If you haven’t been a long-term Unilever fan, you should have been. Its ethical credentials, strong investment behind its brands and fairness to employees are a good advert for capitalism.
Better still, it has provided the returns that prove behaving well pays off, particularly when compared with those who don’t share its values. They shall remain nameless, but one begins with "Kr and ends in “aft”.
That long-termism has born fruit in the Covid-19 pandemic, as its well-invested supply lines have coped easily with the twin terrors of huge disruption to its workforces and unprecedented shifts in demand.
Today’s sales growth — nearly four times higher than expected — is testament to its strength.
But, if you believe some analysts, every time Joe Biden has a good day in the polls, you should sell more of your Unilever shares.
The thinking is that Biden will raise corporate taxes in what is Unilever’s biggest market. Its €9 billion US turnover makes up around 17% of the entire company.
But you have to look at the bigger picture.
For starters, a Biden presidency would most likely result in a lower dollar, sending cash back into moribund emerging market currencies.
For Unilever, that could be a big win, because it has large manufacturing businesses in Latin America, Brazil, Indonesia and India, where devaluations are hurting.
Unilever buys its raw materials - fragrances, oils, packaging - in dollars, often from emerging market currency countries.
So a strong-dollar-weak-emerging-market-currency scene is bad in all ways.
Perhaps more significantly, Biden’s tax policies will put more in the pockets of America’s poor and middle income families. That can only be good for Unilever.
Meanwhile, the social fracturing under Trump has been bad for all consumer businesses. Folks buy less Marmite and Dove when there's riots on the streets.
If Biden can heal America, everybody wins.
