Essity

Essity acquired Kenvue's feminine care business in Brazil for USD 284m, including brands Carefree, Sempre Livre, and o.b.

Leadership read: Consolidation shifts the leadership question from growth to integration. For Essity in the sector, the demand moves toward transformation and integration leaders who can merge teams, systems and cultures without losing momentum. Across Americas, watch whether the integration is properly resourced; deals are won or lost the year after they close.

curated · 2026-08-20 · context →

Essity initiates strategic review of Consumer Tissue business area's global operations to evaluate strategic alternatives

Leadership read: Essity's strategic review of Consumer Tissue commits the company to a defined decision window on a business that competes primarily on price, scale, and private-label margin, a structurally difficult position for a health and hygiene group increasingly orienting around higher-margin professional and medical segments. The review doesn't just evaluate a sale; it forces Essity to run two parallel operating logics simultaneously, one managing the Consumer Tissue business as a going concern, the other preparing it for separation, partnership, or divestiture. That is a materially different management load than maintaining a stable portfolio, and it falls particularly hard on regional operations where the business sits inside integrated commercial and supply-chain structures. This is one of twelve restructuring signals we have tracked across sectors in the last 90 days. The comparable moves most relevant here are directional rather than sector-identical: Standard Chartered divesting its Singapore consumer lending book to refocus on higher-margin activity, and ITV Studios preparing for a structural separation amid declining revenues. The consistent shape across all three is portfolio simplification under margin pressure, businesses shedding consumer-facing, commoditised units to protect group returns. Companies executing this kind of portfolio separation consistently face concentrated demand in transaction-side commercial leadership, carve-out operations capability, and the cross-functional coordination required to maintain customer and supply-chain continuity through an ownership transition. The ANZ geography adds complexity where regional structures are often deeply integrated with global systems rather than cleanly separable.

curated · 2026-05-06 · context →