Consumer durables-maker Lloyd Electric & Engineering is looking to scale up advertising and marketing spends in order to increase market share in the room air conditioning (AC) segment.

According to Lloyd’s Director Nipun Singhal, the company’s expenditure on brand building will go up by over 50 per cent to ₹55 crore this fiscal, from the ₹35 crore it spent in FY15.

“The idea is to increase market share from 8 per cent to 11 per cent. In terms of sales, we are looking at 4 lakh,” he told BusinessLine . Lloyd sold 2.7 lakh ACs last fiscal.

At present, ACs account for the major pie (around ₹650 crore) of its consumer durables biz which stood at ₹1,200 crore last fiscal. “AC business should be around ₹1,000 crore this fiscal,” Singhal added.

Other consumer durables products in Lloyd’s kitty include TVs, refrigerators, room heaters, coolers, washing machines and small electrical appliances.

New markets

According to Singhal, the increased advertisement spends should help the company penetrate its weaker markets like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh.

He is also hopeful of better after-sales service – a prime focus of its current brand campaign – seeing the company through against dominant players like Voltas, LG, Samsung and others.

At present, Lloyd has 394 company-owned service centres across the country which it intends increase to 500 around December this year.

The journey

The New-Delhi based company began operations in 1956 under a joint venture with USA’s Fedders Lloyd and is considered one of the pioneers in the country’s AC industry.

However, around the 1990s, after the JV ended, it stopped catering to the room AC segment and shifted focus on manufacturing for other brands. Later in 2008, it decided to get back into the AC business.

More in pipeline

Lloyd’s ACs are manufactured at its Panthnagar (Uttarakhand) and Kala Amb (Himachal Pradesh) facilities, which have a combined annual capacity of 6 lakh units. This apart, the company is also exploring the possibility of setting up a third plant at Ranipet (Tamil Nadu) over the next two years.

Lloyd will also invest another ₹125 crore over the next one year to set up a new manufacturing facility for washing machines. The facility is expected to operational around June 2016 and will have a capacity of 2,000 units annually.

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