Godrej Consumer Products set to loosen purse strings to ensure volume growth

Sitapati said that half of the capex earmarked is for volume growth while the rest is for efficiency. "We are bullish on our volume growth, we are seeing that our investments are paying back on volume growth and we anticipate that our volume growth will be higher than our historic numbers. So we've got to put the capex for it," he said.

GCPL's India business reported volume growth of 12 percent for the June quarter, which was in-line with expectations of 11-12 percent. However, Sitapati does not believe that these figures would sustain. "That is probably not the volume growth trajectory of the India business yet. We used to be in kind of low mid-single digits," he said. "I think we've gone past that, because of certain external circumstances. Our Indonesia and Africa business, I think will persist and continue the way they've grown in quarter one," he added.

Godrej Consumer Products made headlines earlier this year when it decided to acquire Raymond's FMCG business for a cash consideration of Rs 2,825 crore. While GCPL's MD & CEO does not see much synergies from this deal during the first half of the year, he is hopeful that the synergies will reflect from the second half, on both revenue and cost line.

"We first got to get the business in the right shape, we've got to reduce our inventory, we've got to reduce accounts receivable, all of these were very different from GCPL norms," Sitapati said, adding that they will continue to do the same in the September quarter as well. "We hope that in H2, we will start seeing significant synergies both on the revenue line and on the cost line," he added.

- Household insecticides performance led by seasonality

- Indonesia macros have improved, Africa continues to have some turmoil

- Comfortable around 19-20 percent EBITDA margin