Somany Home Innovation Ltd, maker of Hindware Appliances, is expecting a 30-35 per cent growth in business this year backed by a surge in demand for home appliances such as dishwashers, cooking appliances and other home improvement products.

The company had registered a growth of around 20 per cent to ₹450 crore in 2019-20 over the previous fiscal.

According to Rakesh Kaul, CEO and whole-time director, Somany Home Innovation Ltd (SHIL), with people spending a significantly large amount of time at home in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a demand for various home improvement products over the last couple of months.

Apart from launching variants of existing products such as dishwashers to cater to the diverse needs of customers, the company is also looking to introduce certain products specific to the current requirements. Plans are afoot to launch a vegetable, fruit and meat purifier, which would remove impurities through ionisation process.

“Though consumer appliances fall under discretionary spending, with people spending a lot of time at home, there has been a spurt in demand for home improvement products including chimneys, cooktops, water purifiers, dishwashers etc. In fact, we witnessed close to 20 per cent growth in July and 30 per cent in August on a year-on-year basis. We expect the growth momentum to continue,” Kaul told BusinessLine .

SHIL will further continue to invest in air and water treatment solutions moving forward and would look to launch appropriate solutions at an “opportune time”.

Steady demand

The company further expects sales to pick up during the festival season this year despite the challenges induced by the pandemic.

According to Kaul, consumers who would otherwise spend on apparels, fashion jewellery etc during the festive period, would also prefer spending on home appliances as they would largely prefer staying indoors.

“We have a strong feeling that despite the challenges of the pandemic this is going to be an exciting festive period for us and we expect a surge in demand during September-December. The growth during festival period this year is likely to be around 45-50 per cent over same period last year,” he said.

E-commerce would drive a large amount of sales in the category moving forward. The contribution of e-commerce, which was around 18-20 per cent of its total sales last year, has witnessed a surge and increased to nearly 34 per cent since May-June this year, he said.

Ramping up domestic manufacturing

SHIL, which has close to 60-65 per cent of its products manufactured domestically, is looking to ramp this up to 90-95 per cent in the next two years.

Imports, particularly from countries like Turkey, Brazil and China, currently accounts for close to 40 per cent of its total production. “We are increasingly looking at localising our production in India and we expect that in the next two years, around 90-95 per cent of our products would be made in India,” he said.