Panasonic India crosses Rs 10,000 crore sales mark in FY18

Panasonic India crossed the Rs 10,000 crore sales mark in the fiscal ending March 2018. The Japanese firm posted Rs 10,200 crore sales as compared to Rs 9,600 crore it had posted in 2016-17, said Panasonic India president Manish Sharma.Sharma, however, said the revenue comparison will be not like-to-like due to the transition to goods and services tax (GST) regime last fiscal whereby on an absolute term Panasonic India’s sales would have grown by 16% last fiscal. India is one of the fastest growing territory for Panasonic and is projected to grow at 15%-plus for the next three years, while the consumer electronics business alone will double sales to Rs 10,000 crore by 2020-21, he said.“This is the tenth year of our re-entry into India and we have grown by almost ten times since then. We now have a retail reach to 10,000 stores and have set-up manufacturing capabilities for all consumer electronic products with capacity to support our growth for next two years,” said Sharma. Panasonic is the third largest consumer electronics maker in India after LG and Samsung followed by Sony India.Panasonic India last month started manufacturing frost-free refrigerators whereby now almost 95% of its products are locally manufactured. The company, which intends to expand its presence in B2B products like its parent, will slowly start their manufacturing in the country as they gain scale.“We are going to sell B2B products in areas like smart factory, logistic and retail solution, energy storage, security and surveillance. We would start manufacturing security camera and next expand to video phones,” said Sharma. He said Panasonic is working with Tata Elxsi and through its own innovation centre to develop smart, connected and energy saving appliances. In smartphones, Panasonic will remain a low key player in India for another one year expecting the dust of high competition and price war to settle down by then. It has around 2% share generating Rs 1200 crore sales. While the current smartphone line up is priced in the Rs 6,900 to Rs 15,000 segment, Sharma said the company will be launching models priced up to Rs 20,000.“However, we are exporting smartphones to South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka and will further expand into the African countries. We are also looking at doing work for the parent company in the field of IT such as business application and data centre,” said Sharma.

from The Economic Times https://ift.tt/2kEm7gl