Saba Obaid comes from Pakistan all the way to Vancouver to pursue her MBA. She graduated with high merit from the Lahore University of Management Sciences with a BSc Honours in Accounting and Finance and a minor in Economics. She was one of the lucky 14 Management Trainees to be hired by Unilever Pakistan Limited in 2010 after a rigorous 7-step recruitment process, competing against 7,500 applicants nationwide.

Upon joining Unilever, her training in various finance functions began:

Supply Chain Finance: She started off running discounted cash flow analyses and scenario analyses for various investment projects and revamping the vendor financing agreements.

Corporate Finance: She was appointed project coordinator for the single biggest cash management initiative in Unilever Pakistan and brought together multiple internal and external stakeholders to alter the payment collections process from 300 customers and reduce the cash tied up in cheques in pipeline.

Foods and Beverages Finance Business Partner: She worked on developing and cascading new user-friendly reports to improve the forecasting and management of advertising and promotion expenditure by various marketing teams.

General Trade: She worked with the sales field teams to ensure the productivity of 3 new brands and 2 new variant launches and was the project coordinator for the initiative to expand the geographic reach of existing distributors.

Home and Personal Care Finance Business Partner: Managed, Reported and Forecasted the financial performance of various categories and aided in brands teams decision making to ensure targets were met. Also developed viable business cases for various new brand/variant/format launches and monitored post-launch performance.