Festive season should typically mean good times for consumer goods makers. Instead, companies like Nestle and Hindustan Unilever are grappling with slowing urban sales, as consumers impacted by food inflation spend less on packaged goods. To add to it, inflation in key raw materials like palm oil and tea is also biting, forcing companies to hike prices in a few segments, which while protecting margins raises the spectre of impact on volumes.

Just a day after Nestle India pointed to muted demand, especially in the foods and beverages space, rival Hindustan Unilever (HUL) too has pointed to moderating growth in urban markets.

On Wednesday, HUL reported a 4 per cent year-on-year decline in standalone net profit for the July-September quarter at Rs 2,612 crore, from Rs 2,717 crore. The maker of Dove soap and Bru coffee said revenue for the quarter rose 2 per cent from a year ago to Rs 15,319 crore from Rs 15,027 crore. Volumes (number of packs sold) in the quarter rose 3 per cent. In the June quarter, volumes had grown 4 per cent. 

Company officials pointed that in the base quarter, there was a one-off indirect tax credit from a favourable resolution of past litigation, which benefited both topline and bottomline in the beauty and wellbeing segment.

Over the past several quarters, urban growth had led the growth, while rural growth had been impacted due to poor monsoon rains last year and volatile food prices. The tide now seems to be turning, with rural markets continuing to recover gradually, but major metro markets now emerging pain points.

“FMCG market has witnessed moderating growth in urban market, while rural continued to recover gradually. Even at MET levels, volume growth has slowed down over last few months,” said Ritesh Tiwari, the chief financial officer of HUL.

The company has seen a slowdown in two major segments – personal care and foods and refreshments. Personal care segment declined 5 per cent with negative pricing and low-single digit volume decline. Foods and refreshments declined 2 per cent with also a low-single digit volume decline. 

“There are so many macro factors in this complex big ecosystem of the country that are in play. Its quite logical to assume that real wages, inflation, the agri-economy and employment levels all have an impact on the economy. But, we are not equipped to comment on. What we really know well is what is happening to our business. What we do read is a trending down of urban, a sustained but a gradual increase in rural and therefore an overall tepid growth this quarter. We expect it to probably stay there for the near-term,” said Rohit Jawa, the CEO amd MD of HUL.

HUL is taking calibrated price hikes in the current October-December quarter in tea and skin cleansing segments, to offset rising prices of tea and palm oil respectively. How this impacts demand going ahead is something that will have to be watched out for.

Last week, Maggie noodles maker Nestle India had also reported disappointing earnings for the September quarter, with consolidated net profit declining marginally. 

“While there are some greenshoots like moderation in CPI inflation, a good monsoon and populist announcements by some of the state governments, the overall expenditure increase by states remains modest. The consumer is still facing high food inflation. Raw material costs have started inching up and telecom tariff hikes could also hurt FMCG,” Kunal Vora of BNP Paribas Securities had warned in a recent report.

CLEANING your home is a dreaded chore most of us hate to tackle.

But you could be spending hundreds of pounds more than necessary to get your pad sparkling, according to one expert.

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In the lead-up to the festive season and the ongoing high cost of living, every penny counts.

With a few simple tidying and cleaning tricks, you can make some big savings sprucing up your living space, according to specialist cleaning and home organisation expert, Heidi Phillips.

She owns cleaning firm Tergo Specialist Cleaning. You can find her on Instagram @tergospecialistcleaning.

Here she shares her top tips…

USE OWN-BRAND – £85 a year

Own-brand cleaning and laundry products are a snip of the price of branded items and usually do the job just as good.

Consumer brand Which? found that the most expensive laundry detergents can cost 53p a wash while switching to a own-label powder is just 12p a wash.

Using your machine four times a week would save £85 at these prices and even more if you us your machine daily.

And it’s not just laundry, Heidi says: “You can save loads of money by ditching the big-name cleaning brands and using a supermarket’s own-brand range.

“I really like Sainsbury’s own-label, it works really well and smells divine.”

DITCH DISPOSABLE WIPES – £156

A branded pack of antibacterial wipes comes in at around £3 – if you go through a pack each week that amounts to a whopping £156.

However, they are totally unnecessary.

Heidi says: “Disposable wipes are very expensive and you can just as easily spray a cloth with a bit of anti-bac and it will do the same job.”

Sainsbury’s antibacterial spray is 85p and you can just rinse a cloth and spray.

BAN DISPOSABLE SPONGES – £58

You can also get rid of disposable sponges for wiping and light cleaning.

A pack of two comes in at £2.25 meaning if you used one each week, you’d end up spending around £58 in a year.

Even reusable microfibre clothes are another expense that you can cut out. A pack of five is £4 from B&Q.

Heidi says: “You can save money on cloths by cutting up old clothes that are heading for the bin. T-shirts work really well.”

AVOID SPECIALISED PRODUCTS – £48

You can get specialist cleaning products for just about any task but these tend to be expensive.

For example, some of the branded kitchen or bathroom-specific cleaners are £4 a pop – buying just one of those each month amounts to £48 a year.

And there’s a cheap alternative that we all have sitting at home already.

Heidi says: “Much of the time you don’t need specialised products.

“Washing-up liquid is absolutely amazing for getting rid of grime and you can follow up with a couple of sprays of anti-bacterial to make sure you’re getting rid of any germs too.”

Own-brand washing-up liquid is under a £1 at most supermarkets.

There is also another way to avoid have to use specialised products for limescale or mould, which again can be pricey.

Heidi says that simply cleaning more regularly will mean you’re less likely to get build-up which requires expensive specialised products, and possibly more specialist tools.

She added: “For example, if you clean the bathroom every week you can easily take care of a small bit of mould but if you let it go on, you’ll start to need black mould cleaner.“

CLEAN YOUR DRYER – £25

Consumer group Which? tested a range of tumble dryers and found that after 20 loads of washing, some used 50% more energy on the last load compared to the first.

This was simply because of the filter getting blocked with lint and dust reducing the machine’s efficiency.

The group found the average achine costs £50 a year to run but this could be £25 higher if the energy use increases by half.

Simply cleaning out the filter keeps your machine running to its best without adding any extra costs to your bills.

Good morning. Today, our Russia correspondents report on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s move to thumb his nose at the west with a productive visit to Russia, and our parliament correspondent details how the enlarged far-right contingent in the European parliament is already throwing its weight around.

The Sultan and the Tsar

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan arrived in Kazan yesterday for a meeting with Vladimir Putin, in which the Turkish leader flaunted his easy camaraderie with his Russian host — and reminded his western allies of his power as a go-between, write Charles Clover and Daria Mosolova.

Context: Russia and Turkey have historical ties and Erdoğan has sought to stay close to Putin in recent years despite Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, walking a diplomatic tightrope that takes into account Ankara’s membership of Nato and its similarly close links with Kyiv.

Erdoğan was greeted upon arrival with a taste of chak-chak, a traditional fried dough from Tatarstan, the heart of Russia’s Turkic cultural past, ahead of a 55-minute meeting with the Russian leader.

Erdoğan was the only Nato member among the 24 national leaders in Kazan to attend a summit of the Brics group. That represents a genuine diplomatic coup for Putin, and was conspicuous if not surprising for Erdoğan, who frequently chafes against his western allies by acting as a would-be middleman for Moscow.

Their bilateral meeting was overshadowed by a terrorist attack in Ankara earlier in the day, which killed five and wounded 22.

Erdoğan voiced a desire for Turkey to join Brics and also invited Putin to visit Ankara, a high stakes move if it went ahead given Turkey’s Nato membership and proximity to Europe.

Putin stayed away from last year’s Brics summit after South Africa warned him it would have to comply with an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (of which Turkey is not a member).

Putin said being a Nato member should not prevent Turkey from joining the Brics, and clearly being a Nato member has not prevented Turkey from doing a number of things with Russia — such as maintaining good relations throughout the Ukraine invasion, while also selling Bayraktar combat drones to Ukraine.

While the two backed opposing sides in civil wars in Syria and Libya, they have typically found economic reasons to maintain warm relations: Russia struck a deal to sell cheap gas to Turkey in 2023, giving the country a key economic lifeline ahead of Erdogan’s most recent re-election.

But there are other signs that Ankara knows it needs to play both sides.

This week the FT reported that Turkey has secretly barred exports to Russia of US military-linked hardware after Washington warned Ankara of “consequences” if it did not halt the trade. Ankara has in recent weeks adjusted its customs systems to block exports of more than four dozen categories of goods of US origin.

Chart du jour: A punt on Pyongyang

Vladimir Putin is betting on North Korean troops to retake Kursk from Ukraine, with Pyongyang’s “Storm Corps” becoming the first foreign army contingent deployed in Russia’s war.

Budget bust-up

The populist right which surged in June’s European elections is beginning to flex its muscles in parliament, with a shock vote against a resolution on the EU’s 2025 budget, writes Andy Bounds.

Context: MEPs did agree on a budget proposal. But a bewildering set of votes on an accompanying political resolution saw a far-right amendment to allow EU money to build border infrastructure pass before those who proposed it rejected the overall resolution.

Parliament has three hard-right groups. With increasing extremism, they are the ECR, home to the party of Italian premier Giorgia Meloni; the Patriots, dominated by Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National of France, and the Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN) which includes the Alternative for Germany.

ESN put forward the amendment on funding border walls to keep out migrants and the Patriots, ECR and the centre-right European People’s party backed it. Migration has surged up the agenda in recent weeks to become one of the bloc’s most politicised issues.

Though the European Commission allows spending on watchtowers, cameras and similar infrastructure, it has consistently said walls could breach its legal restrictions on human rights grounds. 

This led outraged liberal and leftwing groups to reject the resolution. Fabienne Keller, of the liberal Renew group, said she “deplored” the EPP’s alliance with the far right”.

“The parliament is becoming ungovernable,” said one centrist party official. 

Three weeks of talks with the council of the EU’s 27 member states will now begin, as the parliament fights to restore €1.5bn of funding cuts before a final vote in November.

What to watch today

1. European parliament president Roberta Metsola visits Italy, meets Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

2. Slovakia’s President Peter Pellegrini visits Germany, meets Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Now read these

Leading insurer Star Health Insurance admitted to a shocking data breach after private data of millions of customers were compromised.

The leaked data not only includes personal info like names, dates of birth, mobile numbers and email IDs, but also sensitive details like PAN, salary, residential addresses, policy numbers, pre-existing conditions and other health details

Who hacked Star Health Insurance?

A user, identified as xenZen, took responsibility for the hacking, alleging that Amarjee Khanuja, the Chief Information Security Officer at Star Health Insurance, sold the data to them directly for $43,000. 

The insurance details of the customers have now been put on sale by the hacker who allegedly leaked 7.24 TB data consisting information about more than 31 million customers. The whole data was offered for $150,000 while they were partially offered in bundles of 1 lakh customer records at $10,000.

The incident camme to light when X user Deedy Das raised alarm about the data leak, saying “Nothing is private in India.” Deedy alleged that Khanuja contacted xenZen through Tox, an encrypted chat messenger, on July 26. They allegedly cut a deal for $28,000 Monero, a cryptocurrency, in exchange for the data. Following this, hacker made the payment and accessed the data using login credentials and API details allegedly provided by Khanuja via ProtonMail.

Khanuja allegedly sold more data for another $15,000 on July 20. Deedy alleged that Khanuja, however, revoked the access within a week, demanding $150,000 for senior management. But the hacker refused and later the data was listed for sale online. In September, a website was set up to offer customer data through Telegram bots.

However, Star Health has dismissed allegations about its involvement in the “targeted malicious attack”. It has filed a lawsuit against the hacker as well as Telegram, where the data was leaked initially

Claiming its operations are fully functional and services to customers are unaffected, the health insurer said a probe is being carried out by its cybersecurity team. “We continue to work in conjunction with authorities to ensure that customer data remains protected,” said the company.

A seven-second TikTok video posted this month on the official Kamala Harris account shows Donald Trump mistakenly telling a crowd to get out and vote on January 5.

“Bro is running for president and doesn’t even know when Election Day is,” reads the caption, alongside a laughing emoji.

While the 2016 race for the White House was labelled the “Facebook election” as campaigns and voters flocked to the social media platform, this year TikTok is the app of choice for Harris and Trump’s online battle for younger voters.

“This election has been the TikTok election,” said Lara Cohen, head of creators at Linktree, which has worked on get-out-the-vote initiatives. The campaigns are “conscious that [Gen Z] is a demographic that they need to be hitting if they’re going to win — and that starts with generating enthusiasm online”.

The campaigns have been harnessing irreverent internet culture, memes and slang on TikTok, as Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has deliberately shifted its algorithm away from serving political content on Facebook and Elon Musk’s pro-Trump bent has alienated some users of his platform, X. 

TikTok’s algorithm — which feeds users an addictive stream of popular short videos — allows campaigns to get in front of new audiences who might not otherwise be searching for political content.

“The design of the app allows opposing filter bubbles to interact,” said Crystal Abidin, professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth. “It allows you to find things outside your palette.” 

Users have been wielding its popular features — such as “duetting” and live streaming debates with other accounts — to engage with politics. Some creators have also taken to making “fancam” videos, compilations of photos or videos of candidates edited with effects, which fans typically create to celebrate musical artists and actors. There is a trend of TikTok users filming themselves filling in their mailing ballots to music. 

To increase Harris’s reach when she became the Democratic candidate in July, her camp hired what deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty described as a pack of “feral 25-year-olds” to latch on to trending music and popular editing styles in real time.

They have generated their own viral videos on issues including abortion and climate change, alongside Trump bloopers. 

At the same time, the campaign openly courted creators on the platform, inviting them to glitzy White House events and to the Democratic National Convention, in the hope their messaging would spread organically to their own sizeable TikTok followings. 

Trump’s TikTok has presented a more sombre offering — videos set to menacing music, with dark predictions about the economy and soaring immigration under a Harris presidency, and pieces-to-camera by the former president warning of a “nation in decline”.

These are interspersed with clips of light-hearted meetups with young male creators, such as prankster Logan Paul and video game streamer Adin Ross, who are closely affiliated with the so-called manosphere, or online spaces focused on masculinity. 

Harris’s TikTok strategy is “aspirational for any brand, let alone a politician”, where Trump’s feels “less native” to TikTok and closer to traditional campaign material, according to Cohen.

Despite having 5mn followers, compared with Trump’s 12mn, Harris’s KamalaHQ account has attracted 1.5bn views, compared with the Republican candidate’s 1bn. 

But Harris mania has lost steam in recent weeks, both in the polls and on TikTok.

Data shared with the Financial Times by social media intelligence platform CredoIQ found that the amount of viral conservative content on TikTok surpassed viral progressive content in the wake of the vice-presidential debate between JD Vance, the Republican, and Tim Walz, the Democrat, at the beginning of October. 

Ben Darr, CredoIQ’s founder, noted that a rise in Trump-supporting creators pushing content criticising the current government’s relief efforts in hurricanes Helene and Milton might have contributed to the swing.

About 47 per cent of content viewed about the October storms was conservative, compared with 43 per cent that was progressive, according to CredoIQ.  

Harris’s digital operation, which is about 250 strong, has a rapid response team of about 15 young people. Well versed in internet speak, they trawl the web looking to latch on to trends just as they are gathering momentum, collaborating through Slack channels and messaging apps.  

The content goes through a light approval process, with an emphasis on trial and error. Some posts mock Trump for being “weird” and “out of it”, or feature clips of Democrats “dragging” or “clapping back” at his policies. In others, Harris is typically laughing or “sharing her love for Gen Z”. 

The goal, according to one person familiar with the campaign’s strategy, is to create “permission structures”, or make influencers feel comfortable enough to post positively about Harris, which means their followers feel able to do the same. 

“Only having Gen Z do that is authentic,” said April Eichmeier, assistant professor in the emerging media department at the University of St Thomas in Minnesota. “A tweet from the Clinton campaign used to take days. That’s not how you run a campaign in a world where something can go viral in 15 minutes.”

The success of Harris’s digital campaign has irked Trump, who has insisted on his Truth Social app that he has “the greatest social media program in history”. 

But experts note there are fewer Republican politicians on TikTok, partly because some have taken issue with its Chinese ownership and described the app as “digital fentanyl” designed to destroy the minds of young Americans. 

“Republicans by and large have missed an opportunity to be there,” said Eric Wilson, a Republican digital strategist and executive director at the Center for Campaign Innovation. He added that the centre’s research found that one in five self-identified Maga Republicans used TikTok every day. 

But in an interview with Semafor, Alex Bruesewitz, senior Trump communications adviser, said TikTok had been “good for us this campaign cycle”, while in 2020 Facebook had engaged in “censorship”.

Bruesewitz added that the campaign had been “leveraging Trump as a person”, for example “through funny TikTok meetups with some of the biggest influencers in the world”. 

TikTok’s new role at the heart of politics has brought with it fresh concerns about misinformation on the platform. A report earlier this month by left-leaning group Media Matters found conspiracies and falsehoods on TikTok related to the recent hurricanes that had garnered millions of views.

With Trump and Harris running neck and neck as campaigning is in its final stretch, it is unclear whether the candidates’ TikTok followings will give them an edge at the ballot box.  

Jessica Siles, deputy press secretary of Gen Z political advocacy group Voters of Tomorrow, said there was a surge in volunteer sign-ups and recruitment when Harris was elevated to the top of her party’s ticket. “So much of that excitement came from the online buzz that immediately happened on TikTok,” she said. 

But Cohen cautioned that while “early indications of voter registration have been really positive in terms of activating young people . . . the proof is going to be in the pudding”. 

Additional reporting by Anna Nicolaou in New York and Peter Andringa in London

Noel Tata has succeeded his late half-brother Ratan Tata as the chairman of Tata Trusts.

Tata Trusts owns 66 per cent of Tata Sons, the holding company of Tata Group. The appointment of Noel Tata as chairman comes after a board meeting held in Mumbai on Friday. 

Tata Trusts, set up by Ratan Tata’s great grandfather Jamsetji Tata in 1892, carry out philanthropic activities in healthcare, nutrition, education, livelihood, environment, migration, skill development, sports, and disaster relief, among other things. Tata Trusts broadly comprises of Sir Ratan Tata Trust & Allied Trusts, and Sir Dorabji Tata Trust & Allied Trusts.

ALSO READ: End of an era: Ratan Tata, titan of India Inc, passes away

Noel Tata currently serves as a trustee on the board of Sir Ratan Tata Trust and Sir Dorabji Tata Trust. He is also the chairman of Tata Trent and vice chairman of Tata Steel.

The 67-year-old Noel, who graduated from Sussex University in the UK and has completed the International Executive Programme from INSEAD remains the chairman of Tata Group’s retail arm Trent. Son of Naval H. Tata and Simone N. Tata, Noel has been associated with the Tata Group for over 40 years.

Ratan Tata, who passed away on Wednesday, reportedly, had not designated a successor.