How HUL's Rohit Jawa plans to beat India's clock speed
Rohit Jawa is clear about the job at hand, which is to nudge India's largest consumer goods company to move “faster than the clock speed of India". Before taking over the corner room of HUL in June 2023, Jawa, 57, served as chief of transformation for Unilever in London, where he piloted the company's end-to-end transformation from January 2022. Jawa expressed surprise at the pace of change in India in an interview late last week, a day after HUL announced its earnings for the fourth quarter, where the company reported a 2% jump in underlying volumes, similar to the previous two quarters.
Comparing his stint in China—where he was Unilever chairman for five years (2017-2022)—with India, Jawa said, “Quick commerce is an example of how quickly the channels change. When I was in China, these changes happened like one big event a year. But here, they're almost all happening at the same time." These are early days for Jawa in India, who described his challenge thus: "How do we become more agile and stay big? How can we atomize our organization, because we are now a very big company?" Atomizing a very big company may sound like an oxymoron, but HUL will constantly be looking for targets that make a “strategic fit".
On the ice cream business, which parent Unilever plans to hive off, its Indian subsidiary will look for cues before deciding on the next course of action. Till then, HUL will take advantage of the hot summer to sell more Magnum ice-cream in India. Edited excerpts.
We should disaggregate our performance in the last quarter where we delivered about 2% volume growth. We had a miss in skin cleansing, which dragged volumes down. However, you need to keep in mind that 75% of our business grew volumes, and half of our
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