Charminar brand continues to be leader in roofing products

HIL, which has eight manufacturing units, has an installed capacity of 1 million tonnes per annum. It has a 20 per cent share in the Rs 4,000-cr market of asbestos roofing products in the country

CK Birla group company HIL Limited has claimed it had produced and sold 100,000 tonnes of Charminar brand fibre cement roofing sheets within a span of one month in May, this year.

“This is the highest-ever achieved by any brand globally,” HIL managing director, Abhaya Shankar, told Business Standard, adding the brand had been a household name, synonymous with asbestos roofing solutions across India, for nearly six decades.

HIL, which has eight manufacturing units, has an installed capacity of 1 million tonnes per annum. It has a 20 per cent share in the Rs 4,000-crore market of asbestos roofing products in the country.

Formerly known as Hyderabad Industries Limited, HIL launched Charminar asbestos roofing products 66 years ago. Shankar said the brand had attained market leadership sometime in the late 1950s and retained that position thereafter.

He said the brand’s recall remained the highest even after the entry of a plethora of new players in the asbestos segment in the post liberalisation period after 1995.

“We have built the brand with a passion in rural India besides ensuring that we are perceived as the most reliable and a consistent quality product,” Shankar said explaining how HIL could maintain the market leadership of the company’s flagship brand for so many years.  

As a part of brand building efforts, he said, HIL had deployed campaign vans, relied on wall paintings and actively participated in village marts and Kumbh Melas and other such events in rural areas.

This apart, according to Shankar, the brand building involved three aspects- a strong relationship with distributors, a pan-India presence and consistent policies in respect of trade. Added to this was a good supply chain and a robust system to get feedback from customers.

He said HIL spent 2.5-3 per cent of its revenues on brand building. In 2013-14, the company posted a turnover of Rs 869.47 crore and a net profit of Rs 7.13 crore.

Shankar, however, said the demand for asbestos roofing products last year was less than expected “as people have delayed their purchasing options”. As people did not replace roofing products last year, he was expecting better sales in the current year.

The company, which embarked on a green manufacturing initiative in 2008, had set up five windmills with a generating capacity of 7.5 Mw for in-house consumption.