Consumer durables company Godrej Appliances will be focussing on launching premium products for this fiscal year as it has seen a 40 per cent growth in this segment.
“Since the opening of the lockdown, sales in July are already looking to be 20 percent higher, month on month in comparison to July 2020. However, the premium category across every appliance segment has seen a two-fold growth of 40 per cent,” said Kamal Nandi, Business Head and Executive Vice- President at Godrej Appliances.
He anticipates that at the rate at which the premium segment is growing, sales in this space will enable Godrej Appliances to recover from the loss of sales due to the pandemic pretty easily.
Godrej has already launched a litany of premium products in 2021. “Our focus this year has been on premium products, therefore in the first quarter of this year, we already launched frost-free refrigerators. We are also in the process of launching fully automatic frost-free machines, all with high-end features like germ shield and 99.9 per cent disinfection,” Nandi explained.
Key idea
The key idea here is that as working professionals increasingly work from home during lockdown conditions, the responsibility to do home chores falls heavily on their shoulders. Thus they are willing to pay for comfortable solutions. For that reason, Godrej Appliances also launched their new product, Godrej Eon Dishwasher. The company remains optimistic that it will be able to capture at least 15 per cent of the market share by selling 15,000 units in this fiscal.
According to their analysis, the dishwasher market size will grow exponentially and is anticipated to cross ₹667 core by FY26. Overall, Godrej Appliances is aiming to increase its market share in the premium segment by three per cent.
Rising commodity and freight prices still remain a burden for the company and are likely to reflect on this new product launched as well. Currently, Eon Dishwasher is priced at ₹37,900. However, these prices are going to increase when the next shipment of product comes in next month, said Rajinder Koul, Product Group Head, Dishwashers, Godrej Appliance.
Speaking about the product launch, Koul said, “The dishwasher category in India is at a nascent stage but the heightened need for personal hygiene and convenience as an outcome of Covid-19, has accelerated awareness and demand for this product segment.”