Berger Paints sees the rural markets starting to recover

Berger Paints, which has seen its rural market share slightly falling in the last couple of quarters, says it is gradually improving.

Paint industry has been a competitive industry so companies had been losing bit of a market share in the past. However, the players should be looking at restoring that back, he said.

The company’s current market share is about 18.8 percent and Roy is looking at pushing it upwards, towards 20 percent in the next one-two years. “If we can do that, that will be good,” he said.

“Overall, we think that we should be able to gain a little bit of market share,” he said.

Growing faster than the industry is Berger Paints’ objective, he said.

Crude oil prices have seen a big slide. The peak level of brent crude prices was about $140 per barrel and now it has almost halved to $77-78 per barrel, flat on a year-to-date (YTD) basis, the lowest level that has been seen in this year. This should be positive for a company like Berger Paints.

While posting its quarter two results for FY23, the company had indicated that softening raw material prices should aid profitability in quarter three as well as quarter four of FY23.

“Prices are softening a little bit. The effect will probably be seen in quarter four. So quarter four margins will move upwards considerably,” he said.

Last year, the company had taken the price increases in October, November period. Therefore the volume-to-value gap is almost negligible. In the current quarter, the base was high because of the price increases, there was a delayed withdrawal of monsoon impact as well. So quarter three has been relatively soft in terms of the growth that has been seen by the company so far.

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