Localised lockdown won't impact business as much as full lockdown, said Sunil Kataria, CEO–India and South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) at Godrej Consumer Products, on Friday. Kataria said essentials and hygiene to see an uptick again.

Godrej Consumer Products posted a strong Q4 update. The company said it has clocked in broad-based sales across all key categories and sees India sales growth around 30 percent this quarter.

Speaking in an interview with CNBC-TV18, Kataria said, “This time, the COVID upsurge will see more of localised lockdowns rather than very far-ranging, wide impacting lockdowns. Therefore, a localised geography-based limited impact will happen on demand, which could impact certain discretionary categories.”

“People have started taking hygiene categories more casually and some stabilising of demand is happening there. I expect essentials and hygiene categories to again see an uptick,” he said.

Talking about demand, Kataria said, “The whole consumption demand has looked up well across most of the segments and I am pleasantly surprised with the kind of recovery in the demand that has happened even after the festive season.”

He said, “Growth has been broad-based across all segments and that gives a lot of confidence and it talks about the quality of our growth across all the 3 segments – soap, hair colour and household insecticides.”

Kataria, however, said that the company has taken calibrated price hikes across the portfolio. “We are going to watch it very closely. We may take more price increases going forward if inflation continues, but one principle we will follow that we will not do these increases at the cost of volume growth. Therefore, what may happen as a result of this is that we may see some short-term pressure on gross margins.”

For the full management commentary, watch the video.

(Edited by : Priyanka Rathi)

First Published:Apr 9, 2021 12:26 PM IST