Unilever Session on The Practices of Finance in the Real-World Business Environment
The Department of Finance, University of Dhaka and Unilever Bangladesh Ltd. (UBL) jointly arranged a session on December 13, 2022 for junior students of the BBA program of the Department of Finance to share everyday practices, campaign stories and business challenges of UBL with students. The purpose of sharing these lessons with students is to help them to make a connection between the knowledge from classrooms and practices in the real-world business environment.
Mr. Bayezid Hasan, Factory Commercial Sr. Manager, Unilever Bangladesh was present as the keynote speaker in the session. About two hundred third-year students from the BBA 26th Batch of the Department of Finance attended the session. Mr. Mohd. Anisul Islam, Assistant Professor of Finance moderated the event. The main session primarily focused on the structure and role of the Finance Function of Unilever. The main session was followed by guidance on career development in FMCG companies like Unilever.
Mr. Bayezid was detailed, well-articulated, and smooth throughout his presentation. He started the presentation by describing multi-horizontal product offerings for people who belong to different socio-economic classes. Then he landed into the discussion of the financial growth model of Unilever stating an interesting fact about how UBL management utilizes the latent demand among the consumers launching a new product and its development over the years considering financial feasibility in terms of ROI. He showed the detailed management of Profit and Loss (P&L) at Unilever by outlining the items of P&L. He also showcased the scope of negotiation and usefulness of Net Revenue Management (NRM) approach for maximizing profitable volume.
Then, the most interesting area of finance team - Product Pricing mechanism was discussed. Mr. Bayezid presented different steps of pricing and depicted an overview of the Packet Pricing Architecture along with a discussion of the Average Pricing Index and Convenience Pricing. Besides, he also explained the Gross Margin Mix and its elements, the Maximization of ROI and its process, the real scenario of Net profit and Fee Cash Flow, and NPV, IRR & PBP calculation with practical implications of finance. He concluded this very first part of his presentation by emphasizing the usefulness of learning some applications e.g. Advance Excel, Power BI, Robotic Process Automation and Python.
Throughout the presentation, students asked different questions from the presented topics and the speaker welcomed each question and answered very specifically. He also made the session more interactive by taking several quizzes out of the presented topics through an online platform called menti.com. It was really a 'learn-by-fun' session for the students at the audience desk.
The final phase of the session was about sharing career guidelines for finance graduates in MNCs like Unilever Bangladesh. The speaker suggested following the 'Unilever Careers' Facebook page first and then talked about UBL’s recruitment process, the outcome of the ‘Bizmaestros’ - a flagship business competition of UBL, and Unilever Future Leaders Program (UFLP) - a flagship program for recruiting fresh graduates. He also shared his career path at Unilever Bangladesh Limited.
The session was wrapped up by expressing thanks and gratitude towards Mr. Bayezid Hassan for his resourceful presentation and valuable time. The participating students expressed their happiness for experiencing such an impactful interaction with the industry expert and appreciated the efforts of Unilever for partnering with academia to hold these collaborative sessions.