Global consumer giants such as Unilever and Nestlé are proving they can resist infection if Turkey catches a cold. Their business models will, however, be increasingly vulnerable if the bug spreads more widely across emerging markets. Market turmoil in Turkey, whose currency has lost more than a third of its value against the dollar so far this year, will have limited impact on Unilever, which made just 3 percent of its total revenue in the country last year. Nestlé is even less exposed, and most of what is manufactured in its two Turkish factories is sold locally. That helps to keep these

The 5 percent fall in Unilever’s share price on Thursday says something about the effect of hurricanes and bad weather on its third-quarter sales. It says even more about brittle valuations of consumer goods companies, which have been pumped up far above their long-term levels. The $180 billion Anglo-Dutch company’s wobble shows how that might change. The 10 largest listed food, drink and household product makers, including Nestlé, Unilever, brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev and Procter & Gamble, trade at an average of 23 times the next 12 months’ forecast earnings – compared with a 10-year mean of 18 times. That’s largely

Nestlé can turn a deaf ear to Dan Loeb’s ideas – except one. While most of the demands the Third Point activist put to the Swiss giant’s board last month wouldn’t obviously juice up the share price, Loeb’s call for old-fashioned margin improvement holds more promise. Loeb thinks Nestlé’s shares ought to be higher than the current level of around 84 Swiss francs. One option, he contends, would be for the company run by Ulf Mark Schneider to increase its net debt to two times EBITDA, adding 21 billion Swiss francs ($22 billion) for share buybacks. While shareholders might like