JEDDAH, 26 April 2007 — The demand for home and personal care products in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the GCC countries grows remarkably. Jan Zijderveld, chairman of Unilever Middle East, told a media conference at the Binzagr Lever Factory at the Jeddah Industrial City yesterday that while the volume of the market for personal care products is $1 billion, the region’s demand for home care products is around half a billion dollars.
“The regional consumer base for these products is growing annually from five to 10 percent,” he said during an announcement by Unilever Arabia about the completion of expansion plans at the local factory that has seen a 25 percent increase in production since last year, driven by investment in new lines and equipment.
“Our annual investment in expansion ranges between $5 to $15 million,” he added.
“With almost three decades of operation in Saudi Arabia and category leadership positions for most of its brands, Unilever Arabia continues to strengthen competitiveness leveraging its global scale to meet local consumer needs in hygiene and nutrition,” Wahib Binzagr said.
The factory, a joint venture between Unilever Arabia and the Binzagr Group, was established in 1978 to locally produce Unilever home and personal care brands. Currently, the factory has 350 employees with a 45 percent Saudi workforce, many of whom have been trained to lead in senior management positions. The factory produces 52 variants of eight main brands across five categories of hair, home care, personal wash and oral care. Clear, a new anti-dandruff hair care brand recently launched by Unilever Arabia, is also produced at the factory, which now exports to 10 countries including the GCC, Yemen, Iran, Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco.
Referring to the factory’s expansion, Binzagr said that over the years it had established itself as one of the major manufacturing facilities in the Kingdom, helping to boost the local economy. “We are proud of this facility and are confident that our latest expansion plan will further propel it into a world-class manufacturing plant for consumers globally.
Yasir Jamal, works director at the factory, guiding media persons on a tour of the plant, said that the competitiveness of the factory was driven by a strong local market that gave critical scale to operation and platforms of expansion.
“For this latest phase of expansion, the ability to leverage superior Unilever technology and access to global research and development resources has enabled us to achieve improvement in capacity at minimum cost,” he said.
The new oral care line from this latest expansion phase allows new innovative formats to Close Up and Signal toothpaste. The newly-introduced technology provides flexibility to produce “Core-in-sheath” (center filled gel) products for the first time in the Arab market. Using this new specifically designed equipment, Close Up Milk Calcium Nutrient variant has recently been launched and has both gel from the outside and paste from the inside in one toothpaste.
“We are starting from a position of significant strength. Unilever has strong heritage and roots in the Kingdom and we will continue to invest in our business here. The new expansion plans will provide us further competitiveness to deliver the latest global innovations for both the local and regional markets,” Zijderveld, said.