Unilever, one of the oldest global corporations in the world, is a one-hundred percent publicly held company that operates in more than 190 countries. The company is one of the world's leading suppliers in the home care, personal care, and food and beverage categories, reaching 2.5 billion consumers everyday with its products.
The company has 169,000 employees and generated sales of EUR 52.7 billion in 2016. Over half (57 percent) of the company's footprint is in developing and emerging markets.
Attaching great importance to innovation, Unilever has been leading scientific research with an annual budget of approx. EUR 1 billion earmarked for R&D. This commitment to R&D allows Unilever to provide high-quality products to its consumers.
Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan underpins the company's strategy and commits to helping more than a billion people take action to improve their health and well-being by 2020, halving the environmental footprint of the making and use of its products by 2030 as the company grows its business, and enhancing the livelihoods of millions of people by 2020 as the company grows its business.
The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan creates value by driving growth and trust, eliminating costs, and reducing risks. The company's sustainable living brands are growing over 50 percent faster than the rest of the business and delivered more than 60 percent of the company's growth in 2016.
Unilever was ranked number one in its sector in the 2016 Dow Jones Sustainability Index. In the FTSE4Good Index, it achieved the highest environmental score of 5. It also led the list of Global Corporate Sustainability Leaders in the 2016 GlobeScan/SustainAbility annual survey for the sixth year running. Unilever has pledged to become carbon positive in its operations by 2030.
While it made its first investment in Türkiye in 1952 with the Sana factory established in Bakırköy, Istanbul, Unilever has been creating added value in Türkiye for more than 100 years with its products. Unilever's products in Türkiye include OMO, Rinso, Yumoş, Domestos, Cif, Sunlight, Elidor, Dove, Dove Men, Toni&Guy, Signal, Clear, Rexona, Lux, Axe, Sana, Lipton, Knorr, Calve, Becel, Algida, Carte d'Or, Cornetto, Magnum, Max, UFS, Hellmann's and Vaseline. These brands can be found in 9 out of every 10 houses in Türkiye today.
Unilever continues to invest in Türkiye, an important regional base, in order to increase its sustainable growth capacity. After a EUR 95 million investment made for the Algida ice-cream factory in Konya, which started its operations in June 2013, the second investment in Konya was made for a home and personal care products factory in May 2017. Thus, Unilever has created a strong supply chain eco-system in Konya with its suppliers and has implemented the largest factory investment of the last decade in the Turkish FMCG sector with an integrated investment value reaching EUR 350 million in total. This is also the largest investment ever made in Konya across all sectors.