 "See huge potential for decorative paints in India: AkzoNobel")
Despite the Indian economy slowing down in the past couple of years, the company said it is not changing its plans as it focuses on long term potential of the market.
"The growth potential in this country is enormous. When you look at the need for housing, the plans, and also the number of citizens who need housing units, (the opportunity is huge), that's amazing," Akzo Nobel Executive Committee Member (Decorative Paints) Ruud Joosten told PTI.
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India, China, Brazil and Indonesia have been identified as a high growth market by the company. AkzoNobel had clocked a total revenue of 4 billion euros from the decorative paints segment in 2013.
He said the demand for decorative paints in India was bound to grow even more considering the plans that the government had laid out along with the global trend of urbanisation, and new cities arriving.
"This country will have growth, that means for us a huge additional volume of paint coming to the market," Joosten said, adding, at present India was among top five markets.
He said India's annual per capita paint consumption was one litre as against two litres for China at present.
"For us it is very important to look at factors like usage per capita. When you compare India to the rest of the world, India's is the lowest...In some countries in Europe it is 11-12 litre per capita," he said.
In the high growth markets, the long term trend is that people upgrade from mid-market and use premium products, he said, adding, the focus in India would be to address all segments of the market while keeping a focus on the premium category with its Dulux brand.
"We have an assortment of products covering major parts of the market, from low price points to high. We are very strong in the premium segment, we will further use our international leverage to bring new products to the market, new global marketing resources to support it," Joosten said.
He added: "We are the only ones in the world with a global presence, that gives us a lot of opportunity to use lot of innovations, for digital and developments that we can use in our organisation."
When asked if the economic slowdown in India has forced the company to recalibrate its targets, he replied in the negative stating the company was "realistic about making our targets for longer term".
"Targets are still the same," Joosten said, adding it even if it may have changed 'a little bit' it could be adjusted by speeding up.
He also said the sentiments in India at present were very positive, which is different from a year ago.