 "Radhakishan Damani buys retail chain Health and Glow for Rs 750 crore")
Radhakishan Damani, billionaire investor and founder of Avenue Supermarts which runs D-Mart chain, has acquired Health and Glow, a Bangalore-based beauty and personal care retail chain for Rs 700-750 crore.
Damani acquired the company from the family offices of industrialist Rajan Raheja and investment banker Hemendra Kothari.
Raheja owns Exide Batteries, and Raheja QBE General Insurance. He sold a majority stake in his cable TV venture Hathway to Reliance Industries.
Kothari chairs DSP Investment Managers, which has $15 billion in assets under management. He also partnered with Merrill Lynch, an American investment management company, in 1995 but sold his 57 per cent stake in tranches between 2005 and 2009.
Health and Glow is Damani's second buyout after Bombay Swadeshi Stores in 2015, the country's oldest retailer, for Rs 42 crore.
The transaction was done via Damani's flagship investment vehicle, Bright Star Investments, late last week.
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According to corporate shareholding data available till June 2023, Damani holds 14 stocks with a net worth of over Rs 1,66,949.6 crore with the largest being VST Industries, where he is the single largest shareholder, and India Cements, where his 21 per cent ownership makes him the single largest public (non-promoter group) investor.
Launched in 1997, Health and Glow was originally a joint venture between Spencer Retail and Hong Kong-based Dairy Farm. In 2015-16, Kothari and Raheja bought out the Health and Glow chain.
The company opened its first brick-and-mortar store in Chennai, and now it has over 175 stores located across Indian cities including Bengaluru, Mangaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Cochin, Kolkata, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, and Hyderabad.
In FY22, the company clocked Rs 200 crore topline and is expected to close FY23 with Rs 370 crore of sales.
According to Euromonitor International, a London-based market research company, the beauty and personal care market of India is estimated to be around $18.3 billion by the end of the 2023 calendar year.
However, newer, well-funded players such as Nykaa have dominated the sector in the recent past, which is increasingly seeing consolidation of brands or bigger conglomerates making an entry.