It's not hard to see why Unilever is shedding 20,000 jobs (see p4). After years of negligible growth and margin underperformance versus rivals like Procter & Gamble and Reckitt Benckiser, the One Unilever programme initiated in 2005 is starting to pay off, as confirmed by its results this week: as well as sales up a very decent 5.8%, household cleaning was up 8% (vs 6.7% at Reckitt), laundry was up 6% (vs 4.3% at Henkel), personal care (up 7.9%) bettered L'Oréal's 7.4%, and food was up 4.6% (vs Kraft's 4.1%).

But this week's global redundancy plans, following our exclusive revelations of 350 job losses in the UK last month, show there's a long way to go.

What's staggering is the amount of fat, in 2007, that a company of this size and this standing can cut. The new management team have been trimming the workforce impressively (if that is the right word) in recent years. To think: in 2000 the workforce totalled 330,000 employees worldwide. At the end of last year it had already shrunk to almost half that level (179,000). Yet sales in that period fell by only €3.8bn to €40bn. And with the possibility of reducing the workforce to under 160,000 employees, Unilever expects investment in growth categories to lead to no further reduction in sales. No wonder the supermarkets have been looking for better prices if there has been that much inefficiency to begin with.

But the new Unilever is becoming very lean indeed. As we reported last month, the €2.5bn UK operation will be run by a chairman and two marketing directors. OK, so there's a sales director and other directors for HR and finance, but this is lean thinking. The national leaders of Unilever and other global fmcgs are bit players, the executioners in a game of global marketing and product development.