Fwd: Are HUL’s best days behind it?
Salil Punoose
- FY 2015-16 (March 2016): The revenue from operations was approximately ₹31,625 crore.
- FY 2024-25 (March 2025): The consolidated turnover for the financial year grew to ₹60,680 crore.
- Growth: Over the nine-year period, HUL's annual sales nearly doubled, demonstrating consistent top-line growth.
- FY'25 Performance: In the 2025 financial year, the turnover grew by 2% on a year-on-year basis, driven by an underlying volume growth (UVG) of 2%.
- Profitability: For FY'25, the profit after tax (PAT) was ₹10,644 crore, a 5% increase year-on-year.
- Recent Context: While the company has seen long-term growth, the most recent fiscal results (Q4 FY25) showed a net profit decline of 3.67% due to subdued demand and challenging market conditions.
From: Ram Ramanathan <r...@coacharya.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 17, 2026 at 9:30 AM
Subject: Re: Are HUL’s best days behind it?
To: Sanjeev Kathpalia <sanjeevk...@gmail.com>
Cc: XLever Buddies <xlever-...@googlegroups.com>
--Views from the group members are welcome.
Begin forwarded message:From: The Ken <in...@the-ken.com>
Date: April 17, 2026 at 7:09:48 AM GMT+5:30
To: sanjeevk...@gmail.com
Subject: Are HUL’s best days behind it?
Reply-To: in...@the-ken.com
Two By Two
Fri, 17 Apr 26
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast.
Good Morning Sanjeev,
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Growing up, the personal care and beauty aisle at my local department store was my happy place. In my angsty tween phase, I would sneak away while my parents were busy buying rice, atta, oil, and all the other boring things that kept us alive. I’d make my way to the good stuff.
This was the mid-2000s, so the good stuff was literally Dove soap, and tiny pots of Pond’s cold cream, usually stored in large glass jars right by the cash register. My local shopkeeper would often fish one out and hand it to you instead of change if you were lucky.
Simpler times.
What I didn’t realise back then was that most of what landed in my family’s shopping cart—the Surf Excel, the Pepsodent, the Brooke Bond tea, along with the little fragrant indulgences I managed to slip in (a tiny tin of Vaseline, a bar of the green Pears soap, which was quite the collector’s item if I recall correctly)—were all part of the same portfolio. Hindustan Unilever (HUL).
For a long time, that was just the story of HUL: if it was in an Indian home, there was a good chance HUL put it there. It was the undisputed gold standard of brand building in this country.
Until it wasn’t.Case in point: a couple of weeks ago, a journalist shared a chart from an HSBC report on social media. The chart listed some of HUL’s biggest brands—Pond’s, Lux, Rin, Lifebuoy, Kissan, Surf, Glow & Lovely, Vim, Bru—and showed where each of them stood 10 years ago versus today.
Turns out, most of them have barely grown, if at all.
Something has shifted at the company that was once India’s consumption barometer. The brands that generate genuine excitement today aren’t HUL brands. More often than not, they are scrappy D2C upstarts like Moxie Beauty and Sleepy Owl that, on paper, shouldn’t stand a chance against a behemoth like HUL.
In the latest episode of Two By Two, we try to answer one simple question: are HUL’s best days behind it?
To help us figure this out, we got two people on the show who know this world well, and who, it turned out, had very different answers to the question.
The case for and against
Our first guest was Seetharaman G, Deputy Editor at The Ken, who had already staked out his position in a recent edition of our weekly newsletter, Trade Tricks. Seetha (as we often refer to him as) firmly believes that HUL is past its prime. That the company, which once ran circles around its competitors in the FMCG space, has lost its edge, and that what we are seeing now isn’t a temporary blip but a structural shift.
Our second guest was Sandeep Nair, co-founder of David & Who, a marketing and branding consultancy. Sandeep spent years inside multinational consumer companies like P&G and Reckitt, building brands before going out to build challenger brands himself. He came in with the opposite view. He thinks everyone is being way too harsh on HUL.
I love it when guests disagree! It always makes the conversation more interesting.Seetha’s argument is structural. For most of the 2010s, HUL was killing it. Despite being considerably larger than the next two or three rivals combined, it consistently grew faster than all of them. But that era is now over.
Part of the problem, as an FMCG CEO told Seetha, is the very thing that once made HUL so dominant. “HUL is suffering more than any other company because it has consumers across strata,” he explained. But the issue with having consumers across every income stratum—from the person buying the cheapest detergent and the person buying premium liquid Surf Excel—is that when the Indian economy slows, HUL absorbs the hit from all sides at once, more than any other company.Sandeep isn’t buying the doom narrative. At least not entirely. His counter is that HUL is a Rs 60,000 crore company and it isn’t going anywhere. The D2C brands everyone gets excited about, in his view, are subject to enormous survivorship bias. For every Minimalist, the clean skincare brand that HUL acquired in 2025, there are hundreds that plateau and quietly disappear. The ones that do break through eventually have to go offline to scale. And the moment they do, they are playing in HUL’s territory.
There, they are still kings. There is no disputing that.
Sandeep Nair, co-founder of David & Who
The question, then, isn’t if HUL is done. It’s whether it can give a new brand enough room to breathe without sandpapering away everything that made it interesting in the first place. Which is exactly what happened when Unilever, HUL’s British parent, acquired Ben & Jerry’s globally. That’s an interesting story.
Closer home, Bombay Shaving Company’s founder Shantanu Deshpande went on Linkedin after HUL acquired Minimalist and wrote: “I am willing to bet that the brand Minimalist will die—or cease to exist in any meaningful way—in the next three to five years.” His argument was simple: the founders had exited, the HUL executive who championed the deal had moved on, and a brand that accounts for under 1% of HUL’s market cap is unlikely to get the focus it needs. He signed off with: “I so so so badly hope I’m wrong.”
It hasn’t been five years yet. We will see.
So, where should HUL be betting?
All three of us landed in roughly the same place on this: food.
HUL’s home and personal care business is extraordinary, but its food portfolio is underwhelming relative to its size.
ITC spent nearly two decades building Sunfeast, Bingo, Aashirvaad, and Yippee, all from scratch, all funded by cigarette money that didn’t need to show quarterly returns. That patience produced a food business that now contributes roughly 20% of ITC’s revenue. HUL has no equivalent.
The opportunity Seetha points to is the ongoing shift from unbranded to branded staples. Sound familiar? That’s because it’s the same playbook that built the great FMCG brands of the past, now playing out in categories like pulses, spices, and ready-to-cook. “People would obviously trust HUL way more than most brands” in these categories, he argued. Personal care is about aspiration and narrative, which are things HUL may or may not be able to sell convincingly anymore. Food is about trust. And trust is exactly what the HUL name still carries.
Sandeep’s specific acquisition bet is iD Fresh Food. A brand that has already built distribution and pricing power in a category (fresh batter, chutneys, parathas) that was entirely unbranded until recently. It has cracked the hard part. What it hasn’t cracked is cold chain logistics at scale. That, as Sandeep noted, is precisely what HUL could bring to the table.
Whether that’s enough to answer the bigger question of whether HUL’s best days are behind it depends on who you ask. Seetha thinks yes. Sandeep and Praveen think no. I am somewhere in the middle.
You can listen to the full conversation here.
And leave us your thoughts on our website or app, or write to us at twob...@the-ken.com.
Until next week,
RahelGet a premium subscription to The Ken
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Ram S Ramanathan Coacharya
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