Procter & Gamble is a giant global corporation with $65 billion in sales, 95,000 employees and popular products used daily in almost every home.
If that’s not feel-good enough, it’s also a company that promotes from within the organization and tries to be a good corporate citizen in the community, through projects to help the needy and improve the environment.
These products and policies have kept Dmytro Kyselov happily employed with P&G Ukraine’s office for 20 years, rising last November to become the first Ukrainian country manager in the almost 25 years that the company has been operating in the nation.
In the fast-moving consumer goods sector, P&G is a world leader that began 180 years ago. Its American Chamber of Commerce in Ukraine profile says it has invested $300 million in the nation. It also notes that P&G partners with UNICEF and the Red Cross Society of Ukraine to help those in need.
While P&G does not break out sales by nation, a couple of indicators — number of employees and purchasing power of Ukrainians — suggest that the operation in Ukraine is a very small part of the global operation.
Ukraine’s division of roughly 700 employees has about 7/10th of 1 percent of the company’s global workforce, which amounts to less than $500 million in annual revenue — if revenue per employee is the same everywhere. In Ukraine, that’s not likely the case. Even Central European nations have between two times and four times the purchasing power of Ukrainians, Kyselov said.
Dmytro Kyselov
Job: General manager of Procter & Gamble Ukraine
Citizenship: Ukrainian
Age: 44
Family: Married, 3 children
Education: Kharkiv University of Radio Electronics, medical equipment engineer; masters in business administration in finance and banking in Switzerland.
How to succeed in Ukraine: “No. 1 is consumer understanding. The second would be creating value for your customers, including our distributors, our retail partners. Third, organization. We try to create an atmosphere where everyone is motivated and everyone is willing to bring their best to the job. Fourth, you need patience in Ukraine. Companies that expected very fast returns on investment, most of them failed and finally left the market. The market has a very high potential. You need to wait, invest and develop capabilities to realize this potential.” (Oleg Petrasiuk)
So Ukraine is not the best country in which to sell Tide and Ariel laundry detergent, Tampax, Pampers, Vicks, Head & Shoulders, Gillette, Old Spice, Gala and on and on.
Purchasing power also took a big hit after the EuroMaidan Revolution that drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014, triggering Russia’s war. Ukraine is now only pulling out of two years of recession, during which time the hryvnia lost more than 2/3 of its value.
But the key barometer for P&G’s financial health in Ukraine is consumer confidence, which is recovering, but still below the pre-global financial crisis levels of 2008.
Sales track closely with the state of consumer confidence, Kyselov said. Low-price products are more popular, obviously, during economic crisis.
“Our business, in terms of forecasting, is not very complicated. Most of our products are of daily usage,” Kyselov said. “Our sales have a direct correlation with the purchasing power of consumer. When salaries grow faster than inflation, sales pick up.”
Kyselov spoke to the Kyiv Post from the company’s spacious, 2,000 square-meter, two-floor headquarters in a business center in Podil, near the Fairmont Grand Hotel. Besides images of its iconic products, the P&G offices have two lunchrooms, a quiet room and lots of open space where awards and honors are prominently displayed, along with drawings and photographs of the employees’ children.
P&G Ukraine also has two production plants, one in Kyiv Oblast’s Boryspil that makes women’s hygiene products and the other in the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast city of Pokrov (formerly Ordzhonikidze), a city of 41,000 residents more than 450 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. This plant focuses on detergents and soaps.
After a 2015 selloff, in which P&G unloaded 100 of its least popular brands, the company is focused on its top 65 brands. Most of these brands can be bought in Ukraine today. At least 15 of them are made in Ukraine’s two plants, while roughly half of the products sold are made in the nation, while another half of the products are imported, Kyselov said.
One more P&G brand — Gala dishwashing soap, detergent and cleaner — is only sold in Ukraine. “That’s a heritage one of our plants we bought from a local company a long time ago, in 2000,” Kyselov said. “That was the brand that originated from there.”
P&G has to be at the top of its game to thrive in the competitive industry that includes such competitors as Colgate-Palmolive, Kimberly Clark, Unilever and more than a dozen others in the personal products segment.
What’s also remarkable is that, despite a difficult business climate that gets low marks for high corruption and bureaucracy as well as lack of rule of law, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based company has no complaints about doing business in Ukraine.
In fact, in some areas, Kyselov said the business climate is improving — in currency deregulation, in collection of value-added tax refunds and so on. Another component of P&G’s success is involvement in the community.
The company donates products around the world, including Ukraine, to people in need “who cannot afford to buy our products or who have been displaced from their homes,” Kyselov said.
Another facet is promotion of healthy habits of hygiene “to improve the confidence of people in need,” he said.
Besides involvement with UNICEF and the Red Cross on various projects, including vaccinations and blood drives, P&G partners with Children’s SOS Villages International on projects such as helping to supply safe drinking water.
In the war-torn Donbas, P&G Ukrane is involved in the creation of parenting rooms in medical clinics in 11 cities of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the country manager said. During holidays, employees help raise money to buy gifts for children in need.
For the last three years, the division in Ukraine has won the company-wide global grants donation contest.
Beyond helping those with the least, P&G sets high targets for environmental sustainability, Kyselov said, on several fronts. For instance, one of the shops in the plant at Pokrov uses rainwater for 85 percent of its needs. On the waste front, “our vision is one day there will be zero waste coming from P&G plants to landfills,” he said.
Besides gaining satisfaction from the products that P&G sells, Kyselov said the “promotion from within principle” helps create a better work atmosphere and give employees concrete opportunities for career progress.
He is a living example. He started as a key account manager, then worked in distribution and commercial operations, then in market strategy and planning. He spent six years abroad with P&G — in Russia and Switzerland — before returning to Ukraine in 2012 and becoming country manager in November.
It’s uncommon for people in Ukraine to stay 20 years, he said, but common for them to stay for 5 to 10 years. In his case, what works for the company also worked for him.
“If you want to take the challenges, you need to learn to develop yourself,” he said.
“Even our president and CEO (David S. Taylor) some time ago started at level 1 in the company.”
