ACC Limited, a part of Holcim Group, expects to register 20 per cent additional sales on the back of its new cement product launched under the brand ‘Concrete +’.
“The Concrete + brand is altogether a new category, which has no competition as of now,” said Rajiv Kumar, director (sales), South & West, after launching the product here on Saturday. The company currently sells around 60,000 tonne cement a month in the Andhra Pradesh market.
The product is priced at Rs 300 per 50 kg bag as compared with Rs 285 of normal branded cement. It also comes with free services for the customers such as assisting in cost estimation, testing of ingredients, site visits and slab supervision, according to him.
The company is targeting individual house builders as 90 per cent of sales come from this segment.
The product has already been launched in Nagpur and Banglore and will soon be launched in Pune. According to PN Iyer, director, sales-south of ACC Limited, the response to the new product in Bangalore has been quite good with initial sales touching around 3,500 tonnes per month.
In terms of the overall cement sales, the southern region was seeing a 10-15 per cent dip in consumption this year compared with last year on slow growth in the infrastructure sector, Rajiv Kumar said.
The southern region accounted for 28.8 per cent of the total cement demand, the highest among all the regions, in the country in 2009. However, capacity utilisation of cement plants in this region was the lowest with around 70 per cent.