TITAN'S MARCH

TITAN COMPANY, THE GEM IN THE TATA SONS VAULT, HAS SET ITS SIGHTS ON ACHIEVING 1 LAKH CRORE IN REVENUES, DESPITE FACING CHALLENGES ON MULTIPLE FRONTS. IT IS BETTING ON AFFLUENT CUSTOMERS AND INNOVATIONS LIKE LIGHTWEIGHT JEWELLERY. WILL THIS PAY OFF?

- ARNAB DUTTA

BRANDED JEWELLERY WAS a novelty in 1994, when Titan launched the Tanishq jewellery range, nearly a decade after captivating India's market with quartz analogue wristwatches and unwinding the monopoly of 'Timekeeper to the Nation' HMT. Today, 30 years later, Titan's branded jewellery division fetches nearly 90% of its revenue.

Titan's gold and jewellery division is growing at a pace that most of its peers in the consumer discretionary market would love to replicate. Although the Covid-19 pandemic's lockdowns and supply disruptions in 2020 hit demand for consumer discretionary items, Titan reported high double-digit growth in its topline. Between FY21 and FY24, Titan's revenue grew at a compound annual growth rate of 33.14%, from ₹21,644 crore to ₹51,084 crore. In the same period, its profit after tax grew at a CAGR of 53.11%, from ₹974 crore to ₹3,496 crore.

At the heart of this growth story was gold, or its jewellery division, to be precise. Net jewellery sales-revenue collected at the counters minus GST, other taxes and dealer commissions-grew at a 26% CAGR between FY20 and FY24, from ₹16,738 crore to ₹42,172 crore. (Titan has not given up on watches, which have been looking up since the Covid-19 lockdown. More on it later.)

Titan's growth story has made it the crown jewel in the diversified Tata Group, but it is not sitting pretty. The key business divisions have been given ambitious targets. One is to double the overall retail value of its products or uniform consumer price (UCP) to ₹1 lakh crore by FY27.

Titan reckons it can do this by doubling the UCP of its jewellery division (which was ₹45,000 crore in FY24), increasing the UCP of its watches & wearables division by ₹4,000 crore (₹6,000 crore last year), that of Taneira branded sarees to ₹1,000 crore (₹250 crore) and Titan Eye+ (eyecare) to ₹2,000 crore (₹1,000 crore in 2024).