe rival conglomerate whose foods and personal care businesses compete with HUL across categories.OrganizationReliance IndustriesIts consumer arm has pushed into the same categories, and it was the seller whose stake in Larsen & Toubro went to Grasim.
OrganizationCompanyConsumer goodsFMCGUnileverMumbaiLargest in India

Sources

  1. Wikipedia, Hindustan Unilever
  2. Mint, Designed for leverage
  3. BSE, Hindustan Unilever share price and exchange filings
  4. The Economic Times, Grooming people is in our genes, says HUL's Paranjpe
  5. Forbes, The World's Most Innovative Companies
  6. Business Today, GSK Consumer Healthcare to merge with Hindustan Unilever: Here are 10 things you should know
  7. Business Today, HUL-GSK deal: 3,800 employees face uncertainty, decision awaited
  8. Mint, FMCG, management firms most preferred campus recruiters: Nielsen
  9. Business Standard, HUL is employer of choice: Nielsen
  10. NSE, Hindustan Unilever quote and filings
  11. Forbes India, Hindustan Unilever: Marrying Business with Social Good
  12. The Times of India, Greenpeace wants probe into Kodaikanal mercury pollution

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