The Rs 1,500 crore water purifier market, growing at an annual 15-20%, is seeing a flurry of brand launches
It’s raining water purifiers. If Amway, the country’s largest direct selling company, is planning to launch its popular ‘eSpring’ brand of water purifiers in the near future, almost all the existing players such as Kent Mineral and Hindustan Unilever have come up with new variants of their brands in the last couple of months. Smaller companies such as Okaya Power Group recently diversified into water purifiers under the Nasaka brand name.
So what’s driving this flurry of activity? It’s still a small industry with a turnover of Rs 1,500 crore but one that is growing at 15-20 per cent annually. And the expectation is that the growth rate will increase manifold with many parts of the country still grappling with the shortage of potable water and increasing consumer consciousness about clean drinking water.
Amway India’s MD and CEO William Pinckney says the company sees a huge potential in the water purifier segment in India. “Water in India is still not very pure as compared to other developed countries. There are many people who still don’t get safe drinking water in India and hence we are evaluating the category,”
Tata ‘Swach’ that was launched last year says it has sold about a million units in just 12 months. The Tatas have positioned it as the world’s ‘lowest cost water purifier’ as Swach is available at three price points — Rs 999, Rs 749 and Rs 499, depending on the volume of water stored and the plastic used. But the purifying cartridge is the same assuring same quality across all three ranges.
Sabaleel Nandy, GM, water purifier business, Tata Chemicals, says while domestic water purification is less than 10 per cent in urban India, it is even less than one per cent in rural India.
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The domestic water purification industry offers three types of water purification technology — reverse osmosis (RO), ultra violet (UV) and offline or storage water purifiers. While Eureka Forbes’ Aquaguard and Kent Mineral RO are the key players in the RO segment, they also operate in the UV and storage category along with others like HUL’s Pureit and Tata’s ‘Swach’.
Mahesh Gupta, chairman, Kent Mineral RO water purifiers, quotes a research done two years ago which said that only 4 per cent of the population in India use water purifiers in their houses. Last year, the company sold about 180,000 RO purifiers, 150,000 offline purifiers and 10, 000 UV purifiers. The company has increased the target to 220,000 RO units, 250,000 offline and 30,000 UV purifiers. The price range for RO is Rs 13,000-15,500, for offline purifiers Rs 1200-2500 and for UV, Rs 6000-8000.
Kent launched its new product ‘Tap Guard’ priced at Rs 2,300 two months ago. Tap Guard is specially devised to fit into taps and provide safe water even for kitchen and washing purpose.
Okaya is also planning big. It has set up a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in Himachal Pradesh with an investment of Rs 72 crore and an overall initial investment of Rs 234 crore. Rajesh Gupta, CEO, Okaya Power, says the company will come up with five new models in the next three months – two in the RO and three in the offline segment, which would be priced at less than Rs 1000. The company is targeting about 50,000 outlets through 470 distributors across the country in six months.
HUL’s ‘Pureit’, launched nationally in April 2008 and positioned as ‘water as safe as boiled’, started off by targeting the lower end of the market with price points of Rs 3200 and and Rs 1,000. It went up the value chain recently with ‘Marvella’ priced at Rs 6900 — a fully automatic water purifier which does not need running water or electricity and by automatically filling itself.
The market leader of course is Eureka Forbes’ brand Aquaguard with 57 per cent share in the RO, 75 per cent in UV and 20 per cent in the storage category. Overall, it has 54 per cent share in the industry. In RO, its brands are ‘Aquaguard Reviva’ (Rs 9,990), ‘Aquaguard Protec’ (Rs 13,500) and ‘Aquaguard Sensa’. In storage purifier, it operates with ‘Aquasure’ (Rs 1,300-1,400) and in UV, with ‘Aquaguard Classic’ priced at Rs 7,390 and ‘Aquaguard Infinity’ priced at Rs 9,590.
Eureka Forbes of course is not happy with the flood of new players offering cheaper products.
Marzin Shroff, CEO-direct sales, and senior VP-marketing, Eureka Forbes, says these days, companies are advertising RO as the new technology and mandatory for clean water, which is a myth. People in cities get water either from municipal supply or bore-wells in their houses. This water does not have dissolved salts and hence doesn’t need RO. In fact 90 per cent of water is wasted in an RO.
The need, he says, is to adapt to an “intelligent” water purifier that can detect the levels of impurities in different samples of water. “We launched ‘Aquaguard Sensa’ priced at Rs 17,900 in this segment which automatically detects impurities and adjusts itself to that level of purification. Likewise, in rural areas, we have community purification system, where people buy water at a very cheap rate of about 12 paise per litre,” he says.
On the new players in the market, Shroff says as a custodian of this industry for the past 27 years, his request to all other players is to act responsibly and not misguide people with false advertisements.