Unilever plans to cut up to 3,200 jobs as consumer goods giant’s new CEO looks to turn the tide

Unilever plans to cut 3,200 jobs in a bid by the consumer goods giant’s new CEO to turn things around.

The struggling conglomerate is under pressure from shareholders, including activist Nelson Peltz, to boost growth.

The owner of Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Dove soap said yesterday it will cut about a third of all office jobs in Europe by the end of next year, after CEO Hein Schumacher announced a “productivity program” in March to axe as many as 7,500 jobs.

“The expected net impact in Europe is between 3,000 and 3,200 jobs,” Constantina Tribou, a human resources official, said on Wednesday.

According to the Financial Times, the cuts will mainly affect office jobs, rather than factory jobs.

Unilever has not yet formally decided where the losses will occur, but staff in London are expected to be affected. It will launch a consultation process with employees in the coming weeks.

“From a shareholder perspective, a turnaround was clearly needed in a company that was underperforming,” said Jack Martin, portfolio manager at Oberon Investments.

“These measures represent the biggest job losses at Unilever in decades,” Hermann Soggeberg, head of Unilever’s European Works Council, told staff.

He said almost all European offices would be affected, but particularly the company’s headquarters in London and Rotterdam.

Unilever has already indicated that it plans to spin off the British-Dutch company’s ice cream division, including Ben & Jerry’s, into a separate company.

Ben & Jerry’s is a headache. In January, its chairman called for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and in 2021 it tried to boycott the occupied Palestinian territories.

Investors also reacted strongly to the ‘woke’ policy.

As part of its transformation plan, the company in April weakened targets on plastic packaging, worker wages and diversity.

Schumacher said he had to “boost performance” and backtracked on sustainability promises.

Star fund manager Terry Smith, whose company Fundsmith is the 10th largest shareholder, said in 2022 that Unilever was “buckling under the weight of a management obsessed with publicly displaying sustainability credentials at the expense of focusing on the fundamentals of the business”.