Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Billion-pound man recruited to take Unilever success story to next stage

Few appointments receive such rave reviews as that afforded yesterday to Paul Polman, the new broom at Unilever. News that he's coming in as chief executive added more than £1bn to the company's market capitalisation, no doubt prompting him to muse on what a pity it is that his share options haven't already been priced.

Had the nominations committee managed to entice Bart Becht himself, the Reckitt Benckiser boss universally acknowledged as the doyen of the sector, it would scarcely have had a more galvanising effect on the share price. As it was, Mr Becht wasn't for hire and it would in any case have looked indecent to recruit such a direct competitor.

Having recently been passed over for the top job at Nestlé, Mr Polman was, on the other hand, more than open to offers. For Unilever, his recruitment marks another decisive break with the past. He's the first ever outsider to be taken on in such a senior post, and it means that all three top positions in the company – chairman, chief executive and finance director – will now be occupied by non-Unilever lifers.

Investors had resigned themselves to the job almost certainly going to one of the four internal candidates widely touted for the job. Nobody would have grumbled too much had one of them got the post. They are all said to be outstanding executives, particularly the two Indian nationals who have been clawing their way to the top of the Unilever behemoth in recent years.

Yet to take the company on to the next stage of its development, it perhaps needs someone unencumbered by the corporate and cultural baggage of the past. Mr Polman has an outstanding track record, first at Procter & Gamble and more recently as finance director at Nestlé. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate man for the job.

Fortunately for Mr Polman, much of the heavy lifting that needed to be done at Unilever has already been executed by the present incumbent, Patrick Cescau. To little applause in the City and the financial press, Mr Cescau has quietly brought about a remarkable change at Unilever.

From being one of the worst performers in the sector in terms of shareholder return, it is now one of the top. Unexpectedly for a company long seen as one of the great lumbering dinosaurs of the European corporate scene, Unilever has also become something of a growth stock, with approaching half its sales in emerging and developing markets where growth is rocketing away at around 15 per cent per annum.

Mr Cescau has even managed to vanquish calls for Unilever to be broken up into its constituent foods and personal care businesses. There is little pressure for such action from the City any more. The "One Unilever" programme Mr Cescau instigated has achieved genuine progress in margin improvement and sales, and it has become generally accepted that it would now do more harm than good to disentangle the product categories and run them as separate businesses.

Even so, there remains a degree of scepticism about how lasting the improvement might be. Mr Polman's job is to ensure that Unilever stays up there with the Reckitts and the Nestlés. Even after Mr Cescau's spade work, it's quite a challenge.

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