The Hindu Business Line : Crystal-clear strategy

For a minute, as you step in, you would think B. Santhanam, Managing Director, Saint-Gobain Glass India, is sitting right on the verdant expanse of lawn that surrounds his office, till, of course, you notice the clear glass panels of his corner office. As a statement by the chief of the country's largest float glass manufacturer, it couldn't be more emphatic. The all-round view from his office of the factory's lush landscaping through the one-way glass is spectacular, and, as if to buttress the point, he stresses, "without the noise and the heat from outside."

Indeed, the drone of traffic on the busy Chennai-Bangalore highway near Sriperumbudur where Saint-Gobain's factory is located, is muted. The sharp evening sun is streaming in on another typical muggy day, but the coated glass panels of Santhanam's office keeps the sting out while the light brightens up his office. And, if Santhanam has his way, he would want even more offices to use glass as a lighter and efficient building material. He gestures to the glass panels of his office. If bricks and cement were used, he says, it would have increased structural weight by six times!

"These days, glass is bought in acres," he says, indicating that the boom in realty and the accompanying swift change in modern architecture has resulted in a great demand for glass with various properties. Saint-Gobain, no doubt, has helped that growth along with some memorable television and press campaigns (Who cannot recollect the large black woman who appears to throw water on two Japanese diners at a restaurant or the child with lips pressed on glass?) as well as working with the trade, architects and consumers. As leading architect Hafeez Contractor, who works with Saint-Gobain glass, says, "Glass is the material of the future. It'll gradually replace all other materials as time passes by."

The perception among consumers about glass is changing very fast — from a low-involvement product that is needed for windows to the different uses it can have. It has become an integral element in architectural design. Architecture too has undergone a transformation across the globe as architects enjoy a gamut of options in terms of building methods, materials, technology and skills. Today, in many corporate buildings, glass almost replaces brick walls. As Santhanam comments, a software park in Chennai has bought at least 10 acres of glass for its frontage! When Saint-Gobain launched its products in the Indian market in the year 2000, it wanted to position its glass on the `clarity' platform. "We realised that one of the most important things that people would want is that the glass should be clear. The glass has to be invisible. Essentially, the first thing in your mind is that you want something which is functional and lets you see through, so we chose clarity as the theme and extended it to say that our clear glass is so clear that you don't notice it," he says.

The company's ad campaigns reinforced this positioning: the commercial of the black woman with a bucket of soap water scaring people in a restaurant; a Chinese waiter cleverly breathing on glass to find his way through a glass partition.

"When we launched our products, we had a tough task and an easy task. The tough one was that nobody has done this work of converting glass into a brand. And, the easy one was that we were the first to do that," explains Santhanam. (See Built on Glass - Page 3)

Today, the company has a range of products in India. It makes plain and coated glass for sophisticated use, and mirrors. Apart from this, the company is doing a lot of market seeding for various other value-added products such as its Sun Ban. According to Santhanam, Sun Ban is the umbrella brand for all reflective glass which comes under the solar control category such as Reflectasol, Antelio and Cool-lite. Reflectasol is primarily for window glazing in residences, facade glazing in small and medium projects. This is a hard-coated reflective glass. Antelio, also a hard-coated reflective glass, is used for façade glazing in medium and large projects. Cool-lite is the premium product in the Sun Ban range, used for façade glazing in large and mega projects. This is a soft-coated, temperable, reflective glass that comes in different colours.

"After a quite successful market seeding programme, we are setting up a new coating line for the Sun Ban range of glass inside the Chennai facility," Santhanam says. According to him, the Rs 120-crore new facility — the Coater — will enable the company to deposit layers of metallic oxides on clear float glass or on body-tinted glass by magnetically enhanced cathodic sputtering under vacuum conditions. The new facility is expected to be operational soon.

Apart from its memorable advertising campaigns, Saint-Gobain attributes its success in branding what was a commodity to a lot of below-the-line marketing. In a bid to encourage architecture and design students to develop futuristic designs, it initiated a programme called Transparence. The idea was to generate design solutions using glass as a structural and decorative element. According to the company, the participants were expected to formulate their own data, starting from site location for their building to defining its context, functional requirements and area allocation. The students could choose from two themes — a shopping mall or a museum documenting the history of glass as a building material. "Apart from students, we also periodically meet a lot of fabricators, processors, builders, architects and carpenters. We educate them a lot about the possible roles of glass as a building material. So far, we have educated around 30,000 carpenters across the country. Today, glass is something we cannot do without," explains Santhanam.

However, Chennai-based architect Tara Murali of Bharath & Associates has a different point of view. She says corporate houses probably prefer glass-clad buildings just for the sake of global architectural identity. In the West, people widely use glass because they want solar heat inside the building. But longevity apart, its suitability to a tropical country such as India is questionable. "Though glass adds to the aesthetic values of a building, considering that glass-making is basically an energy-intensive process, we must also see at what cost we are trying to replace brick walls with glass."

Saint-Gobain has invested Rs 1,400 crore so far in its facilities in the country. In the automotive glass segment, the company claims to have a 20 per cent share of the OE market. "We should get 30 per cent share by 2008," says Santhanam. According to him, Saint-Gobain is the exclusive supplier for cars such as Toyota Corolla, Tata Indigo and Santro (export models). In the replacement market, it boasts a 33 per cent share. Right now, 40 per cent of the output from new float glass production is being exported. Overall, 25 to 30 per cent of its production is being exported.

Though there is a great demand for glass and is growing at around 12 per cent, Santhanam says, "As far as the glass industry is concerned, the supply will far exceed demand at least till 2009." With its competitor, AIS, also expected to add additional capacity of 1.8 lakh tonnes by next year, up to 2009 the industry, which has an annual capacity of one million tonnes, is expected to have at least 20 per cent excess capacity. So, as Santhanam points out, the industry, like Saint-Gobain does, has to export value-added glass, add value as a building solutions company and keep building the brand like the company has all these years.

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