CAN PRIYA NAIR BRING HUL'S MAGIC BACK?

The CEO is betting on premiumization and speed to revive the FMCG giant's stagnating fortunes

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It’s 2014. Mobile phones are slowly becoming common in rural India. India’s biggest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company latches on to this wave.

It launches Kan Khajura Tesan (loosely translated from Hindi to ‘earworm station’), a service where a missed call gave you free radio featuring music, news, jokes and Bollywood updates, along with some ads for brands like Lux and Lifebuoy.

The campaign, launched by Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL), was India’s first free and on-demand entertainment mobile radio station. It took rural India by storm, reaching 33 million people, according to news reports at the time. It went on to win awards, including one from the World Advertising Research Centre. Priya Nair, then vice president of HUL’s detergents business, had piloted the programme for its flagship detergent brand Wheel.

Nearly a decade later, she’s back at the Mumbai headquarters with a new designation and mandate—HUL’s managing director and chief executive officer (CEO), tasked with turning around the company’s stagnating fortunes.

Nair replaced Rohit Jawa in August last year. Jawa had barely settled into the role—although appointed for a five-year term, he exited just two years into the job amid a slump in HUL’s business volumes. Sluggish rural demand, input cost pressure and intense competition in urban markets from premium brands pressured its performance. Months after Jawa took over the reins, HUL’s underlying volume growth fell from a high of 5% in 2022-23 to a meagre 2% the next year. The company cited a slowdown in consumption and uneven weather patterns as its undoing. A year later, volume growth continued to remain weak at 2% while margins stagnated or were squeezed.