On track to achieve all our initial targets: Birla Opus CEO Raksit Hargave

Birla Opus, which opened its first experiential store in Gurugram on Wednesday and kicked-off commercial production at its fifth plant in Maharashtra a day before, said it was on the track to achieve its initial targets, which included expansion its footprint and having a high single-digit market share at the end of March quarter.

 

“We are on track to achieve all our initial targets. We are already present in 6,000 towns and with a network of over 135 depots, we are close to covering 50,000 dealers, which we had planned at the beginning,” Raksit Hargave, chief executive officer, Birla Opus paints, told Business Standard.

 

“Additionally, we had outlined that we will end this ongoing March quarter with a high single digit market share and we hold on to that. This will come along with revenue benchmarks that we had set internally,” he added.

 

Birla Opus is the paints division of the Aditya Birla Group subsidiary Grasim Industries.

 

Launched in February 2024, Grasim industries had outlined the new business to turn profitable once it clocks ~10,000 crore in gross revenue within three years of completing full-scale operations.

 

Hargave was speaking at the launch of the company’s first experiential store, spanning 2,000 square feet located in Gurugram. The company further aims to set up 10 other such studios in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Surat, Lucknow, and Kolkata among others.

 

“From the beginning we wanted to make the painting experience more pleasant, and one of the levers of that plan was to set up company owned stores. These will act like one stop shops for people to choose paints,” he added.

 

Opus has also partnered with franchise partners, which own and operate ‘Opus paint galleries’ in the smaller tier two and tier three cities. While 300 such galleries are currently operational, “many more are in the process of getting operationalised,” Hargave added.

 

Talking about a muted overall demand environment and a slowdown in the paints sector, he said, “Since we’re a new player, every quarter is a growth over the last quarter. But we expect to grow this quarter as well.”

 

The company commenced commercial production at its fifth plant in Mahad, Maharashtra on Tuesday, which has an installed capacity of 180 million litres per annum (MLPA) for water-based paint, 20 MLPA for distemper, and 30 MLPA for solvent-based paint. The sixth, and final plant in Kharagpur, West Bengal is expected to start trials next month. With the final plant, the total installed capacity will rise to 1,332 million litres.

 

“We are a young company and our goal will be to keep gaining market share every quarter next year,” Hargave added.