Unilever has plans to offshore back office functions such as finance, human resources and IT operations to India and Eastern Europe. Offshoring its operations would likely result to 2,500 job losses across Europe.

Accenture and IBM have been asked to review the possibility of handling the company's finance, HR and IT functions and move these operations to Eastern Europe and India.

Reports in Germany have claimed that outsourcing of Unilever's IT functions may begin in early 2006, while the rest of the outsourcing operations may start by mid 2006 to 2007.

Declining to comment about potential job losses, a Unilever spokesperson said, "We have to explore all sorts of options, ranging from the retention of all these roles at the one end to outsourcing it all at the other. We have not yet decided."

Image Source: www.unilver.com