Consumer electrical goods maker Havells India Ltd on Wednesday reported a 7.34 percent decline in its consolidated net profit to Rs 302.39 crore for the quarter ended on September 30, 2021, compared to Rs 326.36 crore in the year-ago quarter.

Its revenue from operations rose by 31.65 percent to Rs 3,238.04 crore during the period under review as against Rs 2,459.49 crore in the corresponding period of the last fiscal.

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Commenting on the result, Havells India Chairman and Managing Director Anil Rai Gupta said, "We are enthused with healthy revenue growth across business verticals. An increase in commodity cost remains unabated creating margin headwinds. However, our outlook on demand remains fairly positive."

On pickup in demand, Gupta said, “Post COVID 1.0 and initial lockdowns, we actually saw that the consumer demand was strong, but the B2B demand was very weak. In the last six months or so, with real estate coming back strongly with the government spending continuing, as well as the stress in many of the commoditised industries is going away. We see that the demand is picking up in the industrial and infrastructure segment as well. So that is a very healthy sign it is not just predicated on the consumer sentiment, it will augur well for the coming years.”

He added, “Also the start of the festive season has been strong, and the consumer sentiment continues to remain strong. We hope to have a good season this year as well, both for lighting and consumer durables. As far as supply issues are concerned, we don't have many supply issues. 95 percent of what we sell, is manufactured in-house so we really don't see that as a major issue.”

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On earnings, Gupta said, “Business does have been stable, because of the product mix, things changed a little bit. So I don't see that overall, we are really impacted on the margin because of the smart price movements or cost management so that is one. The other is going forward, we expect that the margins should continue to be strong as well as come to normalize levels as pre-COVID times, maybe this quarter or next quarter.”

On Lloyd’s, he said, “As far as Lloyd is concerned, this was an unprecedented two years for Lloyd because the major selling season was impacted because of two lockdowns last year summer and this year summer. But I think, overall the sales growth, as well as market share improvement, is underway. We are quite actually satisfied with the growth of Lloyd and coming forward once the normalized demand comes in, in fact, next year, we are expecting a pent up demand in the case of air conditioners. So we should be coming back to profitability as we had been before.”

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On price increases he said, “We have different businesses, cables and wires operate very differently than lighting and switchgear, because of the volatility and unprecedented price increase there is a lag behind that. There are two ways one is further price increases which is possible as or some stabilization in raw material prices which should help not to increase prices further.

For full management commentary, watch the video.

Text inputs from PTI