THE MORNING RANT: Get Woke Go Broke – Unilever Edition

Another woke CEO has run his company into the ground and is being ushered out of his job. This time it’s Unilever’s Alan Jope.

He is a far-left activist who seeks to rid the world of the energy that fuels its prosperity, but you still have to wonder if his catastrophic mismanagement of Unilever might have caused him to go super-woke. Perhaps he thought loony eco-leftism might provide a protective shield against his inevitable ouster for the damage he caused the company.

If you aren’t familiar with Unilever, you are certainly familiar with its stable of brands, which include Hellman’s, Lipton, Knorr, Dove, Dollar Shave Club, Suave, and many other familiar products.

Jope became CEO of Unilever in January 2019. It didn’t take long for him to start trying to impose enviro-communism on the capitalist enterprise he ran, and to also impose it on all other businesses. Advocating for mandatory, externally imposed ESG (“Environmental Social Governance”) is not the hallmark of a man who believes in free enterprise.

Unsurprisingly, there was pushback by people who believe in freedom and free markets.

Also unsurprisingly, with Unilever struggling under Jope’s mismanagement, he sought to buy some market share and gain additional revenue with an acquisition, specifically by acquiring the consumer healthcare division of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) whose products include Tums, Advil, and Excedrin. The final offer was £50 billion (roughly $68 billion at the time.)

GSK ultimately declined the offer. When the deal officially died in January 2022, Unilever’s stock quickly lost about 20% of its value. With the company in crisis, it was also announced that 1,500 employees were being let go.

Activist investor Nelson Peltz saw a great opportunity, not only with the battered stock, but also with Unilever shareholders desperate for relief from the damage Jope was doing to the company with his ESG agenda. So Peltz started buying shares, and by May 2022 he had worked himself onto the Board of Directors.

Jope responded to Peltz and the angry shareholders by doubling down on the ESG agenda that was destroying Unilever.

Just last week, before the news broke that Jope’s tenure was coming to an end, he appeared with Bill Clinton at whatever the Clinton Global Initiative is, and Jope remained defiantly adamant that he would continue to impose the eco-communist agenda on Unilever despite the “anti-sustainability” and “anti-woke” backlash.

Unilever's Alan Jope says company 'will not back down' on sustainability agenda: [Fox News – 9/21/2022]

Unilever CEO Alan Jope reaffirmed the consumer goods giant's sustainability agenda Tuesday, saying it "will not back down" despite "anti-sustainability" and "anti-woke" backlash.

The chief executive, speaking during a Tuesday panel at the 2022 Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, called "anti-sustainability" and "anti-woke" backlash "incredibly dangerous for the world." He also argued that saying "we have a climate emergency" has started becoming unpopular.

"The first thing that Unilever will do is we will not back down on this agenda despite these populist accusations," he said.

He may have finally gone too far by at one point acknowledging that he’ll continue to prioritize ESG activism over his fiduciary duty to shareholders.

Unilever CEO Set to Leave After GSK Debacle, Arrival of Activist Investor [US News – 9/26/2022]

Unilever said CEO Alan Jope would retire at the end of 2023, announcing the move less than a year after a bungled attempt to buy GSK's consumer healthcare business, and two months after activist investor Nelson Peltz joined the board.

The British consumer products maker said its board would start a formal search for a successor to Jope, a Unilever veteran who took up his role at the start of 2019,

The [GSK] move was met with disapproval from shareholders, some of whom also criticised Unilever for prioritising sustainability over core growth.

Unilever's shares rose almost 4% in early trading, hitting their highest since August last year.

Let’s look at how Unilever stock has done under Jope’s awful stewardship. It was trading at approximately $53 per share when he took over in January 2019, rising to $63 per share just a few months later in August. It’s now trading at around $43 per share, a 19% reduction in value from when he took over, and a 32% drop from its peak. By contrast, even with the current bear market, the S&P 500 is up about 40% from January 2019.

$100,000 invested in Unilever stock in January 2019 is now worth about $81,000.

$100,000 invested in the S&P 500 in January 2019 is now worth about $140,000.

Get woke, go broke.

Songs of the Season

This is the first weekend of October, which means Oktoberfests will be popping up everywhere!

I love them. The food, music, and good cheer combined with mild autumn weather just put a smile on everyone’s faces. The Oktoberfest of my upbringing was Wurstfest in New Braunfels, Texas. It was full of family fun all day, but college kids from all over Texas would also party there at night. I recall Myron Floren of Lawrence Welk fame playing his accordion at Wurstfest into the 1990s, and the college kids loved him, knowing that he was going to play the Aggie War Hymn and The Eyes of Texas every show.

Are you going to an Oktoberfest? If so, you’ll probably hear this song.

“In Heaven There Is No Beer”

And of course, the sister song that is also frequently performed.

Its nice to see these young hipsters having some fun with the music of their great-grandparents. Maybe there’s an emerging genre of “alt-polka.”

“No Beer Today”

Have a great weekend.

(buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com)

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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