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Britannia Industries
With competition from regional players intensifying, Britannia Industries is taking a localised approach of looking "at India not just as one country but as many countries within" to stay ahead of rivals and scale up the strategy going forward, according to Vice Chairman & Managing Director Varun Berry. Britannia, maker of Good Day, Marie Gold, and Tiger biscuits, would not go for a price war; it would leverage its brand strength, execution, and network of 70 factories and a vast distribution spread across the country, making its product available down to the lowest population strata, he said. About margins, Berry said it has gone up through cost optimisation initiatives. Britannia has been doing cost optimisation of almost 2 per cent of revenue saving for almost last 13 years. "And as we go forward, we are looking at seeing if we can continue with that 2 per cent, and we certainly have a line of sight to do that," said Berry. Moreover, commodity inflation on input materials is ...
Britannia expects half of its domestic sales to come from rural markets in the next 3 to 4 years, as it is expanding its distribution network to increase its presence in those regions with aspirational buying preferences, said its Vice Chairman and Managing Director Varun Berry. The rural market is "very important" for Britannia, where the maker of Good Day, Marie Gold, and Tiger biscuits reported growth in double-digits in the latest April-June quarter, and is now amplifying reach through direct distribution to have a "continuous stream" of products being available in those far-flung markets, he added. Britannia, which was an urban-centric company, now gets around 40 per cent of its sales from rural markets, Berry said, adding that rural is now growing ahead of urban markets, and this trend is expected to continue. "Our split between urban and rural was something like 75 per cent and 25 per cent. Now, we have gotten to a 60-40 split. It is still in favour of urban, but slowly, ...