Cement companies push for premium products, analysts predict price war in the segment
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Cement makers such as Nuvoco Vistas Corp., Birla Corporation and JK Lakshmi Cement are increasing their focus on premium products to lift margins as an alternative to price hikes in a push that analysts said would work for now but not in the long term as competition creeps into the premium segment. After the goods and services tax, or GST, rate on cement was rationalized in September, cement companies have refrained from raising prices to pass on the benefit of lower taxes to consumers, analysts said.
Instead, some are relying on premiumization to protect profitability amid heightened competition. India's cement market has a concentrated structure with the top four companies accounting for a 60% share of the industry's annual production capacity and top nine holding 81%, per brokerage Systematix Institutional Equities. Nuvoco Vistas, Birla Corp.
and JK Lakshmi Cement, which together account for about 9% of the industry's 688-million tonnes capacity, are among the top-nine cohort. “We have very ambitious plans to increase premiumization, and this should improve realizations going forward," Nuvoco Vistas’s managing director Jayakumar Krishnaswamy told analysts during a post-earnings call in November. Nuvoco Vistas reported a record premium mix of 44% of volumes in Q2 FY26, up from around 41% in the first quarter, and plans to raise this further by 1.5-2 percentage points in the coming quarters, Krishnaswamy had said.
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