Seven years after delisting, Unilever Pakistan is investing heavily in growth

If an initial public offering (IPO) is when a company first makes its shares available to the public, a delisting can be described as the reverse IPO: when it removes its shares from public exchanges and makes them explicitly unavailable to the public. That is what Unilever Pakistan did in 2013, when it delisted from the Karachi Stock Exchange, with its parent company spending $500 million to buy back its shares, an event that shook the market.

Seven years later, Unilever Pakistan remains a juggernaut in Pakistan’s food and consumer goods space, albeit one whose financial statements are no longer readily available. But what exactly did the company set out to achieve when they decided to delist from the exchange? And how successful were they in achieving it? With access to its financial statements from 2014 through 2019, Profit examines the progress Unilever Pakistan has made since its delisting.

In this story, we will cover the history of Unilever in Pakistan, its decision to delist, and the impact of that delisting on the capital markets, and finally, what it hoped to achieve from the delisting and the degree to which it was successful in achieving its stated goals.

For this story, Profit did contact Unilever Pakistan, and their spokesperson Hussain Ali Talib did send us a response, but the response included few details about the company’s strategy since the delisting. So much of our analysis relies on the financial statements themselves, and what they reveal about the company, rather than commentary from the management.

There is no doubt that Unilever is an important part of the Pakistani corporate landscape, a training ground for highly talented and qualified professionals, and what happens at the company matters to the Pakistani economy. The delisting made it more difficult, but not impossible, to understand what is happening at Unilever in Pakistan. Here is their story.