For five decades now, Bourbon and Britannia have gone hand in hand. The Wadia family-controlled company lords over 70 per cent of the popular biscuit category. The rest of the market is with about half a dozen other brands.
A meeting of the board of directors of Britannia Industries Ltd is scheduled on January 23, 2003 to consider and take on record the unaudited financial results of the company for the quarter ended December 31, 2002.\n\n
Britannia Industries Ltd on Saturday reported a 6.77 per cent increase in its net profit to Rs 26.8 crore for the third quarter as against Rs 25.1 crore in the corresponding quarter last fiscal.
Britannia executives were, however, non-committal on whether the company had initiated discussions to return the Little Hearts trademark and the right to use the product recipe back to Groupe Danone.
'Due to rural stress, volumes continue to remain an issue for the industry, and we are yet to see any revival in demand.'
Britannia Industries Ltd managing director Sunil Alagh will not seek extension of his current tenure, which expires in February next year.\n\n\n\n
Operating margins have been the primary driver of corporate earnings in India in recent quarters, despite revenue growth suffering from weak consumer demand. Companies across sectors have reported a sharp improvement in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (Ebitda) margins over the past two years, benefiting from lower commodity and energy prices. Higher margins more than compensated for slower revenue growth, resulting in double-digit growth in net profit for five consecutive quarters.
The index is currently trading at 149 per cent of its historical P/B valuation, surpassing its previous peak of 125 per cent made in 2020-21.
The slowdown in private consumption in the economy is taking a toll on the growth of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). The net sales growth of listed FMCG companies hit a 14-quarter low of 2.5 per cent in October-December 2023 (Q3FY24). This is the lowest revenue growth for the industry since the June 2020 quarter, when the FMCG firms in the Business Standard sample had reported a 13.2 per cent Y-o-Y decline in combined net sales owing to the lockdown.
Britannia Industries Ltd has posted a net profit of Rs 251 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2002 as compared to net profit of Rs 227 million in the quarter ended December 31, 2001.
Renewed inflationary pressures, led by a spike in prices of vegetables and cereals, have cast a spell on the equity markets in the past month. The BSE Sensex and Nifty50 have declined up to 2 per cent each during the period, clipping the 13 per cent rally from the March lows, shows data from ACE Equity. Investors typically consider shares of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies as defensive bets, putting their weight behind them in a falling market.
The growing mismatch between Go First's losses and other group companies' profits was making it tough for the group to fund the losses of the airline venture.
Pepperfry co-founder and CEO Ambareesh Murty passed away in Leh due to cardiac arrest, company co-founder and COO Ashish Shah said on Tuesday. Murty, 51 years, was also an angel investor. He recently announced completing 12 years at Pepperfry on his LinkedIn post.
A young couple sharing a laugh - in the living room over a Polish joke book, on the beach, in the rain - with the tagline, "Made for each other", hung from billboards at prominent street corners from the 1960s to the 1990s. It was a campaign for one of the largest selling cigarette brands in India, Wills (Navy Cut) from the ITC stable, that resonated with a generation of smokers and non-smokers alike till the curtains came down on tobacco advertising in 2004. As we prepare to welcome 2024, ITC has metamorphosed from a tobacco giant into a conglomerate straddling multiple large-sized businesses. In the mind space of Gen Z or millennials, the company represents a gamut of branded products - from frozen food (ITC Master Chef), noodles (YiPPee!), and cookies (Sunfeast) to snacks (Bingo!) and notebooks (Classmate), and so on and so forth.
Japan's Sumitomo Realty & Development Company will buy a 22-acre land parcel in central Mumbai from Bombay Dyeing for Rs 5,200 crore, the Wadias-run company said on Wednesday. The sale of the land parcel in Worli is one of the biggest land sale transactions in the history of the financial capital.
Irregular rainfall and a pick-up in commodity costs are expected to weigh on the demand and margins of fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies. Most companies reported a sharp expansion in gross margins in the April-June quarter (first quarter, or Q1) of 2023-24 (FY24), given the lower prices of key raw materials and earlier price hikes. Furthermore, there were expectations that cost savings being passed on could reflect in volume growth going forward. However, these hopes could be dashed if demand recovery, especially in the rural segment, stalls, and gains on the raw material front start to recede.
'The risk is in not being invested and missing out on an upmove.'
Stocks of alcoholic beverage makers have corrected over the last few trading sessions on worries that taxes, competition and costs will hurt sales and profitability. The recent trigger for the decline is Karnataka, which accounts for 15 per cent of overall liquor consumption, increasing duties. The state increased by 20 per cent the additional excise duty on Indian-made foreign liquor (IMFL) on all slabs.
It may be a little early to cheer the recovery in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) space as a deceleration in discretionary demand, after the festival season, may offset fragile rural recovery, analysts have cautioned. "The overall demand environment for staples remains muted, while discretionary demand trends have seen some deceleration after the festival season. "We believe margins in staples have bottomed out, but we expect only a gradual uptick with the ongoing softening in raw material prices.
Gurvinder Nath was delivering pizza at around 2:10 am on July 9 in Mississauga's Britannia and Creditview roads, when unknown suspects confronted him and tried to steal his vehicle, CTV News channel reported.
The FMCG sector is generally considered to be a safe haven during difficult times as people never stop buying soap and toothpaste. However, weak rural and semi-urban demand has been a factor since the lockdowns of 2020-21 while rising inflation has also impacted margins. While the FMCG majors have survived on the basis of price hikes and good management practices, they have seen growth slowdowns and experienced margins being squeezed as raw materials and transport costs rose. The FMCG sector witnessed positive volume growth in the fourth quarter of the 2022-23 financial year (Q4FY23) after five consecutive quarters of decline, and the rebound in demand was led by urban markets.
Campa is set to take on its competition, which pushed it out of the aerated drinks business in the late 1990s, but this time with a new owner - Reliance Industries. Campa's entry comes at a time when aerated drinks as a category is already saturated. But experts say this could give rise to competition in the segment, eventually causing the space to grow.
The recent sell-off in IT stocks such as Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has resulted in a sharp decline in the IT sector weighting in the Nifty50 index. The sector's weighting in the index has slipped to a five-year low of 12.2 per cent, down from the 17.7 per cent at the end of March 2022. The top IT companies - TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Tech Mahindra - accounted for 13.6 per cent of the index at the end of March this year.
The domestic benchmark indices - the S&P BSE Sensex and the National Stock Exchange Nifty50 - had lost close to 1.5 per cent in three days recently before gaining slightly. Notwithstanding weakness and volatility, the Nifty50 has managed to hold on to the 18,000 mark, while the Sensex has managed to stay above the 61,000 level. The performance of the stocks that comprise these front-line indices remains polarised.
The new entrants comprise Asian Paints, Britannia, Titan, Nestl, Bajaj Finance and Bajaj Finserv.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, Research, Religare Broking, answers your stock market queries.
The third-quarter financials didn't excite market watchers. But equity investors can still make money if they invest in the right stocks.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, Research, Religare Broking, answers your queries.
Manufacturing companies have been outperformers on the bourses in the current year, leading to a rise in their weighting in the benchmark index. Companies in sectors such as FMCG, automobile, pharmaceuticals, metals, cement, and agrochemicals now account for 25.43 per cent of the Nifty 50 index, up 88 basis points from 24.55 per cent at the end of December last year and a record low of 23.1 per cent at the end of CY20. The manufacturing sector is now dominated by FMCG majors such as Hindustan Unilever, ITC, Asian Paints, Nestle, and Britannia, accounting for 45 per cent of the combined market cap of all manufacturing companies in the index.
ITC has been one of the best performing large-cap stock at the bourses thus far in calendar year 2022 (CY22), rallying nearly 52 per cent during this period and outperforming the sector benchmark - the S&P BSE FMCG index - by a wide margin that moved up around 17 per cent during this period. However, the counter has lost over 5 per cent from its recent high of Rs 346.25 hit on September 23, 2022 and has underperformed the S&P BSE Sensex, which has lost nearly 2 per cent since then. So, is the rally in the stock coming to an end, and is this a good time to book profit?
At 49, she also becomes the first outside woman to hold a key position in a Wadia company.
Ajit Mishra answers reader queries on the stock market.
Ajit Mishra, vice president, research, Religare Broking, answers your queries.
The new season of The Crown is a bit of a dreary watch, observes Deepa Gehlot.
Sharad Pawar reckons that the NCP has value as a united, going concern, not as a gaggle of leaders in search of followers, notes Shreekant Sambrani.
However, rural demand continued to remain a concern for FMCG companies during the quarter.
Global trends, the last batch of Q2 earnings and domestic macroeconomic data will dictate terms in the equity market, which had an extended weekend last week, analysts said. "FIIs' behaviour along with inflation numbers from US and China will remain key factors for this week. After an extended weekend, Indian markets are likely to start a fresh week with a positive note on the global backdrop. "However, there is a risk of selling pressure at higher levels as we are underperforming the global peers where the near-term texture has changed to 'sell on rise' from 'buy on dip'," Santosh Meena, head (research) at Swastika Investmart Ltd, said.
The US Fed interest rate decision, domestic macroeconomic data announcements and ongoing quarterly earnings are some of the major factors that will drive the stock markets in a holiday-shortened week, analysts said. Besides, monthly auto sales numbers and the LIC IPO will also remain in focus, they added. Equity markets will remain closed on Tuesday for Id-Ul-Fitr (Ramzan Id). "The market is likely to kick off this week on a sombre note after a sharp fall in the US market then the focus will shift to the outcome of the US FOMC meeting, which is crucial amid record inflation and growth worries.
Uber, Puma, Nissan, Britannia have already lined up for the upcoming parade of cricketing nations, looking to align with the game and its legion of fans