Unilever and Nestle to appoint new finance chiefs as industry battles inflation

Francois-Xavier Roger Photographer: Stefan Wermuth/Bloomberg

Nestle SA and Unilever Plc are appointing new chief financial officers, underscoring a changing of the guard at consumer-goods companies as inflation pressures the industry.

Nestle said Anna Manz, the finance boss of the London Stock Exchange Group, will take over from Francois-Xavier Roger when she is released from her current role.

Unilever’s veteran CFO Graeme Pitkethly plans to retire by the end of May next year. He will be working with a new chief executive starting in July as Royal FrieslandCampina’s Hein Schumacher takes over from Alan Jope.

Others in the industry like Reckitt Benckiser Group Plc and Carlsberg A/S are also hiring new bosses. The changes come as the industry faces an existential challenge from a cost-of-living crisis that’s forcing shoppers to tighten their belts and trade down to unbranded products.

The incoming managers will need to stem the erosion of market share without spending too much on advertising or new products, threatening profitability.

Roger and Pitkethly took on their CFO roles just months apart in 2015. During their tenures, the consumer-goods makers both doubled shareholders’ money, when including reinvested dividends.

Roger, 61, helped steer Nestle during a period of impressive growth even as the pandemic caused supply shortages, disruption and uneven demand in recent years.

‘Effective Partnership’

“We are disappointed to see Roger go, as he has built, to our eyes, an effective partnership with Nestle CEO Mark Schneider,” a Jefferies analyst wrote in a note.

Roger helped manage more than 100 deals, including the sale of Nestle’s dermatology business, the purchase of licenses to sell coffee products under the Starbucks brand and the divestment of part of the company’s stake in L’Oreal SA.

The last years of Pitkethly’s 21-year stint at Unilever have been more chaotic. To rebuff a takeover by Kraft Heinz in 2017, the company committed to a margin improvement, aggressively cutting costs and harming its brands. Then it failed to unify its corporate structure in 2018, and last year Unilever made a doomed and much-criticized attempt to buy the consumer-health arm of UK drugmaker GSK Plc.

Despite investor frustration, much of Unilever’s top brass has remained the same, so a broader overhaul is expected after Schumacher starts as CEO.