Titan has issued a growth warning for its watches and eye-care segments. Bloomberg TV India spoke to S Subramaniam, CFO at Titan, on the outlook for these segments.

You have issued a warning on your earnings outlook for the watches and eye care businesses. Can you elaborate?

We mentioned this in our quarterly update. The watches and eye care businesses have been a little slow over the last one quarter. Having said that, jewellery did quite well and jewellery contributes more than 80 per cent of our revenues. So good growth there means decent overall growth for the company. So I am not too worried. There will be ups and downs in watches and eye-care, I am sure they will turn around.

Why are we seeing some lack of demand? Why are you concerned when we talk about these two verticals?

It could be that people are delaying spends. We can’t really attribute it to anything specific here. Just that the general walk-ins have been little low. Typically this time of the year it starts picking up so we hope things will get better.

What has been the impact of both the Chennai floods and the new regulations on transactions with PAN details?

Chennai was bad. It is possibly something that has contributed to the slow growth in both watches and eye wear. This is a very important market for us for both these categories. It is not just Chennai, Tamil Nadu has suffered as a whole. Bangalore had a big problem during Diwali as well as there was lot of rain there. . It did impact our jewellery business as well. In jewellery, we are not entirely dependent on the South. Coming to the PAN part, it is much better than what we expected. A cap at ₹1 lakh would have been something that would have affected us badly. At ₹2-5 lakh we have stated that the impact should be less than 10 per cent overall in terms of cash sales in that segment. Our average ticket size is ₹65,000 and we are pretty low on that and we may not be impacted as much as the other jewellers are.

How is the e-commerce segment working for you?

Our own e-commerce site has been growing significantly but is still in very small numbers. We actually sell far more outside our own Web site, which is through other e-commerce Web sites. It is a very important category for us. As for our own investments in e-commerce, we have invested towards an omni-channel play. You will start seeing the benefits of this sometime in the middle of next year.

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