Voltas Aims At Regaining Top Slot In A-C Mart

Voltas Ltd, a Tata group company, has chalked out an aggressive plan to regain its number one position in the room air-conditioners market. As part of this, the company today launched Vertis range - part of the 'Voltas international range', - room air-conditioners in the market from Hyderabad.

"The company is also increasing its annual brand-building budget by three-fold from the current level of Rs 7 crore", S N Tripathi, executive director of the company said. "We lost the number one position in room air-conditioners in 1995-96. With in a short time we will regain it. We will make our competitors' life miserable", Tripathi said.

"Till now, we were concentrating on institutional sales. Now, our focus is going to be retailing. We are also taking up so many customer relationship initiatives (CRM) towards this end", Tripathi said.

"Vertis is a value-for-money product. It is the natural extension after the acceptance achieved by the premium Verdant and the popular Vectra models", he added.

The air-conditioners are manufactured at the company's Dadra unit - a 50:50 manufacturing joint venture unit between Voltas and the US-based Fedders International. An amount of Rs 40 crore had been spent on the modernisation of this unit, earlier owned by Voltas.

Tripathi said Voltas has an annual turnover of Rs 750 crore from these segments, making it the largest air-conditioning and refrigeration company in the country.

He said the cooling appliances (air-conditioners, refrigerators, etc) business is going to be the major growth engine for Voltas and this division aims at a turnover of Rs 1,400 crore by 2003, from the current level of Rs 750 crore.