Page Industries, the exclusive licensee of American brand Jockey in India, is targeting $1 billion in revenue by 2026 backed by burgeoning demand for athleisure wear, women’s innerwear, junior’s innerwear and strong demand from Tier-2 and- 3 markets, a top executive told BusinessLine .

The company is augmenting production capacity across 15 manufacturing facilities with additional shifts, setting up three new manufacturing facilities in Mysuru, Hassan and Odisha, hiring 2,000 plus associates for its shop floor and 350 staff in manufacturing, sales and marketing roles this fiscal.

Despite sales being severely impacted due to Covid-19 in Q1 of FY21, the company witnessed a steady recovery with strong sales momentum from Q2 onwards, leading to best quarterly performance in the history of the company across key financial metrics in Q4. Although revenue was down 4 per cent YoY in FY21 at ₹2,833 crore, the company reduced operating costs by 16 per cent to ₹478.7 crore and reported EBITDA and PAT margins at 19 per cent and 12 per cent respectively.

Pent up demand

“We had a record Q4 last fiscal, that can be attributed to pent up demand in the market and a robust business continuity plan. We had a good amount of inventory and much better control of our supply chain to scale up capacities with our own internal manufacturing capabilities. We continued to expand during the pandemic adding 10,000 new points of sale taking our count to 78,000 points of sale pan India and added over 200 EBOs (exclusive brand outlets) taking our count to 950 plus,” VS Ganesh, CEO and Executive Director, Page Industries, told BusinessLine.

Besides innerwear, athleisurewear, activewear, sleepwear, socks and thermals, the company also offers face masks, towels and caps. On the growth strategy to achieve $1billion revenue, he said: “We have a strong business continuity plan that takes into account the third Covid wave and with the robust demand that we continue to see, we are well on track to achieve $1 billion by 2026. We were one of the few companies that found growth opportunities during the pandemic with our inherent strengths in supply chain and distribution. We also doubled our e-commerce business to 8 per cent last fiscal and in the last 6 months have seen 300 per cent growth in e-commerce on our website and third party marketplaces.”

Growth drivers

The company sees steady growth coming from Tier-2 and-3 cities and rural markets where people who predominantly buy products from the unorganised sector pre-Covid switched to branded products as there was a huge supply disruption in the unorganised market during the pandemic and branded players like Jockey were able to offer affordable premium products.

“Jockey is one of the fastest growing brands in the athleisure segment, which is one of the company’s key growth drivers, followed by women’s innerwear which has scope for accelerated growth and junior range of innerwear and outerwear which grew 35 per cent last year. We have plenty of headroom to grow, because in the men’s innerwear segment our marketshare is only in the teens and marketshare in women’s innerwear is in single digits and junior, we just started a couple of years ago,” said Ganesh.

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