Conference/Earnings Calls Alerts
Conference Call with Godrej Consumer Management and Analysts on Q1FY21 Performance and Outlook. Listen to the full earnings transcript.
Conference Call with Godrej Consumer Products Management and Analysts on Q4FY20 and Full Year Earnings Performance and Outlook. Listen in to the full earnings transcript.
Call Participants: Nisaba Godrej - Executive Chairperson, Vivek Gambhir - MD & CEO, V Srinivasan - CFO & Company Secretary, Sameer Shah - Head of Finance,
Key Highlights from Vivek Gambhir
It's a pleasure to speak to all of you. Good evening! Hope all of you are safe and healthy. I think whichever way you look at it, it has been a weak performance overall in Q4. The details are there in the presentation that has been shared. We want to spend more time on discussing how we are preparing to deal with the evolving situation and share our perspectives why we believe we are well positioned to emerge stronger.
As you all know, this quarter was an unprecedented period due to the spread of the Covid-19 epidemic across the globe impacting all the geographies of our operations. At GCPL, we worked first on safety ensuring that the employees and business partners are safe and taking all the necessary precautions to control the spread of Covid-19. Godrej group in solidarity with people and government efforts earmarked an initial outlay of INR 50 crores for community support and relief initiatives in India. We ensured adhering to the lockdown and in parallel worked with government authorities to revive supply chain operations for essential items.
During this quarter, we witnessed steady demand in mid March 2020. At that time, out teams were quite optimistic and hopeful of a decent quarter. However, the spread of the virus and the eventual lockdown in geographies of our operations resulted in virtually no sales in the later part of March 2020 significantly impacting our sales performance in the quarter. This resulted in a weak performance in our India and GAUM businesses which got impacted the most due to the lockdown. In India, the impact was substantial as we typically had very high sales in the two weeks of March since it is the onset of the summer season.
For HI as well, we also saw a significant adverse impact on sales in the later part of March 2020 which marks the onset of high mosquito infestation in north India. Our international business Indonesia continued with its growth momentum with mid single digit profitability and constant currency growth in spite of the Covid-19 crisis driven by consistent performance and several go through market initiatives. In GAUM Godrej Africa, USA and the Middle East, we witnessed a weak performance amidst disruptions caused by Covid-19 in all our countries of operation.
In this unprecedented quarter, for encouraging, we can share across most categories. In fact, we can share in almost 70% of our portfolio. What we are doing now with approaching the problem is restart, recover and retool our business. So as part of restarting, we are safeguarding lives and livelihoods. We are starting operations wherever possible with the necessary clearances and permissions. We are also supporting our partners a lot. We are among the first FMCG companies to provide the Covid insurance scheme to our entire extended team. Additional allowances, safety kits, documentations to our vendors so that they can operate as essential good manufacturers. We are giving advance payments to few vendors to supply critical materials etc. Supporting our partner in this situation is extremely important.
At the same time, we have been doing what we call cost management. We have been supporting the community that we mentioned to you. We know that this is ahead of the humanitarian crisis and we have people working from home, setting up connecting engagement and with a lot of care, compassion and communication with our teams. The second part of our approach has been recovery or the bounce back phase where markets are opening up. As lockdowns are easing, we are ramping up operations in both production and distribution. We are also looking at third parties to augment production. We are trying to make it easier for our GTE partners to order.
We are partnering with other companies such as Udan, Swiggy, Zomato, shop kirana, zoom car, etc. The idea is to keep on ramping our operations. What is important right now is improving availability and so we are working very hard to ensure that our products are getting more and more available. This is also a good opportunity to drive market share. In spite of a tough environment, our market shares have been increasing and we too believe there are opportunities to further drive market share. We are tracking IT innovation. You will see a lot more innovations launched by us over the next few weeks.
The channel dynamics are quite different right now. There are different channels that we are employing with each channel requiring a different playbook whether its a kirana store, modern trade, ecommerce, chemist. So a very progressive approach is being employed at the channel level. And then we are planning for different scenarios to prepare for life post lockdown. As part of the retool safe, we recognize that we need to prepare for the new normal. So, we are understanding and analyzing new consumer needs and behaviour, understanding channel ships, looking at a much more flexible and adapted supply chain, trying to forge a much more agile culture, and also embracing digitization in a very big way.
The idea is to be able to use this turbulence and volatility to create more opportunities and definitely emerge stronger. So there are three big areas of focus for us. One is around getting back growth because we recognized that growth has been a challenge for us. Second is to relentlessly execute and the third is to sustain a very high performance and winning culture. The situation will remain challenging. There is no way to accurately predict the coming year. So, we will have to plan for different scenarios, be adaptive and resilient. However, we believe that we are relatively well positioned and our several strengths will hold us during this time.