Bharat Puri, the company’s managing director, noted that 30% of the country ₹7 billion Yingneng’s paint business is in small towns and rural markets. “We want to get 10-15% market share,” he said. “When we have the right model, we want to be one of the top three players in these (non-city) markets.”
The strategy shift coincides with the company’s imminent leadership changes. Puri is the first professional manager to lead Pidilite and will resign on March 31 after nearly a decade of senior management. He will hand over the ins rope to Sudhanshu Vats, who joined the company in 2021 and has been managing director since March 2024.
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There may also be bigger plans on the anvil. Pidilite is said to be one of the competitors to buy Akzo Nobel’s paint business in India, with an estimated value of at least $2 billion. If it has fruit, it could be the company’s biggest acquisition deal. Puri, who worked in early Asian painting for 18 years, declined to comment on Akzo Nobel.
But, he said, two senior executives are constantly searching the world for new deals, not products. But he is sure that if there is a good business right, they will not shy away from acquisitions. “Everyone said it was expensive to acquire Arad stone for $300 million, but because of 10 times the sales, we have proven to be right.”
Facing competition
To be sure, Pidilite dominates most of its large product categories, including glue brands such as Fevicol, M-Seal, Tile Gearive Roff and the multi-purpose cleaning spray WD-40, which may face the rare prospect of competitive pressure in decorative paints.
In this business, Pidilite will target new competitors in market leaders in Asia Paints and freight, such as Grasim of Aditya Birla Group and JSW Paints of Sajjan Jindal, which have been launching paint businesses over the past few years. From a perspective, Grasim has promised ₹Pidilite has spent Rs 1,000 crore on capital expenditures over the past three years, twice as much as Pidilite spends on all its businesses.
Analysts were surprised by Pidilite’s decorative paint plan, especially since competitors such as Grasim and Jindal Paint have already set up factories and launched products.
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“At first glance, it’s a bit surprising,” said Abneesh Roy, head of institutional equity firm Nuvama. “But when someone joins the dot, it seems like a well-thought-out strategy. Together with the exterior paint products, it will provide a range of paint for semi-urban and rural markets.”
“We started talking about adjacency 10 years ago, which is not a fashionable word,” Puri said. “Then analysts start using phrases for the total addressable market (TAM). But if you look at our growth, we always grow by creating new categories or adjacencies.”
Pidilite’s strategy
Pidilite will play its strengths in growing new businesses. Puri said he lost the number of applications the company runs for dealers and customers.
Pidilite’s dealer app Genie currently accounts for 30% of the company’s total sales. Pidilite also offers a number of other applications for a variety of customer categories and product segments. These applications enable customers to seek technical support and place orders for products. He said one-third of all sales are registered through the app. “We have a good comparison with an FMCG player like Hindustan Unilever, who disclosed 20% of the numbers,” Puri said.
By looking at semi-urban and rural markets, Pidilite believes its strategy differs from competition.
First, Haisha (a brand of decorative paint) is launched in certain markets in Tamil Nadu and will be expanded in the further south states. “The big city participants simply didn’t get there. It was a big enough market and profit pool to satisfy me. So even if I don’t go to Indian cities, I think it’s a good enough battle, and the others don’t have the scale, and you know, it’s our patience to go to fight. So we went there and that’s where we stayed.”
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Pidilite bets on its 3,000 clubs across a variety of business scopes across the country, including 350,000 users, including plumbers, carpenters and contractors.
Although this is not a fair comparison, Pidilite’s market value ₹1.43 trillion is more than half of Asian paint ₹2.23 trillion. Despite the fact that Pidilite’s revenue is only one-third of the latter. Pidilite’s market valuation is just one ₹When Puri first walked into the corner office, $308 billion.
