Irish-born Niall FitzGerald spent 30 years helping to build Unilever up and now as chief executive he is trimming the business from 1,600 brands to 200, writes Emmet Oliver

"Don't call me Sir," cautions Mr Niall FitzGerald, an honorary knight of the British Empire since the start of the year. "I don't use the title, I am an Irish citizen."

Humility is a precious commodity among chief executives running global behemoths such as Unilever but, at least on this score, Mr FitzGerald is happy to talk down the honorary knighthood (or KBE) he received from the Queen a few months ago.

In Dublin to attend a rugby match and deliver a speech to the JC Decaux Forum, he puts the honour in perspective. "I realise I wouldn't have got it if I wasn't the head of Unilever. It was for the company and its achievements, rather than anything done by me personally," he is quick to add.

Mr FitzGerald, as joint chairman and chief executive of Unilever, is unlikely to get too fazed by being so publicly recognised by the British establishment. While he may hail from Farranshone in Limerick, he is used to being wooed - and more often listened to - by influential business and political figures in London.

Mr FitzGerald counts embattled British Prime Minister Tony Blair among his friends and his measured pronouncements on issues as diverse as the euro and GM crops are given considerable media space in the UK.

He is also on a number of high-powered committees and bodies in London and has drifted on to the international stage in recent years as a council member of the World Economic Forum.

While all of this qualifies Mr FitzGerald to be a fully paid up member of the City establishment, he still likes to wear his Irishness on his sleeve. "The English expect the Irish to be a little eccentric, so it means you can get away with a lot more," he says.

Mr FitzGerald has been with Unilever for more than 30 years, having joined the company when he left UCD.

He speaks methodically and appears ultra casual for a chief executive. He is wearing a tie but normally goes tieless and expects the same of his staff.

But this is casual of the manicured nails and expensive blazer variety and with an annual salary of more than €2.5 million Mr FitzGerald has moved a long way from his time in the communist party in UCD.

While this might seem a colourful background for somebody who now heads up a multi-national, FitzGerald is not - contrary to some portraits of him - a footloose marketing showman. In fact, he originally worked in the finance area at Unilever and it is only in recent years he has been seen as an out-and-out marketer.

As the business world dusts itself off from the Enron and WorldCom debacles, there is an increasing emphasis on the hard end of business and less on the "softer" skills of the marketer, but Mr FitzGerald rejects this as a false dichotomy.

"In the final analysis, it is about understanding your customer's needs. That is what pays our bills. If you lose that skill you are gone."

He says Unilever was regarded by some analysts, as recently as two to three years ago, as the ultimate example of an "old-economy" dinosaur. "People say the bottom line is back, well we never lost it at Unilever. We are a major cash-generating business. I have the monthly figures for the whole company on my desk six days after the close of the month. As my old UCD lecturer used to say, profit is a matter of opinion, cash is real."

Mr FitzGerald deals in brands, thousands of them. To get a sense of the scale of Unilever, one can consider some of the following figures: it operates in 150 countries, it has an annual turnover of €52 billion, it employs 265,000 staff and is the biggest advertiser in the world, spending €7.3 billion worldwide in 2002.

But maybe a better way to judge the company's dominance is to take a look around your house. Have you any of the following brands in your bathroom or kitchen? Lipton tea, Dove soap or moisturiser, Hellmans mayonnaise, Cif, Domestos, Impulse, Vaseline, Ponds, Signal, Comfort, Slim fast, Magnum and Selero Ice Cream, Bird's Eye and Findus.

All are big brands, all are literally household names.

But three years ago Mr FitzGerald embarked on a massive cull of Unilever brands, including old favourites such as Oxo, which was among those to bite the dust.

"The whole thing had become too complex and too unwieldy," he says.

Where there were 1,600 brands, there will soon be 200 and within that group, 40 truly global brands, he says. Unilever was operating in 50 product categories, it is now down to 12.

Less brands also means less people, 33,000 have been let go since the company started to slim down and Mr FitzGerald says that, by the end of the year, 38,000 jobs worldwide will have been shed. In total, the massive shedding of jobs and brands will save Unilever € 4 billion, he says.

While the company has been discarding brands like they are going out of fashion (Mr FitzGerald says he has disposed of 87 businesses in the past three years), global brands have been assailed by an assortment of anti-globalisation campaigners and marketing gurus who preach the message "local is best".

Maybe surprisingly for someone who heads up such a large conglomerate, Mr FitzGerald agrees. "Local knowledge is everything. You will never meet a global consumer."

He gives the example of one of Unilever's largest brands, Dove. He says that, while Dove moisturiser might appear to have global possibilities, the skin type and climate in different countries have to be taken into account and modifications have to be made.

So who decides whether Unilever brands continue to dominate the shelves.

"About 80 per cent of our products are sold to woman," he says, and keeping them happy is at the centre of Unilever's work.

"Brands are owned by consumers; they exist wholly and solely in the minds of the millions of people who have a point of view about them," Mr FitzGerald told the JC Decaux Forum.

The company's share price has been suffering a little recently and it has sought to boost revenues in key food areas such as ice cream, which generates some 10 per cent of Unilever's turnover (it is planning to produce cheese and curry flavoured ice cream). It also recently announced a deal with MTV to promote its ice-cream brands through a dance talent competition.

Mr FitzGerald says the company is following a growth plan mapped out in 2000 and revised after its $24.3 billion purchase of US Bestfoods three years ago. He says the growth plan involves driving underlying annual sales growth to 5-6 per cent and profit margins to more than 16 per cent by 2004.

He says Unilever believes it can add value by building up critical mass in the largest market in the world - China.

Mr FitzGerald says he spends a lot of time there.

"We have a $600 million business there already and we are confident we can grow that very seriously over the next few years," he says.

He says the communist system that China's leaders still preside over has not held back Unilever or any of the other big corporations.

"Deng Xiaoping had a great phrase - it doesn't matter what colour the cat is, once it catches the mouse. And I think the political culture there is not hampering investment in any way."

As for Ireland, he says he only follows events here from afar, with most of his visits home now confined to rugby weekends and the Wexford Opera Festival.

However he still believes Ireland needs to face up to some painful realities, one is in the area of banking (he is a former board member of Bank of Ireland).

"I wonder whether two large independent banking groups are viable in Ireland going forward. Now the domestic market is the global market and it seems to me they may not be viable on their own. I realise that regulators get worried about competition but it is not the number of companies that encourage competition, it is the level of competition that is important," he says.