Pros
While for the outsiders Reckitt might appear as a FMCG player full of confidence and other qualities, from the inside the situation is very different.
Cons
In the last 10 years the company has been passing through various harmful phases that brought it from the powerful engine created by Bart Becht to the out-of-steam reality that is now. Too many errors have been made along the road in one decade, enough to write a book about it. Most of the acquisitions have failed to scale-up and become global successes (Scholl, Schiff, Mead Johnson), and internal projects such as SuperCharge have suffocated the company by depriving it of the resources to invest. This has generated a ripple effect that implicitly invited most of the in-house talents to run away and accept offers from wiser enterprises. What remained was the least talented selection of talents and we can see the results 10 years later. The company has been lucky enough to leverage on 2020-21 external factors that we all know well to sustain sales for specific Health and Hygiene brands, but what would have happened without those? There’s no innovation, only acquisition of startups that are not yet scaling up consistently because there’s no successful model yet to share to scale up businesses. And I can’t even recall when was the last time that Gaviscon, Strepsils or even Durex genuinely innovated their lineup. It’s all a giant cash cow to foster new acquisitions of startups that are not scaled up successfully. And the flywheel continues. If you’re still here up to this point and you’re considering whether to join or not this company while having multiple offers in hand, I would strongly suggest you pick the offer where you can find the smartest possible people to work with. This is how you’re going to grow and succeed. Don’t settle for average or below.
