London, 28 July 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Anthony Gill
Unilever reported its best volume quarter in more than ten years on Tuesday 28 July, with underlying sales up 4.8% in the first half and 5.8% in the second quarter, and chief executive Fernando Fernandez credited a portfolio “driving Desire at Scale”. The company was the official personal care sponsor of the FIFA World Cup, fielding more than 35 brands across 120 markets with some 50,000 creators. Its Personal Care division, the one that ran that campaign, was the slowest-growing of its three home and personal care businesses.
The number that tells the story sits two lines further down the company’s own results statement. Home Care grew 7.6% in the half. Beauty and Wellbeing grew 5.9%. Personal Care, with the football, grew 4.8%. Not one of those Home Care brands went near a stadium. The tournament was real and the growth was real, but they are not the same event, and the gap between them is where the interesting part of these results lives.
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SubscribeWhat the football actually delivered
Personal Care’s 4.8% breaks down as 4.1% volume and 0.7% price. In plain terms, Unilever sold considerably more deodorant and soap, and got almost nothing extra for each unit.
That is not an accident. Unilever names the World Cup as one of three reasons underlying price growth fell in the second quarter, alongside tough comparators in Personal Care and the carryover from resetting prices in Brazil. It also says plainly that it invested in planned promotions to support the campaign. Gross margin came in at 46.8%, seventy basis points lower than a year earlier.
So the blitz worked, on its own terms. It moved product. It moved product by making the product cheaper for a quarter, which is a legitimate thing to do with a global cultural moment and also the oldest trick in consumer goods. The open question is what happens in the second half, when the tournament is over, the promotions stop and the company expects pricing to lead growth instead. Habits formed on discount have a way of ending with the discount.
There is a version of this that reflects well on Unilever. Dove grew high-single digit. Deodorants gained share in the US. Personal Care’s operating margin still rose ten basis points to 22.2%, so the marketing was paid for. Being the most decorated advertiser at Cannes Lions is not nothing. But a campaign that produces volume without price is a promotion, not a brand-building exercise, and the two get confused because both show up as growth. It is the same distinction that separates a genuinely strong brand from a heavily supported one, and Rolex’s peculiar ownership structure exists precisely to protect the first from becoming the second.
The engine is in India and Brazil
Strip out the football and the pattern is unmistakable. Emerging markets, 60% of turnover, grew 7.0%. Developed markets, the other 40%, grew 1.5%.
India grew 8%, accelerating to 10% in the second quarter, with home care and hair care both reaching their highest ever market shares there. Latin America grew 7.6%, with Brazil into double digits and Argentina stronger still. Indonesia grew 7%. Home Care’s 7.6% is essentially a story about two countries and a portfolio of unglamorous brands — Cif up double digits, Domestos and Comfort high-single digit.
Meanwhile Europe shrank. Underlying sales in Europe fell 0.9%, with volumes down 0.2% and prices down 0.6%, which Unilever attributes to soft markets and pricing in Foods. Foods overall managed 1.2%, dragged by developed markets and a share loss in US condiments to premium and avocado mayonnaise, of all things.
The verdict
This was a good half, and the market is right to take it that way. The €800 million productivity programme finished early, overheads improved seventy basis points, the dividend rose 3% and the outlook was upgraded.
But the headline that writes itself — World Cup blitz drives sales surge — has the causation the wrong way round. The tournament bought volume at the cost of price in the division that ran it. The company’s growth came from Mumbai and São Paulo, from washing powder and bleach, from markets where rising incomes are doing the work that no amount of creator marketing can replicate.
For a company still listed in London and Amsterdam, and heading toward becoming a pure personal care business once the Foods combination with McCormick completes by mid-2027, that is the number worth sitting with. Europe’s largest consumer goods group had an excellent six months, and Europe contributed none of it. Commodity costs are still climbing, as the oil price has been signalling all summer, and the second half is meant to be led by price. We will find out then whether the football won anything that lasts. And whether the economic case for hosting and sponsoring these tournaments survives contact with a margin line.
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