Godrej Consumer Products Q3 Net grows 22.52% to Rs 323.95 cr

FMCG firm Godrej Consumer Products Ltd (GCPL) today reported a 22.52 per cent jump in consolidated net profit to Rs 322.95 crore for the quarter ending December 31, 2015, led by effective cost management and volume growth.
Its net profit for the October-December quarter last year stood at Rs 263.57 crore.
GCPL's consolidated net sales were up 5.73 per cent during the period under review at Rs 2,353.54 crore as against Rs 2,225.82 crore a year earlier, it said in a statement.
"We have been managing our cost very prudently and as a result of that 9 per cent volume growth has been matched with 23 per cent growth in net profit. This has been a quarter where we have delivered industry related volume growth along with strong profit growth," GCPL Managing Director Vivek Gambhir told PTI.

He further said: "We have grown ahead of the market because of the reason as we remained focused on few categories and are investing consistently on key brands. Our innovation pipelines remain very robust and we continued to enhance our distribution network in urban and rural areas".
Godrej Group's Chairman Adi Godrej said: "In a challenging operating environment, we have delivered a resilient and competitive performance in third quarter of the current fiscal... Operating earnings growth was ahead of sales growth across most of our geographies, aided by lower commodity costs, calibrated price hikes, stringent cost management and effective leveraging of brand platforms."

GCPL also witnessed a slowdown in the rural sales, which has traditionally grown faster than the urban sales.

"We are feeling a slowdown in the rural because of two years of bad monsoon and the prices have come down. The good thing is that still 70 per cent of our business is urban focused," Gambhir added.
Rural segment contributes 30 per cent of GCPL's domestic sales, he added.
On GCPL's performance in overseas markets, Gambhir said that on constant currency basis the performance was well.
"In Africa and Latin American markets, we performed well. In Africa we grew 16 per cent and in Latin America by 28 per cent. The part of the portfolio where we saw some challenges was in Indonesia, where we saw a 3 per cent constant currency growth," he added.

In Indonesia the company saw a significant slowdown in the FMCG demand although it was higher than the market growth there.
International business contributes around 48 per cent of GCPL's revenue and rest 52 per cent is from domestic market.
Over the outlook of the company in coming quarter, he said "Our expectations is that Q4 would be soft, however, it would be better than the 12 months ago period. There would be an uptick but it would be soft".
Meanwhile, in a separate filing, GCPL informed that its board in a meeting held today declared a third interim dividend of Rs 1/- per share for the financial year 2015-16.

GCPL's shares today settled at Rs 1,147.60 per scrip on BSE, down 0.23 per cent from previous close.