Marico Ltd. Earnings Call Nuggets: Market Share Loss and Input Cost

Marico Ltd. (MARICO.BO) recently reported its third quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Market Share Loss

Abneesh Roy – Edelweiss: If you see how the companies have seen sharp slowdown in the modern trade and if I see Saffola numbers for the past two quarters, from 12% it stripped to 6% and now to 4%. So in terms of the same-store growth in modern trade and overall net closures, if you can share some insights? Secondly, if you see the other competitor to Saffola had seen marked acceleration in volume growth in this quarter. So any market share loss not as per the initial numbers, as per your analysis, is there any market share loss?

Saugata Gupta – CEO – Consumer Products Business: See, I think as far as modern trade is concerned, obviously it’s not – we don’t keep a complete track of same-store growth category-wise. But in the modern trade sector, our growth this quarter in value terms was around 24%. As regards Saffola is concerned, I think which we have raised – which we have discussed earlier, what has happened was that the specific Saffola premium to Sunflower and therefore the pricing was unsustainable. We have taken a price drop in December which as you know, there are always a pipeline in the market and therefore it is actually getting a full impact of that price drop in the buying cycle of Jan and February. So I think with that price correction, which has been taken, we’re pretty confident that we will get back Saffola growth on track. I think it will take a little bit of time, but certainly by quarter one of next year we will get back into double-digit growth.

Abneesh Roy – Edelweiss: Sir, but one follow-up on this. Normally, we have a good modeling for this volume growth. So two quarters of slowdown and then this price cut, should I see this as that margin contraction in Saffola are so much that price cut was delayed because of that and if you could refer to that growth of the competitor.