Not cool enough: Bleeding Lloyd gives Havells a hard time

livemint.com:

NEW DELHI : In the first week of March, a Vijay Sales store in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, buzzed with shoppers crowding the place. Holi, the festival of colours, is around the corner; it announces the onset of the long and gruelling Indian summer. Expectedly, around this time, the demand for room air conditioners (ACs) shoots up.

However, at this prominent outlet selling consumer electronics, one brand was missing—Lloyd. “We haven’t been stocking Lloyd for some time now. There were some issues related to annual maintenance packages.

Very rarely do customers ask for it, anyway," a mildly irritated sales executive told this writer before listing out specifications and finance options for ACs sold by Voltas, a home appliance company from the Tata group, and Hitachi, a multinational aggressively selling its wares in India. Lloyd is owned by Havells India, one of the country’s largest electrical equipment companies, which sells everything from switches and cables to fans and water heaters. It is the same situation in nearly half a dozen stand-alone electronic shops in Noida’s Sector 18 market—only one shop had a Lloyd AC on display and could provide information about the product, pricing, and warranty.

This sticks out like a sore thumb given that Havells claims that it is the No. 3 in the pecking order of AC manufacturers in India with an estimated market share of over 10%. Lloyd began in India as a joint venture under Fedders Lloyd, a multinational company, in 1956, but became a solo brand in 2007 when Fedders went bankrupt in the US.