TALKING POINT: SUNIL KATARIA ON PROTEKT MR MAGIC LAUNCH

WE WANT TO MAKE PROTEKT MR MAGIC A RS 500 CRORE PRODUCT WITHIN FOUR YEARS: SUNIL KATARIA
Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL) has come up with a new product, a powder to liquid handwash priced at Rs 15 that Sunil Kataria, CEO – India & SAARC, Godrej Consumer Products Limited (GCPL) feels has the potential to disrupt the liquid handwash category. Kataria tells us more…

A FUTURE CATEGORY DISRUPTOR: Currently, the Indian handwash market which is growing at 15%, is pegged at Rs 740 crore. However, the penetration of handwash is very low and restricted to the higher SEC’s which is around 20% in urban India. Meanwhile, the market estimate for handwashing soaps stands at Rs 8000 crore. We want to play in the Rs 8,000 crore category and are confident that Protekt Mr Magic, a first-of-its-kind product in the world, will be able to disrupt this category. Today the average cost of liquid handwash is Rs 50 and we have priced our product at Rs 15 for a pouch and Rs 35 for a combi-pack.

EXPECTATIONS FROM THE PRODUCT: The liquid handwash category in India is still at an infancy stage, in terms of adoption. However, with this new product, we are hopeful that we will be able to make India adopt the handwashing habit in the future. As to where we want to see the product in the next few years, we have big aspirations. Our target is every home that uses soaps, which is 100% of India. While its difficult to put exact numbers, we want to see it become a Rs 500 crore product within the next four years.

MORE LAUNCHES IN THE PIPELINE: We have already had four new products on the table and you can expect this number to be doubled in the next six months. We are going to be doing a lot of NPDs across all our current segments. There’ll be adjacencies in the current segments and also new segments that we’ll get into.

(As told to Samarpita Banerjee)