And encouragingly for Unilever’s profit margins, the fastest growing ice cream brands were in “super premium” ranges, it said, where a few brands experimented with new products.
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Still, Unilever slightly brightened its sales outlook for the year after third-quarter sales flew past estimates, due to soft comparisons in China, a strong summer ice cream season and a shift in the timing of sales in Latin America. The group comfortably beat market expectations for revenue growth in its latest quarter, recording the biggest rise in underlying sales in years.
Unilever has announced that turnover increased by 9.4% to €13.4 billion including a positive currency impact of 2.9% in Q3.
Units sold in the quarter rose 4.1 per cent, supporting the company’s forecast that selling volumes would improve over the course of the year.
The group said emerging markets grew by 8.4% with an increased contribution from volume. Pricing declined across all categories, despite strong improvement in volumes. Food sales edged up 1.6% with savoury seeing “good volume-driven growth” led by cooking products in emerging markets and innovations around naturalness and health. “Our innovation is getting stronger, incorporates more differentiated technologies and is more and more aligned behind the category strategies”.
He added: “As the results show, the scale and breadth of our portfolio brings resilience in challenging economic conditions”.
The company launched Knorr Mealmakers with 100% natural ingredients and continued to expand the business in Africa with fortified stock cubes that address iron deficiency.
“We will continue to invest steadily behind our brands, innovations and go-to-market capabilities”, he says.
For the remainder of 2015, the company said it is expecting underlying sales to come in around the upper end of 2-4% range.
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“We would not take the improved numbers as a sign of green shoots”, said Susquehanna analyst Pablo Zuanic, adding that consumer-goods companies face continued challenges outside of North America. Unilever has muscled deeper into the ice-cream business of late, earlier this month saying it had bought Italian artisan ice-cream maker Grom.
