Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information

Division of Knowledge Management

UNILEVER - LIPTON RISK ANALYSIS

Submitted By

SESAGIRI RAAMKUMAR ARAVIND (G1101761F)

MANE SHIVAJI DILIP KUMAR (G1101841A)

THANGAVELU MUTHU KUMAAR (G1101765E)

BALASUBRAMANIAN DIVYA (G1101736H)

SELVARAJU NIRMALA (G1101760J)

Unilever

Unilever is the world’s third largest Consumer goods company and market leader in tea industry. Unilever

group consists of Unilever NV and Unilever PLC headquartered in Rotterdam and London respectively. This

makes Unilever a dual listed company. However both these companies operate as a single business and share the

same directors. Unilever has annual sales turnover of €46 billion for 2011.Unilever NV shares are listed in both

New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and Euronext Amsterdam. The PLC shares are listed in London Stock

Exchange and as American Depository receipts in NYSE.

Any company which has to survive and grow through such a long period of time as Unilever has to evolve with

their business models and strategies periodically. Unilever has always affirmed their global presence over their

acquisitions of brands which satisfy every customer needs. More lately, the company is trying to present

themselves more as marketing company rather than a manufacturing company and this is evident from their

actions to scale down the brands from 1600 to 400 during the period 2000 to 2004. As on date, Unilever has 13

one billion € worth brands and Lipton is one among them. (Image4.Image5.in Appendix)

“We’re not a manufacturing company any more. We’re a brand marketing group that happens

to make some of its products.”

- Niall FitzGerald (former Unilever Chairman and chief executive)

In this report we focus on Lipton and discuss the different factors and risk events associated to their supply

chain. We try to mitigate the risks through the business intelligence solutions provided.

Lipton

Tea is the most consumed beverage in the world next only to water and to be a market leader in the field further

affirms its global presence. All this was possible for Unilever after their acquisition of Lipton. Both Lipton and

Unilever share a long history on their own. Lipton as tea brand was first created in the year 1893 by Sir Thomas

Lipton. Unilever completely acquired Lipton in the year 1972 which actually began in the year 1938 following

the acquisition of Lipton’s North America Operations. It became the first company to commit its sourcing of tea

in a sustainable manner, through Rainforest Alliance.

Lipton forms the major part of the refreshments sector in Unilever which accounts for 19% of the total revenue

in year 2011. Lipton’s major brands are Lipton Yellow Label and Lipton Iced Tea (LIT). Iced tea forms the

major share (85%) of tea business in the US with Lipton clearly leading the market. Lipton created its first joint

venture with PepsiCo in year 1991 for marketing of its ready to drink products in North America followed by its

second joint venture with the same company covering non-American markets too in year 2003.(Table3 in

Appendix)

The Supply-Chain Network:

The tea industry is a significant contributor to the economy of the tea producing countries. Tea is a major cash

crop that provides for the food, schooling and other basic needs of the poor communities in the remote rural

areas. The sustainable production of tea and the social changes that are brought about by it are greatly impacted

by the policies and the practices adopted by the companies at the buying and the retailing end of the tea value

chain.

In addition there are the potential problems like the volatility of the tea price and the long term decline in the tea

price with a raise in the production costs that forces the lowering of wages of the tea workers that in turn causes

social unrest among the workers. Tea being a commodity that deteriorates quickly the need to clear stocks

necessitates the cutting of down of the prices.(Image6. & Image7 in Appendix)

Unlike the other consumer goods or commodities, the ratio of stocks to demand does not play a major role in

determining the price level of tea, as a result of which, the tea stocks are at all times maintained at low

quantities. Therefore the stocks of tea acts more like a “pipeline” stage in the supply chain framework.

Figure1: Supply Chain Network of Lipton

Unilever Plantations:

“LIPTON uses only the top tea leaves of the tea plant” .The tea leaves that are the youngest and the most

flavourful of the plant contribute to the highest-quality to the tea. To achieve this they grow their own tea. They

own plantations at India, Kenya and Tanzania. Continuous and extensive research programs are conducted at the

estates to ensure the improved growing and harvesting practices.

Besides the plantations they own, raw material is also sourced from thirty five other countries in order to

guarantee an uninterrupted and a consistent supply of tea.

Production & Processing:

Teas being a labour intensive crop, thousands of workers are employed to maintain and harvest the tea fields.

The major part of the harvesting is plucking and the allocation of workers for plucking is gender specific and

female workers are preferred for this activity.

The challenge is to transfer the tea to the factories and launch processing within five to seven hours after

harvesting. The processed tea is then shipped to the various distribution centres that strategically scattered all

over the world.

In the case of USA the single distribution point is Suffolk in Virginia, from where the tea is blended and packed

and then from there distributed to the retailers all over the country.

Blending & Packaging:

Every flavor of tea has its unique taste and aroma, this part of the supply chain is the most revenue generating

part. Blending is considered to be an art where the numerous tea tasters are employed to assure the consistency

of the quality and taste of the tea in each tea bag. The Lipton Institute of tea has been established for

maintaining and improving the blends.

Marketing:

The belief of the market analysts is that the tea industry will continue to boom and that there is no saturation

level in the near future. This propitious timing for tea is ascribed to two factors, the consumers need for

convenience and time-saving services and the bolstering of tea adverts by the press.

Convenience has been made a necessity by the American life style and the work habits. The ready-to-drink

variant of Lipton was introduced to capture this new turn in the tea market. In order to drive this capture of the

market, the Unilever Company established a joint agreement with American PepsiCo in 2003.

The three important aspects of marketing:

Aggressive marketing strategy

Improved packing

Improved Shelf presence

Innovative products

Sustainability plans:

Sustainable agriculture is towards profitability for all involved. The sustainability plans include:

All the tea for Lipton shall be from Rain Forest certified plantations from 2015.

“The Rainforest Alliance pioneered the practice of setting standards and certifying well-managed forests nearly

20 years ago, and developed comprehensive principles and standards for sustainable agriculture shortly

thereafter. Rainforest Alliance works with a number of crops, including coffee, bananas, wood, and chocolate.

The companies they work with include Kraft, Chiquita, McDonalds Innocent Smoothies and Ikea.”

The energy needs are from renewable sources

“Specifically in Kericho, 98% of our energy needs are from renewable sources through 4 hydro electric power

stations and renewable fuelwood for our factory boilers.”

Save Transport costs by using plastic slip sheets for shipping tea.

“‘The ‘slip-sheets are much thinner than the traditional wooden pallets which will help cut down transportation

and fuel costs while reducing the impact on the environment. It is expected that this initiative will result in

ocean freight savings of approximately 10 – 20%”

Zero Land fill Facility at Suffolk

“Zero-landfill means that we do not send any waste materials to landfills from this particular plant. Instead, we

process our waste through robust recycling and composting programs and turn some of it into usable energy”

Risk Map Analysis:

Based on the risks identified and categories in the PEST and the SWOT frameworks the RISK MAP has been

plotted. (Table1.&Table2. In Appendix)

Figure2: Risk Map

Risk Events identified in the Supply Chain & other key processes and Mitigation:

“Supply chain risk is the damage - assessed by its probability of occurrence - that is caused by an event within a

company, within its supply chain or its environment affecting the business processes of more than one company

in the supply chain negatively” ( Kersten et al., 2006).

A general classification of the risks with majority of players in supply chain and others along the marketing and

communications line of process is summarized as follows.

Procedure Risks - lack of formal procedures, lack of quality control system

Decision Risks - Bureaucracy, lack of authority, lack of decision support

Communication Risks - cultural differences, language barriers, misunderstanding

Knowledge Risks - lack of formal education, lack of training, unskilled labour

Supply Risks - disruption of supply, inventory and schedules, incoming delays

Operational Risks - failure or breakdown of operations, changes in technology

Demand Risks - variations in demand, changes in technology

Security Risks - theft, counterfeiting, terrorism, piracy, infrastructure breakdown

Macro Risks - economic shifts, recession, labour costs, exchange rates, customs

Policy Risks - actions and sanctions of governments, shifts in legislation

Competition Risks - uncertainty about competitor's moves and actions

Resource Risks - lack of human resources, capital or technology

Business continuity management is the common concept that is applied to mitigate the effects and impacts that

are caused by the various risks. Strategies, plans and actions are devised to provide protection as a means of

alternative solutions or modes of operation to those processes, which if interrupted might bring about a serious

damage or potential fatal loss to the enterprise.

The elements of the Business continuity management can be summarized as:

Figure4: BCM Plan

Classifying the sources of information based on Business information Cube Framework (Hannula &

Pirttimäki 2004) ( Table4. In Appendix)

Designing an efficient Business Intelligence Solution:

Chadwick (2001) lists three features of effective BI systems - Integration service, the facility to gather and

integrate data and information from several sources, Information service, the facility to convert raw data into

relevant, high-quality information and knowledge and Interaction service, the facility to share information and

increase interaction among employees, the management, suppliers, and customers. Kalakota and Robinson

(2001) categorize the foci of BI applications as Information organization and collection, Analysis and

segmentation, Real-time personalization, Multi-channel delivery and interaction and Performance monitoring

and measurement

Grounded on these theories the risks and mitigations for Lipton-Unilever have been identified and listed

below:

1) Risk event & Factor: As 60% of the tea dust for the distribution centres comes from the unilever

estates at Kenya, Tanzania and India; political unrest or change of the policies and procedures, for

example the inheritance law, property law or the commercial transaction law in any of these countries

could be a major supply or resource risk for the industry.

Type of Risk: Supply/ Resource Risk

BI Solution: In order to mitigate the risk one needs to get periodic information regarding the political

unrest regions which generally are associated with our tea plantation countries. The information

sources include Newsfeeds, Government Reports and other government data from embassies and press

releases.  Decision Support System and Supply Chain Management Systems help in identifying

alternate suppliers and Enterprise Information Portal for displaying political unrest news. If required

the plantation would need to shut down for the safety of the employees. Supply demand simulation

with alternate suppliers on a specific supplier channel disruption can help us to plan the situation and

hence mitigate risks proactively.

Risk Mitigation: To mitigate risks of this type, dependency and good relations with alternative

sources of tea plantations and third party suppliers can be maintained and initiatives like deploying

resources at the plantation countries, to monitor and report the potential risks can be regulated.

2) Risk event & Factor: 80% of the operating cost from the retail price has been invested in the supply

chain and so the proper maintenance of the operational production and distribution capability is an

operational risk that could have a major impact on the profitability of the industry.

Type of Risk: Operational risk

BI Solution: Bar-coding data, Radio frequency (RFID) data, Biometric identification data can help in

monitoring the efficiency of operations during warehousing and movement of raw materials and end

products along the supply chain.  Enterprise Application Integration Systems like ICAN and Tibco help

in integrating various sources of organizational data from ERP, CRM in different platforms or vendors

(IBM, SAP) and other work flow software in different units of organization or sometimes cross

organizational data from suppliers. Data from internal audits, process and quality control reports are

also sources to eliminate the risks

Risk Mitigation: Training for the workers at the plantations and implementation of strict quality

control measures would ensure the mitigation of such risks.

3) Risk event & Factor: The social issues like standard of living of the workers in the plantations

including high discrimination, gender inequality, the economical issues like low wages, high

casualisation of labour and uneven value distribution can cause disruptions in the supply of the raw

materials leading to a resource risk.

Type of Risk: Resource Risk

BI Solution: The information regarding the local living standards is often obtained from agency

Survey reports and necessary actions needs to be taken if any insufficient standards identified from

sources [1]. Benchmarking can well be applied to gauge the company standards with respect to the

survey results and take necessary action. Open house with workers union and adopting regional

standards like CSR and ILO conventions help minimizing this risk.

Risk Mitigation: In order to limit the impacts of these risks, measures like strict adherence to the ILO

conventions and national laws, open house with the worker’s union to deploy and manage the standards

can be followed.

4) Risk event & Factor: The major share of the retail income goes to the supply chain and the instances

of corruption and collusion in the network involving the plantation country governments could result in

the major shares of the company’s investment being appropriated.

Type of Risk: Procedure risk

BI Solution: The kind of information which we deal to mitigate this risk is often opportunistic in

nature. For example, the people within the Organisation come to know about the collusion that occurs

with the trade unions or the external agencies which are clearly against the fair play. Data mining

technologies such as Content Analytics, Social Network Analysis, Opinion mining helps in getting the

information from the employees which leads to reporting such cases before it gets out of control to

tarnish the company reputation.  

Risk Mitigation: For preventing such loses, contracts with the government agencies and other third

parties should be renewed periodically and even assigning an external NGO or an agency to monitor

the control over the contracts can help.

5) Risk event & Factor: 50-60 % of the production costs are contributed to the labour wages, and the

inflation in the wages leads to a resource or a macro risk.

Type of Risk: Resource/ Macro Risk

BI Solution: Forecasting Systems provide information regarding the impact on the profitability due to

the rising labour costs. The regional rise in labour costs can be obtained from the union groups and

regional government data.  Decision Support Systems facilitating ‘What if Analysis’ and Social web

Mining can be adopted to get trends whether the rise in cost is temporary or does it have some

correlation with other political events in the sequence.

Risk Mitigation: Casualisation of the labour without permanent work solution is one way of

mitigating; adherence to the conventions and national laws and audits by the external agencies are other

ways.

6) Risk event & Factor: The raw material is majorly from agriculture and so any uncertainties in the

weather or water scarcity or the greater impacts of the natural calamities might affect the supply of the

raw materials.

Type of Risk: Supply/ Operational risk

BI Solution: These are forecasted through the data sources like weather forecast data or the regional

demographic data and to solve these Decision Support Systems or the Supply Chain Management

systems can be deployed. Getting the information regarding the business continuity plans and periodic

review of it helps to minimize the damage and loss due to natural calamities. Worker attitude and

regional demographics in uncertain environmental conditions can be a valuable of information to be

analysed. The plantations owned by Lipton and the employees must properly covered by insurance and

periodic review of it will only help in minimizing the losses during times of natural calamities in the

plantation sites.

Risk Mitigation: Finding and maintaining cordial relationships with alternate suppliers and due

insurance of the crops assist in mitigating the risk

7) Risk event & Factor: The ever-changing customer needs and trends have to be matched by the up-to-

date innovative processes and products; lack of this creates a demand risk, the customers’ demands are

not satisfied and there are chances for the competitors to capture the market at such a vulnerable state.

Type of Risk: Demand Risk

BI Solution: CRM systems help in getting the demand information of the customer groups and the

kind of brands they are interested in buying more and the fast moving type of packages of the brand.

Opinion mining and Sentiment analysis help in getting additional information from retailer giants,

distributors and customers respectively. The trends give some valuable insights into the kind of

products customer are more interested in buying and also to change our production plan for each

product. This is a cyclic process.  The CRM systems have to be monitored periodically for the

emerging trends which help us to minimize the risk to an extent. Crowd sourcing data can be

interesting to look through and analyze the current trends aligned with latest scientific discoveries

which can drive Lipton’s innovative strategies to address future solutions focused on water scarcity,

carbon foot print reduction and green sourcing. For example, Procter & Gamble employs more than

9000 scientists and researchers in corporate R&D and still have many problems they cannot solve.

They now post these on a website called InnoCentive, offering large cash rewards to more than 90,000

"solvers" who make up this network of backyard scientists.

Enterprise Application Integration systems connecting cross organizational and university  research

groups  and technology related knowledge bases, Enterprise Data Warehouse consisting of KPIs of

effective research like Patents per person in a specific timeline, latest scientific publication, journals ,

magazines and conferences data , Knowledge Management metrics, best practices data, social network

analysis data from communities and interactions., resource utilization percentage, intellectual capital

and intellectual property audit data and subject matter expert data .Risk Mitigation: To alleviate this risk the regular and periodic customer fee back sessions and crowd

sourcing contests for finding innovative solutions can be conducted and besides, the R&D has to be

committed to highest level of innovation at shorter time periods.

8) Risk event & Factor: When there occurs fluctuations in the foreign exchange markets, there arises

difficulty in making investments and in expanding the Developing & Emerging markets.

Type of Risk: Supply/ Resource Risk

BI Solution: Data mining techniques help in forecasting the future growth based on the historical data

and the correlation with other economic indicators obtained from reliable reporting agencies like

Bloomberg, Reuters and IQ Capital .’What if Analysis’, Hedging Simulation and Decision Support

Systems trained with extensive historical and real time scenarios and business impacts can facilitate

study of investment trends before new ventures.

Risk Mitigation: Allaying these fluctuation risks could be done by utilizing the financial instruments

like the Foreign exchange derivatives – which are the currency swaps, forward or future contracts or

the options contracts that can be used to hedge the exposure to currency exchange risk; the availing of

the electronic brokering service systems – who provide trading solutions for preserving income in

commoditized products and leveraging the market presence.

9) Risk event & Factor: The breach in the strategic alliances or partnerships is likely to happen for

numerous reasons and it is a potential risk that could have a significant impact on the market

performance of the product. In this case the alliance with PepsiCo ltd for the marketing of Lipton RTD.

Type of Risk: Operational Risk

BI Solution: Collecting data from social web mining, ESS, Opinion mining of public speeches

Risk Mitigation: The Mergers and Acquisitions with the other options in the market could be one way,

although a far-fetched mitigation strategy. The other option could be to re-phrase the terms of the

contract and renew it.

10) Risk event & Factor: The competitors can be the greatest challenge when they capture the market by

the introduction of new product changes or through new partnerships. The Nestea alliance with Coco-

cola is one such instance and the Arizona’s introduction of a new Jug concept is also an example of

such risks.

Type of Risk: Competition/ Demand Risk

BI Solution: Keeping a regular watch on the Communities, social media, opinion mining of speeches

and corporate stories in news articles will give crucial clues for the Lipton’s top management to revise

their strategies. This helps Lipton to be well prepared to face such competitor mergers

Risk Mitigation: The up-scaling of the R&D to counteract the risks with new innovative products and

analyzing through SWOT frame-works to gain competitor intelligence to predict these risks before-

hand.

11) Risk event & Factor: The recession periods brings about such depressive seasons that there could be

decline in spending trends of the customers and so the beverage consumption patterns also could be

affected; as it did happen in 2008 when there was a 33% decline in the commodity food and beverage

price index. A risk that affects the demand from the customers.

Type of Risk: Demand Risk

BI Solution: Decision Support Systems to facilitate ‘What if Analysis’ with a sudden change in

consumption trend with an economic event like recession. Process cost reduction and profit margin

hedging can be carried out with simulation of process productivity and efficiency indices.

Risk Mitigation: Mollifying such risks could be done by periodically revising the sales forecast, by

repackaging and by finding alternate avenues like showcasing the product in the light of health

improving drink or depression alleviating drink confining to the laws of the FDA.

12) Risk event & Factor: When certain processes are being outsourced, for example the Siruis (SAP

based) or the mountain internal information systems that are main source of the data or information

tracking systems; when there happens to be unexpected downtime with such systems it might prove to

be an operational risk that could delay the process that depend on the information from these systems.

Type of Risk: Operational Risk

BI Solution: System Availability Dashboards revealing information about process memory allocation,

resource sharing, network traffic allocation, possible deadlocks of processors and databases. Mobile

and Cloud based services increase the possibilities of system uptime and reduce infrastructure costs.

Risk Mitigation: The competent maintenance of the Disaster Recovery Management Systems

(DRMS), as a part of the business continuity management plan and adopting solutions like Software as

a Service, Infrastructure as a service and Platform as a service.

13) Risk event & Factor: Pressured by the urge to capture the market, resorting to extensive

advertisement campaign is a common phenomenon; but care should be taken that there is no

misleading of the consumers with exaggerated or misleading promotional campaigns that includes

unquestionable or unproved health facts. There are always activists of all sorts out there waiting to

point out the misbranding and this would become a policy risk for the industry.

Type of Risk: Policy Risk

BI Solution: Proactive E intelligence with government policy reports, standards and compliance data,

scientific discoveries publisher’s data, Proof read by experts in the field and providing disclaimers

appropriately help in minimizing the risks. Gathering adequate information from the health authorities

before make inconclusive or controversial judgments will only lower the brand value and face several

legal consequences which are additional expenses to bear for Lipton. EAI services can help in

identifying proactively this branding miscommunication proactively.

Risk Mitigation: To assuage the warnings from FDA caused by such risks, there has to be a strict

review process for these adverts or promotional campaigns and the confining to the FDA norms to be

ensured.

14) Risk event & Factor: Lipton has spent double the investment of the previous year for digital

advertising in 2010; there is risk of the failure to realize the return of investments in the digital

advertising sector due to the intended impact not being achieved or the target sector been mis-

identified.

Type of Risk: Demand Risk

BI Solution: Information congregated from online sources like social media,  blogs, Youtube, Google

trends , social networks like facebook and google+ data reflecting upon customer’s attitude towards

different channels and forms (Audio, video, interactive content, digital stories) of communication can

form  a rich source of intelligence to study the customer sentiments about the channels of

advertisements. Further customers increasingly need a personalized approach based on their selected

interests mined from their open data and sometimes interactive media or augmented reality based

advertising solutions for a strong appeal. Online ad feedback, surveys, digital advertisement consultant

practices and reports from firms like RGA, Wunderman and significant others act as vital source of

information to realize Unilever’s strategies. Point of Sales data can be an efficient source of data for

validating the marketing campaigns and reach of advertisements with different channels of sales

Risk Mitigation: Periodic monitoring of the analytical data and making of appropriate financial

planning for the investments, promotion of the digital adverts by offering incentives or the gamification

of the adverts are all possible solutions.

Challenges in BI implementation:

Different levels of users of BI solutions need a significant consideration on the Human Information

Behaviour factors and their perception towards the using BI solution as illustrated in Technology

Acceptance model (Davis, 1989)

Specific Security and access privileges to all information sources accessible to BI framework and high

encryption and authentication standards need to be set for applications on open web where remote

terminal intrusions may be possible, say when the BI solution uses cloud as a platform.

Costly, time consuming and "risky implementation of cross-organizational information systems" with

Enterprise Application Integration Services (Dvorak et. al., 2009)

Incompatibility of technology levels of Unilever with its suppliers

Social Media mining and social network data Analysis are emerging trends where there isn’t many

robust software to accurately reflect on behavioral trends and causal mining of a context on the web

becomes difficult with reliability and consistency issues. Difficulty to mine sentiments, handle word

sense disambiguation and Natural Language Processing can also be a challenge while extracting

information from interactive sources on the internet.

Organizational and Cultural barriers hindering the flow of knowledge, sharing and codification in

relevant information portals so that BI can analyze it efficiently and help in dissemination after

transforming into an easily consumable form.

Rapid obsolescence of technology can pose threats of frequent software replacements and upgrades for

organizations.

References:

Wolfgang, K., Philipp, H., & Mareike , B. An empirical approach to supply chain risk management:

Development of a strategic framework . Hamburg University of Technology

TCC Tea Barometer 2010

Annual Report- Unilver2008, 2009, 2010.

http://www.liptont.com/tea_experts/growing/research.aspx http://www.arabianbusiness.com/lipton-reinforces-green-supply-chain-operations-in-middle-east-

45794.html

http://www.industryweek.com/articles/the_greenest_tea_unilevers_lipton_tea_achieves_zero-

landfill_goal_at_suffolk_va-_facility_20248.aspx?SectionID=3

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/Teaprocessing.svg

http://freshpakcorp.com/products/lipton

http://www.teausa.com/index.cfm/14709/bioterrorism-legislation-guidelines

http://www.teausa.com/index.cfm/14655/tea-fact-sheet

http://tradeunionfreedom.fnvcompanymonitor.nl/perch/resources/

Unileverandthetradeunionchallenge1.pdf

http://www.investorwords.com/

APPENDIX:

Table 1.Lipton SWOT Analysis

Strengths

Owned by Unilever.

Long history in tea manufacturing industry.

Extensive knowledge of local culture and tastes.

Wider product range with technological superiority, e.g.

Brooke Bond’s hot tea can.

Alliance with Rainforest Organisation.1

Single point of tea distribution in US from Suffolk.

Strong financial position.

Increased health consciousness among US

population and health benefits of tea such as herbal

and green tea is another major cause.

Supply Chain Management.

Weaknesses

Having too many brand extensions can dilute and

confuse consumer perception and give fresh and new

competitors to seize market share.

Political unrest in certain plantation country

Opportunities

Alliance with Pepsi to access massive distribution

network. Presence of big, well known partners drives

demand further.

Technology advancements in manufacturing.

Greater awareness of health benefits of tea.

New varieties of tea drink flavours can be launched

particularly in the Ready to Drink segment.

Acquisitions of companies in developing markets.

Threats

Overcrowded and small market with about 200 other

brands which might cause significant demand reduction.

Presence of other major players such as Coca-Cola and

Nestle leading to tough competition.

Competition from local competitors

Indirect completion from other energy drinks like

Redbull which could eat into Lipton’s market share.

Increasing Tea prices

vi) Fluctuating Economy

1

Table2.Lipton PEST Analysis:

Table 3.Lipton Unilever Sales Information:

Entity\Sales ( in millions ) (Euros ) 2011 2010 2009 2008

Unilever Global 46,467 44,262 39,823 40,523

Unilever US 15,251 14,606 12,743 12,967

Unilever Icecream Beverages in US 2,890 2,840 2,478 2,521

Approximate Revenue of Lipton 1,177 1,157 1,010 1,027

Image1. Sales Information Comparison Graph

Image2. Profit Margin and Sales growth Comparison Chart

Image3.

Image4.

Image5.

Table4. Business information Cube Framework (Hannula & Pirttimäki 2004).

Type

Source

Subject

Qualitative Quantitative

Internal External Internal External

Internal Server and System

maintenance logs,

worker surveys,

Enterprise 2.0 data,,

Intellectual

Property Audit

Reports,

Information

Security Audit,

Customer service/

Call centre reports

Social network

data, Labour union

audit reports,

Agency/ Analysts/

Research reports,

University/

Research databases,

FDA and

government agency

policy data,

Scientific

publications, Social

Media, Audit

reports of Small

holder firms,

promotional

campaigns

Process Audit

Reports, Quality

Management/

Assurance Reports,

Production Reports,

Reports on

liquidity, cash flow

and investments,

financial

statements,

Marketing, Sales,

Organic growth and

market value

reports

Agency/ Analysts/

Research reports,

Investment hedging

reports, Lipton

Market share / Sales

volume fluctuation

reports

External Infrastructure and

equipment Lease

reports, Third party

expert (Consulting

firms) audit/

advisory services,

General Broking

services reports,

Sustainability

compliance reports

Newsfeeds,

Government

reports, Supplier,

Partners,

Distributors,

Retailer surveys and

reports, Agency/

Analysts/ Research

reports about

competitors and

market, Press

releases, Bench

marking standards

of competitors

Bank/ financial

institutions

transactional

reports, Insurance

transactional

reports, Supplier,

Retailer, Partners,

Distributors

transactional

reports, Electronic

broking services

reports

Market Research

Agency/ Analysts/

Research reports

about competitors

and market, World

Bank/IMF/ News

Agency like

Bloomberg

Economic

indicators data,

Meteorological data

Image6. Tea Supply Chain:

Image7.Tea Production-Coutrywise Infographics:

Image8. Challenges of Tea Industry

Image9. Business Intelligence Stack Solutions: