Rising competition, price hikes & declining volumes? Amit Syngle on what Asian Paints will do going ahead

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Amit Syngle, MD & CEO, Asian Paints, says the company faced pressure in the overall product mix and sales. All the metro towns and the bigger cities did not do well and even the B2B market, where Asian Paints accounted for 15-20%, did not go the way we anticipated. Industrials was the only segment where they did well.

Coming to price hike, Syngle says that given the inflation in the first quarter, they took a price increase in terms of passing it on to the market. They also saw a lot of volatility in terms of the crude prices. The entire paint industry has taken a price increase and the full realisation of the price increase will happen in Q3.
In Q2, your peers had managed to report a volume growth between 4% and 9%. But your numbers were clearly a bit of a miss. In fact, the volumes declined by half a percent. What led to this divergence because we usually do not see Asian Paints performing so badly versus its peers. What led to that?
Amit Syngle: As we look at the last quarter, we have just touched our base in terms of the volume terms and the value has also been negative. July was good for us but then all the rainfalls and floods that came in August, were not very well distributed across the country. So, we saw a muted demand coming in both August and September and given that the seasonal component in overall our sales is very high, we saw that in all the seasonal markets, and faced pressure in our overall product mix and the overall sale.

The other area which we felt strongly is that all the metro towns and