Unilever shares gained 4% in Thursday morning trade as a consistent improvement in volume growth, particularly across the consumer goods giant's power brands, fueled a 4.5% growth in third-quarter underlying sales. Despite slower market improvement, the British-Dutch group's volume growth strengthened for the fourth successive quarter to 3.6%, with all business divisions delivering higher volumes year over year in the three months ended Sept.
30. A 4.3% rise in volumes of power brands, specifically Dove, Liquid I.V., Comfort and Magnum, strengthened their underlying sales by 5.4%. Power brands generate over 75% of Unilever's turnover, which edged up 15.25 billion euros in the third quarter, from 15.24 billion euros a year ago, amid the impact of currency and disposals net of acquisitions.
The personal care division was the largest contributor, with a turnover of 3.4 billion euros, down 5.7% annually. Underlying sales of the segment still climbed 4.4% on strong Dove performance. Regionally, developed markets raked in 43% of the group turnover and recorded a 6.9% gain in underlying sales.
Emerging markets, which made up 57% of group turnover, logged underlying sales growth of 2.9%. Unilever's performance in China declined by a low-single digit due to market weakness across categories. Southeast Asia contracted by a mid-single digit, dragged by a decline in Indonesia. "We are making decisive interventions to fix our long-standing issues in Indonesia, which include removing price instability across channels and resetting stock levels in retail to what we consider optimum levels," the company said on Thursday, expecting to see the results of the changes in Indonesia and China from the second half of 2025. Against this backdrop, the board declared a third-quarter interim dividend of 0.3663 pound sterling per ordinary share, lower than 0.3715 pound per share paid a year ago.
For full-year 2024, Unilever maintained its guidance for volume-led underlying sales growth within its multi-year range of 3% to 5%. RBC Capital Markets said "..the fact that we can view this modest, volume-driven beat relative to company compiled expectations, and reiteration of full year guidance, as uneventful is a testament to the extent to which Unilever has been rehabilitated." While RBC noted that the outperformance was predominantly due to ice cream, which is on track to being spun off, it labeled the third-quarter results "decent." Speaking on the progress of Unilever's ongoing productivity program, Chief Executive Officer Hein Schumacher noted that the company is "still in the early stages of transforming our performance as we execute the Growth Action Plan at pace - focused on doing fewer things, better and with greater impact." Schumacher added that Unilever is "starting to see the positive impact from scaling fewer, bigger innovations across our markets supported by increased brand investment.".