Remain optimistic of future despite recent mkt slump: HUL

Below is a verbatim transcript. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: What have you made of the recent pause in market growth?

A: Obviously the markets are slowing down a bit but they are still growing and if you look at a longer-term view of India. There is absolutely no question that we should be seeing some good growth coming here longer term. It is difficult to predict what's going to happen exactly in the next 6 months or the next one year. But we remain very optimistic about the future if you take it into the longer context.

Q: But what would you attribute this short term slowdown to and when you talk of the long term picture what is the sort of time horizon that you are looking at and what kind of growth can we expect?

A: The question really is when we talk about slowdown meaning the markets were growing very fast. The markets are still growing. The question is we are not growing at the rate at which they were growing, but we are still in growth markets. So the way to look at it is that going forward the consumer confidence is not shaken or anything and so in developing countries we have to be a little cautious about not interpreting 1% drop or 2% drop as suddenly something sort of dramatically changing.

Q: I want to talk to you about the sustainable living plan that's been put out by Unilever. You have a sustainability report that you put out annually, how different is this from that sustainability report and why did you feel the need to actually put this out?

A: This is a very comprehensive approach in terms of what we intend doing between now and 2020. If we can make our consumer take some small actions which individually may be a small action but collectively it can make a big difference. If you take for example what we are doing on say Surf Excel Quick Wash in India where the product has been formulated to save two buckets of water everyday, every time you wash your clothes you save two buckets of water.

It's greatly convenient in water stressed areas and generally I would say in the country. But importantly now multiply these two buckets of savings with the millions of consumers who are using our brands and see the impact it can make. From the time we buy the raw materials, to the time we convert it in our factories, to the time we distribute it, to the time it gets consumed and disposed we want to make sure that it is an end-to-end approach to reducing our environmental impact across the lifecycle of our operations or of our brands.