Eveready appoints jt MD, mulls new FMCG play

Kolkata: In line with what

Mohit Burman

of Dabur, the single largest shareholder of Eveready, was insisting on having a professional management in the dry cell battery major for the last one year, the flagship company of Williamson Magor group has inducted Suvamoy Saha as the joint managing director (MD) of the company. Saha has been with

Eveready

for a long time and has professional experience of over 30 years.

When contacted,

Amritangshu Khaitan

, the managing director of the company, told TOI that Saha was inducted as the joint MD in order to increase the depth of the management. He also indicated that the management is toying with the idea of entering into more FMCG segments going forward.

Amritangshu, grandson of B M Khaitan, founder of the Williamson Magor Group, pointed out that Eveready earlier also had a professional MD when his grandfather took it over in 1994. “It used to have a professional MD for a few years when we acquired the company. He was C P Raman,” Khaitan added.

After Raman, Deepak Khaitan became the MD of Eveready followed by Amritangshu.

According to him, the new restructuring will help channelise Eveready into a high growth path with a focus on its core categories as well as grow into newer segments of lighting and appliances. “The company will also explore entry into other FMCG products and scale up JV with Wings group of Indonesia,” he added.

Now Burman family is the single largest shareholder with around 20% holding, EIL has already made complete provision of group level debt in the fourth quarter of the last fiscal. It has made provision for Rs 629 crore debt (principal and interest) given to group firms as inter corporate deposits (ICD) as exceptional items.

Industry experts feel that high group level debt was one of the reasons that have led to fall in promoters holding in the dry cell battery major.

In the first quarter of this fiscal, Eveready registered a 32% jump in net profit to Rs 31 crore from Rs 23 crore in the same period last fiscal. The turnover for the quarter registered a growth of 7%. The company has said that it was mainly attributable to a robust pent-up demand in June as the economy started to open up from lockdown like restrictions imposed in the earlier part of the quarter to counter the second surge of the pandemic.

“The performance of the battery and flashlight segments remained relatively unaffected despite the second surge of the pandemic. Though battery volume was flat as compared to the corresponding quarter of the previous year, the segment was benefited by generation of a healthy demand in June as lockdown restrictions were relaxed, coupled with decline in imports of poor quality products from China post implementation of quality standards issued by Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS),” it has added.