Friday Dec 12, 2025
Friday Dec 12, 2025
Friday, 12 December 2025 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Unilever Sri Lanka Marketing Director Imeshika Kariyawasam
– Pic by Upul Abayasekara
By Charumini de Silva
Unilever Sri Lanka pushed back against the long-held argument that the country’s population of 22 million restricts investment opportunities, insisting that the country offers a far more compelling case when viewed through the lens of value generation, consumer behaviour, and category development.
Speaking at the Sri Lanka Economic Summit last week, Unilever Sri Lanka Marketing Director Imeshika Kariyawasam said despite economic turbulence, Sri Lanka continues to be viewed positively within Unilever’s global system.
“In the global Unilever eyes, we are performing better in terms of the relative size and the right-to-win side of things,” she added.
She acknowledged that size matters, noting that Sri Lanka is just “1.5 to 2% of India’s population” and “about 10% of Pakistan’s population.” However, she stressed that Unilever evaluates markets using several additional criteria beyond population alone.
“When you look at the other lenses that we look at—the GDP per capita or the per-capita turnover—that our portfolio generates, we perform better as a country. From the shared point of view, we have the right to transform, grow the categories that we are in,” she added.
Kariyawasam said Unilever assesses investments based on incremental growth potential and the speed at which capital can be recovered.
“This is where the country’s economic journey and the regulatory journey comes in; when you make an investment, how fast you can get that return on investment (RoI) into the business,” she noted.
Kariyawasam cited the company’s long presence in the laundry segment as evidence of how category transformation can unlock significant value.
“For the past 80 years, it was a bar format, and in the last decade, we transformed our consumer from bar format to powder. Now, when we move them from powder to liquid, we unlock approximately 15% value in a transaction,” she explained.
“It’s value generation that happens in the country even in the mass categories,” she added
She opined that while Sri Lanka’s population is small, categories such as skincare and haircare remain “significantly underpenetrated,” presenting substantial future opportunity, particularly given the country’s high literacy and female literacy rates.
“When the right product comes in with the right proposition and the right benefit, it can unlock fast future growth,” she said.
Kariyawasam noted that the country’s potential is not limited by scale. “Sri Lanka is very much poised to grow,” she stressed, while cautioning that macroeconomic and regulatory stability remains essential. “We need the external environment stability to bring this full opportunity to life,” she said.
