Bharat Puri, MD of Pidilite said he was cautiously optimistic for the remainder of this year. In an interview to CNBC-TV18, he said, “As long as we don’t have a second wave and the situation on the pandemic doesn’t deteriorate, I think demand will continuously, steadily improve.”

Puri further added that the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) margins will be maintained between 20-25 percent.

“Going forward, our focus is going to be on volume growth and investing back to get volume growth. We would be far more comfortable in our stated range of 20-25 percent range, in fact we are already seeing some amount of hardening of input prices. So, I think over a period of time our objective would be better volume growth and margins at 20-25 percent depending on input prices,” he said.

On the Araldite merger, he said that there were a lot of revenue and cost synergies. He further added that the Araldite revenues could double hereon.

On the B2B (business-to-business) business, Puri said that there was a gradual improvement. September was the best month for B2B, and October is holding up, he added.

(Edited by : Santosh Nair)