Dabur India: scale up existing brands in FY19

By

Isabelle Crossley

Published
Jun 22, 2018

Marking the current 2019 financial year (FY) as a year of recovery from Goods and Service Tax (GST) struggles of FY18, Dabur India plans to prioritise scaling up its existing brands over adding new ones.

Sunil Duggal, the CEO of Dabur India, told ET Now in an interview that FY19 will be “a year of recovery”. Duggal said: “There may not be any huge uptick in performance but definitely it will be a significant improvement of what we did last year, which was hampered by so many issues like demonetisation and GST rollout etc.” 

Duggal assured that sales are picking up again and “demand seems to be coming back”, especially in the food and healthcare sections of the fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) business. However, according to Duggal, the home and personal care sections are taking longer to bounce back. “Overall the picture today is much rosier than it was a year ago, when we had significant headwinds,” explained Duggal.

The business will take FY19 to scale up its existing subsidiaries instead of focusing on acquiring or launching new ones. Duggal explained that, “plans for the current year is not to do a significant amount of new launches but rather to go for a lot of scaling up. When you look at our portfolio, there is a lot of small brands which perhaps have been under invested. They lie in the healthcare space. We are taking these brands and investing big sums of money and scaling them up. This comes at a lower cost, at a lower risk and much better than perhaps getting into completely new products.”