Birla Opus, the paints division of Grasim Industries – the Aditya Birla Group flagship, is looking to exit the fiscal with a “high single digit” market share. The company, which is only into the decorative segment, sees a cyclical “general slowdown” in the segment but remains confident of markets improving “sooner or later”, said Rakshit Hargave, CEO, Birla Opus Paints.
According to him, market share gains are expected to continue into next fiscal, quarter-on-quarter.
“…we can see that in the last six (to) eight months there has been a slowdown. But we believe that the slowdown is also cyclical and sooner or later the market will improve,” he told businessline.
Hargave said, it is difficult to peg a timeline for demand recovery, but the medium and long term outlook for the Indian market “is very attractive”.
“We want to exit (the fiscal) at high single digit, and as we approach March end, we are confident in holding on to that target. Objective for next year is also to gain market share and we are in the process of firming our operating plans in FY26. Obviously as a new player we will continue to gain share in the second year as well,” he said.
Capacity Expansion
The company’s sixth facility at Kharagpur in West Bengal is expected to go live in Q1 FY-26 (April – June). Construction activities had been impacted there following a cyclone.
Earlier this week, Birla Opus’ fifth manufacturing plant at Mahad in Maharashtra was brought on stream, thereby making the entity the second largest player by installed capacity, with an installed capacity of 1096 MLPA (million litres per annum).
The Mahad facility will have an installed capacity of 180 MLPA for water-based paint, 20 MLPA for distemper, and 30 MLPA for solvent-based paint.
Other commissioned facilities include Panipat and Ludhiana (Haryana), Cheyyar (Tamil Nadu) and Chamarajanagar (Karnataka).
Asked about price movements, the CEO said “We are here to be competitive and offer a good price to the dealers and customers.”
During a recent investors’ call, the Grasim top brass was asked about the operating losses in the division.
The top brass said, “We presented a game plan where we said that within 3 years of full-scale operation, we would want to break even. So there is a journey. And what we are seeing this year is the part that was planned.”
On-boarding Dealers
The company is “aggressively” trying to bring on board dealers, and is working on improving the dealer throughput on a per dealer basis
According to Hargave, there are close to 135 depots which are operational, and the target is to reach up to 150 depots “in a short period of time”.
“We are already present in close to 6,000 towns,” he said, adding that the company would like to clock in close to 50,000 dealers by the end of the year. “We are also more or less in line with that journey….what we had committed 12 months ago.”
