Uniform focus helps Mafatlal Industries fashion a revival

The firm shut its loss-making, less-profitable businesses, and diversified into new categories

- Nehal Chaliawala

Mafatlal Industries Ltd, a 120-year-old textile company, shuttered its loss-making and less-profitable businesses while sharpening focus on its core strength of supplying uniforms, including through government tenders, to stitch a turnaround after years of indifferent financial performance.

Over the past five years, the company shut its loss-making denim division, exited contract manufacturing for overseas retail brands, reduced its workforce through voluntary retirement scheme and focused on debt repayment. It also switched to an asset-light business model, where the bulk of the textile it sold was procured through vendors, instead of in-house production. Outsourced production accounted for 95% of the firm's top line in the first quarter of FY26, as per an investor presentation.

The company also diversified into new business categories like making sanitary pads, offering digital infrastructure to schools and supplying consumer durable kits for the economically-marginalized section of the society to engineer its revival.