'Will strengthen our distribution in smaller towns to fuel growth'

Tata Consumer Products expects to see India growth portfolio grow at 30 per cent and expects margins to improve, says MD and CEO SUNIL D'SOUZA. In a video interview with Sharleen D'Souza, he talks about the firm now turning optimistic on rural demand. Edited excerpts:

- Sharleen D'Souza

When do you expect to see an improvement in performance in the core portfolio of India business?

Now, for both of these (salt and tea) categories, the medium to long-term aspirations are about 5 per cent volume and a couple of bps on that value. For salt, we are already at four. The big thing is, that the last price increase that we took was about 15-18 months back and now we've kept pricing stable.

Over a period of time, volume has come back. It is broadly in the ballpark. Tea is a bit of a slow starter. We had roughly 3 per cent volume growth coming in Q4 (January-March). From a volume perspective, Q4 was slightly tough. But, there is nothing fundamental that I see, whether it is in our brands, business, distribution, and supply. If anything, we've gone deeper into distribution, strengthened in large towns. Therefore, I would say a couple of quarters, and we should be broadly back. In margin terms, they are in the range where we would expect gross margins to be. So, profitability is not an issue. It's volume growth that we will push for.

What is your strategy to push for volumes in the core portfolio?