The very nature of our products requires proximity to local markets economies of scale in certain functions justify a number of head-office departments and the need to benefit from everybody’s creativity and experience makes a sophisticated means of transferring information across our organization highly desirable. Ever since then, the company has evolved mainly through a Darwinian system of retaining what was useful and rejecting what no longer worked-in other words, through actual practice as a business responding to the marketplace.īut regardless of the process, Unilever has become a transnational company in the most basic sense: we think globally as well as act locally.

When Unilever was founded in 1930 as a Dutch-British company, it produced soap, processed foods, and a wide array of other consumer goods in many countries.

Yet our organization of diverse operations around the world is not the outcome of a conscious effort to become what is now known among academics as a transnational. These days, Unilever is often described as one of the foremost transnational companies.

Floris expanded vs evolved