Tata group firm Voltas expects its home appliances business to capture at least 20 percent market share in the next five-seven years.
Voltas is into ACs and air-coolers and has an equal standalone joint venture formed in May 2017 with Turkish company Ardutch, under the name of Voltbek Home and launched a home appliances brand Voltas Beko in September 2018.
“We have just begun our journey. In the next five to seven years, we would like to get a market share of about 20 percent and become one of the top three players,” Voltas managing director and chief executive Pradeep Bakshi said.
Voltas Beko is present only in the niche segment now- frost-free and fully-automatic washing machines, he said.
The joint venture also has a semiautomatic offering and is planning to enter the direct cool refrigerator segment, which is the largest chunk in the appliances domain, for which it is setting up a factory at Sanand in Gujarat, he added.
“This Sanand factory will be up and running by this year end. That will be a formidable size of the business,” he said, the plant has an annual capacity of 1 million units.
The overall investment for the home appliances factory at Sanand is over Rs 1,000 crore, Bakshi said, adding they have big plans for the business but declined to divulge the revenue estimate.
Voltas, which is the largest player in the AC segment, is also investing over Rs 500 crore to set up a manufacturing facility at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh.
The facility will initially manufacture and assemble ACs and other cooling products with a total capacity of over one million units to start with.
For the AC segment, Bakshi said the company aims to augment its market share to 25 percent this year on an expected a growth of 25 per cent.
“I am looking forward to 15 per cent growth this coming summer season. Last year our growth was in single-digit. We have been hovering around 7-8 per cent,” he said.
Voltas closed 2018 with a market share of 24.1 per cent in the 5-5.5 million units market, from 22 percent in 2017.
“We have widened the gap between the No 1 and No 2. We are almost double than the No 2 player. We will continue to expand our market share. We look forward to crossing at least 25 percent this year,” he said.