India's Urban Consumption to Revive: Colgate CEO

New Delhi, Jun 23 (PTI) Leading oral care products maker Colgate-Palmolive (India) is optimistic about revival of urban consumption by the end of this fiscal and expects rural to remain buoyant and continue its growth, said its MD & CEO Prabha Narasimhan on Monday.

The company sees 'tremendous opportunity' in the urban market, the main customer base of Colgate-Palmolive (India) Ltd (CPIL), and is confident that the macro indicators will improve with the recent interventions and measures announced by the government.

Moreover, the company sees an opportunity for premiumisation, happening not only in the oral care category but also for other categories in the urban market.

"We are certainly optimistic about urban consumption coming back towards the back end of this financial year. I think there are a lot of interventions that have gone in, and so our expectation and our planning is always it coming back towards the back end," Narasimhan told PTI.

On rural growth, she said over the last few quarters it is growing faster than urban markets, and offers huge headroom for growth with a change in their habits.

"The size of the rural opportunity relative to its population is smaller, and that's where we have headroom opportunity to drive the right oral care habits," she said adding "we are seeing buoyancy in rural so the combination of these two, we are very optimistic about what we can achieve in rural India."


CPIL had last month reported a decline of 2 per cent in its topline to Rs 1,482 crore in the March quarter YoY, along with a 6 per cent decline in PAT.

"We had a difficult quarter because of two reasons. One, we saw a lot of competitiveness in trade, which we did need to respond to, and we did, and the second, we saw a degree of slowness in the bottom 70 per cent of the urban market, which is a large proportion of our business," she said.

However, she added from a medium-term perspective, the company is optimistic that the macro indicators of the bottom 70 per cent of urban India, with the actions that the government is taking, will certainly improve.

As per its strategy, CPIL will focus on the mass market as well as the premium segments, which are also scaling in India, driven by factors like rising income levels, urbanisation, and the increasing accessibility of premium brands through online platforms.

CPIL will not only cater for growth from the mass market but also from the opportunities coming from the premium segment. The company, which spends 14 per cent of its sales as advertising expenses and is probably the largest single brand advertising company in India, expects it will certainly do the two jobs together.

When asked whether the company will hold the prices as the inflation is cooling down, she said "we will take pricing as and when we believe there is an opportunity, there is a gap between the value that we are delivering and the price that we are asking for, as and when we see an opportunity there ..."

Over the recent geopolitical events, Narasimhan said they would not have any major bearings on its supply lines as "almost entirely everything that we sell in India is produced by Indian factories. So to that extent, we are a little bit insulated from this.