Bathrooms going beyond function

Bathrooms going beyond function A plethora of brands have entered the Indian bath ware market today. Factors such as urbanization, increasing disposable incomes, busy lifestyle with higher standards of living and increasing expenditure on digitizing lives provides a further impetus to the growth of this segment.Pau Abello, Managing Director, Roca Bathrooms Products Pvt. Ltd, spoke to Deepshikha Singh about the latest developments in bath and sanitary ware market. What are some of the latest trends in bath spaces? Bathrooms are the new living spaces. As this trend catches on, the new bathroom fittings too are coming with smart functionalities and designs. Cleanliness and modernization being key agendas to the development of these products, a wide-range of automated functionalities for cleansing, drying, perfuming along with power and water saving technology are available. For instance, W+W is a wash basin cum WC and reflects Roca’s “water-reuse technology”. It reuses waste water from the washbasin to fill the toilet cistern. Here, integration took on the expression of innovation and design. Similarly, the eco-friendly urinals like water-less urinals and smart toilets are a great fit in the modern-day trendy bathroom space. The impact of technology on bath designs Life is getting smarter and technology is penetrating and integrating into our living spaces every day, with convenience at the fore front. The idea of a smart home is officially on the rise with high-tech modular kitchens, digital garages, and automated home entertainment systems making way into Indian homes. The next focus area for our new age consumer is bathrooms, all set to witness the technology outburst. A bathroom is actually a perfect place for gadgets specifically to conserve water, maintain sanitation and enhance the bath experience. From automatic seat control to temperature control; from massage functions to electronic faucets, bathrooms are truly becoming an extension of our individualities. Toilets conserving water, sensor controlled functions and a lot more options exist for these compact spaces of our homes today. Roca India operations and presence I have been associated with Roca Group for the last 18 years. Since September 2013, I am accountable for Roca India’s growth and have been engineering diverse strategic changes across businesses. We have commenced centralizing of warehouses, instituting fresh commercial policies, reinforcing quality standards in existing departments, setting up new technical offices, acquiring two new plastic factories and making requisite investments for the expansion of installed capacities in vitreous china and faucets. In India, we operate through a strong network with around more than 10,000+dealers, sub-dealers and retailers for all our brands. So some point of sale of any of our brands can be found in hundreds of cities.Talking about our showrooms, after the one opened in March 2016 in Gurugram for Parryware we are planning to open one for Roca next year.     The Indian sanitary ware market scenario India is a diverse country. No other country has people with so many varied choices and income groups. This creates the biggest challenge of serving customers of each and every segment. Although, the Sanitary ware industry has seen enormous growth in past few years, there’s still a lot of scope for improvement in it. We do see the presence of many international brands in the Indian market from affordable to luxury segment, but there is a lack of uniformity in taxes and difficulties in moving goods (supply chain criticality). Roca Group’s current market share in India, especially with Roca & Parryware is around 30-35 per cent of the organized market. Kohler, Duravit, American Standard and Totoare the other players in the sanitary ware domain and the key faucet players in the organized market are Grohe, Hans Grohe and Kohler. For Parryware, the main competitors are Hindware, Cera and Jaquar. Company’s portfolio for Indian consumer Our main differentiation as a Company is our vast brand portfolio: In India, Roca Group offers a vast collection of products under its six brands, each of them catering to different segments in the market. And in every brand we offer the full collection of bathroom products: vitreous china, faucets, bathtubs, accessories, furniture, mirrors, etc. Armani-Roca, Laufen, Roca, Johnson Suisse, Parryware and Johnson Pedder, each is different from the other, each with a complete bathroom offering of its own. The products under Armani-Roca brand are exclusively available with select distributors in India.The brand Laufenis exclusively sold through FCML in India. In 2016, the point of sale has increased to 12. We are widely increasing dealerships for Roca in India. The company has increased the number of dealers from 150 in 2015 to 225 in 2016 and plan to achieve 250 by 2017. In 2015, the brand Johnson Suisse was launched in India via FCML and has been well received so far.The Parryware brand has a huge demand in the market. We are currently focusing in areas where our presence is not significant especially in tier-II and tier-III cities. Right now Parryware has around 1000 dealers in the country.We are planning to increase the number of dealers for Johnson Pedder brand in Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Maharashtra etc. What are company’s future growth plans? The company has made a lot of efforts in last three years to increase the production capacity of vitreous china products, faucets and plastic cisterns/seat & covers which at present is 6.0 million pieces installed capacity in vitreous china, 3.8 million in faucets and more than three million in plastic products. As part of future plans, the group intends to continue investing around Rs 40-50 crores every year in India to enhance the quality processes. Our QA laboratories provide with technologically advanced machinery for all our seven factories and develop and launch many new products with an aim to increase the sales by 15 per cent annually. We are also evaluating the possibility to construct some more factories in our premises to start the production of other bathroom products.