NEW DELHI – It may be an unlikely combination — yoga for inner peace and FMCG for external beauty — but Baba Ramdev appears to have struck the right pose in both. The guru whose ‘easy yoga’ has won him a mass following is also cornering the FMCG market with daily use products ranging from soaps and mustard oil to cornflakes.
Baba Ramdev’s brands seem to have scaled up quite rapidly. For fiscal 2014, Patanjali Ayurved, the company that manufactures the products, clocked a turnover of about Rs 1,200 crore, up from about Rs 850 crore a year earlier and Rs 450 crore in fiscal 2012, company filings and industry sources said. And in the current fiscal, Patanjali is expected to clock a turnover of Rs 2,000 crore, according to Aditya Pittie, CEO, Pittie Group. This marks a 67% jump from the previous fiscal.
Pittie is the Mumbai distributor for Patanjali’s general trade business and a pan-India distributor for its modern trade segment.
Currently, Patanjali is present in almost all categories of personal care and food products — soaps, shampoos, dental care, balms, skin creams, biscuits, ghee, juices, honey, atta, mustard oil, masala, sugar and much more. Going by current turnover projections of Rs 2,000 crore, Baba Ramdev’s FMCG business could rival Emami’s (Rs 1,700 crore), and be nearly half of Marico’s (about Rs 4,000 crore).
This is despite the fact that most of Patanjali’s products are priced lower than its competitors. What gives the company an edge is its very low expenses on advertisements. In comparison, leading FMCG companies spend about 20-30% of their sales on advertisements.
