118-year-old paint company, Shalimar Paints has been buzzing off late. The company has been in losses for the last 12 quarters but Ashok Gupta, MD of the company, while speaking to CNBC-TV18 said that they saw a cash profit in the second quarter and that he expects profitability to improve further in Q3 and Q4.

“We were making losses for the past few years, including cash losses. But last quarter i.e. Q2 we were cash profit. So, I think there has already been a turnaround. We hope to improve our profitability more Q3 and Q4 onwards. So hopefully we are already at a stage where we should be turning the corner,” he said.

Gupta said that they are targeting revenue growth of 20-25 percent every year and are hoping to reach Rs 1,000 crore topline in the next 3 years.

“Year after year we are planning growth of around 20-25 percent in revenue which should take us to around Rs 1,000 crore in about 3 years. We would have done it faster, but because of COVID suddenly everything went haywire. But now we are back on track and we are hopeful that within 3 years we will reach that target,” he said.

He said that they are seeing an improvement in industrial demand. Urban demand is also back to last year’s levels, he said.

“Our decorative business constitutes about 70 percent of our total revenue and balance 30 percent is industrial. We are getting good traction in both parts. In decorative, we have our distribution in B2 and B3 cities where we are seeing the demand improving even over the pre-COVID levels. Metro cities and B1 cities we see that the demand is almost at the last year level. In industrial, the demand recovery was a bit slow till about Q2, but now we are observing after Diwali that even industrial the demand is picking up,” he said.

Gupta said that they need to take a close look at raw material prices as the prices are gradually inching up in the last 2-3 months. However, he said that they have taken some price hike in the industrial segment and will soon take a call on the decorative segment.

He also said that there were no plans to increase the promoter stake at least for the next 6 months.

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(Edited by : Abhishek Jha)