Inside Out on the road travelled to the headquarters of Eveready Industries at Kolkata to understand how is Eveready 2.0 shaping up. There has been no revenue growth in past decade but now the street is pinning their hopes on the Burmans as they have employed a fresh team of professionals to run the company. As of last reported shareholding, total promoter holding is at 43.2 percent out of which the earlier promoters account for 5 percent of this. In fund action Tata Small Cap fund has 2 percent in the company.

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Suvamoy Saha, Managing Director, Eveready believes the company is capable of doubling its revenues within four years with minimal investments.

"We are good to go to 2x from our current scale during the medium term," he said.

In the past year they did revenues of Rs 1,328 crore with margins of 8 percent.

The management has discontinued all the unremunerated and low range appliances from end of FY22 and has now narrowed its focus on 3 core businesses – batteries, flashlights and lighting.

In the battery segment, their market share is around 53.4 percent and are the leading player in the carbon zinc batteries space but have low presence in alkaline batteries whose average selling price is double the average selling price in the carbon zinc batteries.

The flashlight market size is around Rs 1,100 crore in which the Eveready has a strong presence in battery operated segment but in the rechargeable segment they are under indexed which is growing by 15 percent.

Finally in the lighting segment Eveready has increased its focus on the LED lighting business, but has a long way to go before competing with the market leaders like Havells, Crompton and Orient Electric. The management aspires to move up in terms of margins towards mid-single digit in comparison to break even now.

New management' focus is on growing revenue in teens with focus on premiumisation, shift in strategy to push versus pull strategy, which will demand higher advertising and promotion spends with some improvement in margins in coming years.

Debt has been an enemy when earlier promoters were at the helm but now seems under control at around Rs 365 crore and they are borrowing at approximately 9 percent.

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