Pidilite Industries Limited Q4 FY22 Earnings Conference Call Insights

Key highlights from Pidilite Industries Limited (PIDILITIND) Q4 FY22 Earnings Concall

Q&A Highlights:

• Abneesh Roy from Edelweiss asked about the competitive intensity in adhesives from regional players. Bharat Puri MD said that intensity over the last 1-2 years have been lesser than normal, largely due to large number of regional players suffering due to supply chain impacts and the input cost inflation.

• Abneesh Roy from Edelweiss asked about demand situation going forward. Bharat Puri MD answered that there were local stoppages due to Omicron in January, supply stoppages, and shop closures. But looking at long term, largely demand has still been good. There is just some amount of slowdown.

• Tejas Shah of Spark Capital asked if there are any divergent trends on growth and margins pressure from the lens of core, pioneer and growth categories. Bharat Puri MD answered that the largest margin pressure is on the core category, with little less pressure on the growth and pioneer categories.

• Tejas Shah of Spark Capital enquired about the capex guidance for FY23 and FY24. Bharat Puri MD answered that the company’s capex still remains at the traditional 3-5% of sales. But since the sales have gone up, there is a massive amount of investment made in the supply chain, digital, etc. In the next 12-18 months, PIDILITIND added that one new product can be seen every quarter from each division.

• Anirudh Doshi with ICICI Securities asked how the company’s market share moved in waterproofing in last 1 year and 3 years. Bharat Puri MD replied that waterproofing has been one of the company’s strong drivers of growth over the last 24-36 months.

• Krishnan Sambamoorthy from Motilal Oswal asked that from a technology perspective what have been the efforts in reducing the pipeline inventory in the last few years. Bharat Puri MD replied that in the last few years, PIDILITIND has virtually taken the salesmen out of the equation as far as inventory is concerned.

• Krishnan Sambamoorthy from Motilal Oswal asked about working capital, if it’s proving to be longer than expected in some of the categories. Bharat Puri MD answered that with the company’s retail footprint and the ability to influence in retail, there is no substantial difference in working capital across the categories. The difference seen is between B2C and B2B. B2B tends to have longer working capital, which has always been the case.

• Krishnan Sambamoorthy of Motilal Oswal also asked about anything unusual on the working capital in the international business. Bharat Puri MD answered that the small area of concern is the closure in Sri Lanka. Overall there are no issues in working capital in international markets.

• Jaykumar Doshi of Kotak Securities asked about the Huntsman portfolio, if the entire distribution benefit is captured or there are any low hanging fruit on distribution and topline. Bharat Puri MD said there is definitely a low hanging fruit and a distribution runway. PIDILITIND is only two-thirds of the way there; one-third is still to be captured.

• Ritesh Shah from Investec asked about the company’s thoughts on the subdued demand. Bharat Puri MD answered that where the company is seeing demand subdued is in small towns, rural and wherever there are economic challenges. The rest, PIDILITIND believes will even out over a period of time.