Food Brands Lose Ground As The Consumer Seeks Value
If consumer spending on inexpensive items is supposed to be a foreshadowing of an improving economy, better days are still a long way off. Unilever, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world, said its profit fell 45%…
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Unilever, one of the largest consumer goods companies in the world, said its profit fell 45% to $973 million. The firm said that its results had been materially effected by people buying the least expensive, non-branded food and toiletry products that they can find.
The results of Unilever, Colgate (CL), and P&G (PG) are probably as good a leading economic indication as economists can find. As long as consumers believe that they cannot pay a dollar more for a branded bar of soap or can of soup, they are not likely to be in the market for a car or a refrigerator. Those more expensive items are only going to be purchased when they need to be replaced.
Unilever’s results are a fairly good weather vane. The economy may not be stabilizing as quickly as most analysts think.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
