By Siddharth Cavale (Reuters) - Unilever restored its pre-pandemic sales growth target on Thursday, underwhelming investors seeking more ambitious goals amid strong consumer demand for plant-based food products and home care brands. The Ben & Jerry s ice cream and Dove soap maker said it would be laser focused on driving top line sales growth and would invest 1 billion euros in each of 2021 and 2022 in high growth areas including business to business e-commerce retailing, plant-based food and beauty products. This would help Unilever to achieve a long-term underlying sales growth target of 3% to 5%, restoring a previous forecast set in 2020 but pulled in April due to uncertainty caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Unilever struggles to keep rising costs from spoiling rebound
Thomas Buckley, Bloomberg News VIDEO SIGN OUT
Unilever Plc rode out COVID as consumers kept buying staples like shampoo and food seasonings during lockdowns. Now higher costs threaten to tarnish the Tresemme and Knorr brand ownerâs exit from the pandemic.
Raw material prices will probably rise more in 2021, Chief Financial Officer Graeme Pitkethly said on a conference call with reporters. The shares fell as much as 4.4 per cent.
Concern about higher costs overshadowed the return of a previous sales target for annual underlying growth of 3 per cent to 5 per cent. Chief Executive Officer Alan Jopeâs job has gotten harder after the pandemic led to the weakest revenue growth in almost two decades last year.