M Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3750 words

M - Essay Example It controls roughly 90 subsidiaries in the world. It’s the second largest packaged food company in the world just behind Procter & Gamble. Its current expansion programme includes a number of acquisitions and mergers. Its smaller acquisitions like the purchase of Kwality Group’s ice cream plants in Delhi, India by Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) and bigger ones like Japans Ajinomoto Co. for $381 million. This acquisition gave Unilever the full management control and total sales and profits in seven Asian Ajinomoto owned companies. The strategic significance of these acquisitions has to be examined against the backdrop of their future revenue generating capacities. Above all they have to be considered as part and parcel of the overall Unilever operations in the world. Its organizational structure and culture have augmented this A&M drive despite a number of set-backs that it suffered in some of its operations recently. The strategic competitive environment of the global packaged food industry in particular and the consumer goods industry in general has been characterized by a series of causative factors such as demand-centric and supply-centric influences. Health worries on the part of consumers have taken a particularly worse turn for the packaged food industry while suppliers are going for mergers and acquisitions to achieve scale economies and bigger profit margins. This trend has brought with it a host of other consequences within and without the industry. Such developments have place Unilever in a particularly tight spot with regard to M&A activity. Both causes and consequences of these acquisitions and mergers can be considered on a broader set of strategic management choices and imperatives along with competitive expediencies of time and circumstance. Unilever has been operating on a uniformly defined platform of principles of which the corner stone is the strategic competitive edge over its rivals such as Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Kraft. Thus