Last year, Bajaj Finance presented its FinAI strategy with the goal to save ₹150 crore in OPEX in FY 26

They shared 21 workstreams where AI would be deployed and this month - BFL has come back with an impressive update on the FinAI strategy

Below are highlights from the investor day ⤵️ 1️⃣Certain updates from BFL regarding megatrends caught my attention:

Megatrends are structural shifts in India’s commerce & finance landscape which the BFL leadership team updates from time to time - these are supposed to guide the overall Strategy for the firm.

(a) BFL has a 147 member team working on AI across 7 pods (these pods together work towards the earlier 21 pillars identified under the FinAI strategy 2024)

(b) ₹4,500 crore of loans have been disbursed using voice AI (v/s last reported statistic from their vendor Navana AI was ~ ₹1,500 crore in Aug 2025) - clear acceleration

(c) Finance on ONDC is picking up!
BFL is disbursing ~₹30 crore in loans per month now via its integration with ONDC (which took place as recently as June 2025)

(d) Live & social commerce playbook:
BFL has onboarded 2,000+ creators to help drive Sales across Bajaj Mall (electronics marketplace) and other online properties

(e) BFL has decided to NOT pursue insurance entirely (good decision if you ask me 😆)

10 years ago, Y Combinator took the leap of faith to admit Meesho into the S16 program

In that same year, 2 individuals decided to invest in Meesho alongside YC; they’re both sitting on a x210 return in less than 10 years.

Both investors are named in the RHP; they are well regarded investors but not well known to the general public.

Here’s who they are ⤵️ (1) Man Hay Tam ($10.2 million position)

He is selling 33 Lakh shares of Meesho in the OFS portion of the IPO - in fact, he is even named in the Top 10 selling shareholders as part of the IPO.

Man had bought a total of 82 Lakh shares (equivalent) in 2016 at a ~₹43 Lakh cost price.

Some context: In 2016, this would have meant Man wrote a large ~$60K cheque to Meesho as part of the S16 Demo Day round (typical Angels in YC co’s would write < $25K cheques)

Man’s $60K cheque in 2015 is today a $10.2 million position 🤯

🤔So, who is he?
Man Hay Tam is known to the world as Perry Tam - one of the GPs at Locus Ventures - a fund started in 2016!

(a) Perry studied CS at Cornell Univ - then worked at Oracle, Guidewire & FB

(b) He founded a gaming studio called Storm8 which he sold in 2021

(c) More recently, he started a DeFi trading firm called Jaguar Technologies

Btw, Perry & his 3 fellow GPs have an astounding track record of Angel investments including Gitlab, Postmates, Blue Bottle Coffee etc.

Locus Ventures has invested in several India focused companies too e.g. Decentro, Razorpay and Recko (acquired by Stripe).

Man is walking home with a $4.1 million cash payday on this investment AND a further ~$6 million worth of shares which free up at lock-up: VERY well deserved 👏

Policybazaar today has 5,000 Sales personnel and another 2,000 who work in Claims processing.

PB isn’t unique - the entire insurance industry in India employs 1000s of people whose entire job is to write email follow-ups, make phone call follow-ups and format Excel documents.

In fact, for a small 35 person Sales team at my company in 2022 - we had ~2 persons whose full time job was “co-ordination” with insurers, customers and the sales team.

Insurance is one industry where AI can make the biggest dent - PB is leading the charge here ⤵️ What is PB’s edge?

(1) 100% of calls are transcribed into text format which provides a rich training data set for AI Sales agents (per Q4 FY 25 earnings deck)

(2) 16+ years of claims data history - mostly stored in emails & PDFs - this is the perfect starting point to build an AI claims assistant

(3) B2C / digital heavy business where data is shared directly by the customer (via auditable channels) - AI systems are pure GIGO - if your agent mistypes customer info then everything downstream goes wrong from there.

Btw, almost everything in Insurance today has been touched (most unsuccessfully) by the previous generation of RPA - everything will again be re-written in the era of AI automation.

Dunzo’s founder Kabeer Biswas is starting “Dunzo 2.0” - he’s apparently raising ~$12M for a personal concierge company

In the same space - TryFaff has raised from Nexus Ventures, Indulge Global raised money from Nikhil Kamath, some co’s like Pinch Lifestyle are bootstrapping, Swiggy launched Crew etc

The personal concierge space in India has blown up in the past ~45 days; I’ve been tracking this space for a year now - it is a natural extension of the Quick Home Services theme (Snabbit, Pronto, Insta Help by UC etc)

Below are some snippets from our investment thesis (for an un-named company)⤵️ (1) Four arcs of Labor Leverage 🏋️

Unorganized → Organized → On-demand → Orchestrated

Labor Leverage (i.e. outsourcing work) becomes increasingly expensive as you move from left to right

Unorganized → Organized: We pay a convenience fee to Urban Company to get a plumber booking scheduled OR for Swiggy to deliver an order to our house.

Organized → On-demand: Some of us pay a surge fee to get groceries delivered via Quick Comm; once the discount wave ends - we’ll do the same for InstaHelp, Snabbit and Pronto

On-demand → Orchestrated: VERY few Indians have this. Please read on:

The “elite” (Indian) class doesn’t book on UC, Blinkit, MMT or even AMEX Platinum Concierge. They have a House Manager (₹50K - ₹1L monthly CTC resource) to manage this workload for them.

Typically, this House Manager will also liaison with your EA to ensure work & personal life is orchestrated - remember movies where the top honcho would get passed a slip of paper in a meeting - that is exactly what I’m referring to here.

A significant part of India’s metro population has started to pay for Unorganized → Organized (maybe 3 crore) & Organized → On-demand (maybe 30L people).

On-demand → Orchestrated is the next big theme for Labor Leverage startups in India✌️

I made my 1st trip to Chennai to attend the annual Speciale DeepTech Summit this week

Speciale has been an OG DeepTech investor in India (portfolio includes Agnikul Cosmos, GalaxEye, ePlane Co & several others) - they recently raised a ₹600 Fund III

The Summit was a single day event which had ~350+ attendees (Speciale LPs, portfolio founders & other investors like me) - sharing a few observations from the event ⤵️ (1) The showstopper: Unmannd (UAV || Defense) 🪖

- Unmannd is founded by Yeshwanth (IIT B graduate) who also started Aereo (India’s largest drone-based mapping/survey company; raised ~$23M to date)

- They had a TITAN 30 series UAV on display; this is their logistics drone capable of carrying 30 kgs payload

- The supply chain & components are optimized to a great degree; primarily indigenous contents and in-house battery packs

- Next technical milestone here is to do a demo of their counter-EW capability (i.e. ability to operate in presence of signal jammers)

- The company raised ~$2M from Speciale & Accel India recently

The key insight for me from Unmannd’s presentation was that in a ~₹2,000 crore Defense tender for GNSS denied navigation systems - there was NO domestic players who successfully cleared trials (!)

Unmannd has placed bids for several military tenders too.

Yeshwanth & Hemaditya are very clear about their mission: To build the world’s leading Defense focused UAV platform - starting with logistics & then moving into counter UAV systems.

Urban Company today faces the same Innovator’s Dilemma which Zomato faced 2.5 years ago

Zomato acquired Blinkit in June ‘22 to take on Zepto & Instamart in Quick Commerce - it was considered a fad then; today Blinkit is larger (NOV basis) as compared to the Zomato by a large margin.

UC’s Q2 FY26 tell a similar story: The overall loss is driven by investment into Insta Help (UC’s quick home services arm in India)

UC has NO choice but to do this because of how hot the Quick Home Services market is - Snabbit has raised $50M+, Pronto has raised $14M+ and there is a new clone popping up every fortnight.

I’ve tracked this space closely - sharing my thesis on what is happening below ⤵️ First, let us see how Insta Help has been scaling within UC:

(a) Launched in Feb ‘25 in select pin codes in Mumbai (around the time the news of Snabbit’s $1M Seed round was announced)

(b) QoQ it has grown ~10X from ~₹1 crore Sales in Q1 FY26 to ~₹9.9 crore Sales in Q2 FY26

(c) Oct ‘25 itself was ~₹8.6 crore Sales - the trajectory is upward!

The growth is explosive - naturally the losses will pile up (same happened during the early frenzy of Quick Commerce expansion days in ‘22 and ‘23)

I can already see the consumer behavior shift - several of my own colleagues who recently moved cities don’t employ a full time help - they book on Insta Help or one of the other platforms!

Remember: Don’t look at the gross transaction value - look at Net Sales (after discount). It is too early to look at Revenue from Ops (i.e. after partner payout) because this business is NOT fully optimized as yet - per my own offline chats with the service executives (who are currently on generous minimum guarantees)

One of the big winners in India’s IPO gold rush is Redseer - a market research consulting firm.

Lenskart, Meesho, Urban Company, Swiggy, Vishal Mega Mart, Nykaa, FirstCry, BlueStone & LG Electronics - all have one thing in common: They have paid Redseer to do an industry report as part of the IPO marketing material

For e.g. Lenskart will be paying ~₹1.9 crore to Redseer for its report & other consultancy services as part of the IPO roadshow (more details below)

If you are a professional investor then Redseer is popular name - but if you aren’t then here are a few interesting facts you need to know ⤵️ First, who is Redseer?

(a) Redseer was founded in BLR back in 2009 by a young IIT-Delhi grad Anil Kumar; fully bootstrapped to date; the business does ~$25M+ in revenue today (my estimate based on online sources)

(b) The idea behind Redseer was to create a domestic equivalent to the MBB consulting firms - with a specific focus on new economy companies (the startup world)

(c) Redseer started by doing a lot of market research projects but has slowly moved up the “Strategy value chain” to do MBB-type CXO consulting projects.

Pretty interesting & niche consulting business!

Sify Infinit’s 560 page DRHP is a masterclass on the Data Center (DC) market in India

Apart from covering the nuances of its own business, Sify has also included a primer on India’s 5GW ambition for FY30 and the challenges that lie ahead

After China, India has the lowest cost per MW of DC capacity - we plan to almost X3 our DC capacity in the next 5 years.

Sharing a few takeaways ⤵️ (1) Energy is 44% of total expenses

- This data point confirms what several industry reports have pointed out: Energy is the single largest OPEX component of a DC

- This % has been on a downward trend for Sify from ~47% to ~38% - driven by shifting to more Renewables & operational efficiency

PS: PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is the KPI for measuring energy efficiency; Sify doesn’t provide this figure in its DRHP

- However, Sify does shared that 27% improvement in PUE in FY24; driven by 20% reduction in energy leakages.

- Btw, Sify passes these costs on to its customer (this is part of the Colocation DC operating model - more on this below).

Imp nuance (can skip too): Industry avg. PUE in India is close to 1.5 - versus high end DCs in USA which are at 1.1 i.e. they are able to reduce energy wastage by ~40% (hence, can operate at Energy as ~30% of COGS).

India will see its 1st pureplay data center IPO soon - Sify Infinit Spaces (SISL) has filed for a ₹3700 crore IPO last week

SISL was started in 2017 as a subsidiary of NASDAQ listed Sify Technologies - it operates 14 colocation data center sites in India.

For FY25 - it made ~₹1,400 crore revenue with ₹125 crore PAT; the EBITDA margin is 44%

Btw, SISL’s parent Sify Tech was affiliated to the infamous Satyam Computers at the time of founding until 2005 (full stake sale) - at the time of 2009 scam - it was no longer affiliated.

I’ve been studying the Data Center opportunity in India for a couple of weeks - sharing a few fun facts to begin your learning journey below ⤵️ (1) India consumes 20% of global data - but has only 3% of data center (DC) capacity

Our data consumption will only continue to grow:

(a) We are the 2nd largest consumption market for several AI co’s like OpenAI, Perplexity etc

(b) 5G roll-out & adoption is still WIP; has gone from 10% to 35% penetration last year - will go beyond 50% in the next 18 months

(c) Our per capita data consumption is ~25GB per month, expected to grow to ~40GB per month over the next 5 yrs

Meesho clocked ₹30,000 crore of Sales in FY25 - this is approx. 30 lakh orders per day fulfilled by 5 lakh sellers!

They aim to raise ~₹6,500 crore in their upcoming IPO; and it is the first horizontal e-commerce platform to go public in India (Flipkart started 8 years prior btw!)

Meesho’s updated 667 page DRHP is a must read for anyone who follows E-Commerce in India

Here are my 5 key takeaways from the filings⤵️ (1) Meesho has 21 crore active shoppers who place avg. 9+ orders per year 🤯

Few observations v/s their 2024 annual report:

(a) LTM order frequency is up from 9 to 9.5

(b) ATUs (active shoppers) is also up from 18.7 crore to 21.3 crore

(c) Order growth (50% YOY) is outstripping NMV growth (36% YOY) - this is interesting, Meesho is already a value commerce platform - the AOV is declining even further (by design) - to grow the customer base!

AOV has reduced from ₹336 (FY 23) to ~₹270 (Q1 FY26) - worth tracking this for the future! Valmo (check pt 3) is critical to making this AOV decline unit economic sustainable.

PS - I had covered Meesho’s 2024 Annual Report a few months back (bookmark for later):

x.com/Rahul_J_Mathur…

This year, ICONIQ led Anthropic’s $5bn Series F, ElevenLabs $180M Series C, Legora’s $80M Series B and TinyFish’s $47M Series A..

They are a media shy Wealth Mgt firm with $90bn+ of AUM who put their money where their pen is (quite literally)

Earlier this yr, they published their “State of AI 2025” report - now they’ve topped it up with several updates in a 73 page analysis of their portfolio companies.

Sharing a few takeaways ⤵️ (1) “AI” has changed what “best in class” means for Software

(a) OPEX leverage: ARR per FTE has increased 65% from ~$200K Pre-AI (2020) to $331K now; touching $390K for co’s with $500M+ ARR

(b) The goalpost “Rule of 40%” is now the “Rule of 60%” - BUT, there is ONE nuance: FCF margins are taking a hit - but growth rates are MUCH higher (even for “AI adjacent” SaaS co’s)

(c) NDRs (net dollar retention) also takes a hit - gold standard was ~135% in 2020; it is now down to ~115%. Elevated churn (experimental ARR, hype etc), competition & pricing pressure is hurting.

The change doesn’t impact Seed investors (like me) - but is VERY relevant for Growth & Public market investors.

Btw, ICONIQ’s Enterprise Five - ARR, NDR, Rule of 60%, Net Magic Number & ARR per FTE provides an excellent scorecard for Growth investors!

Doug Leone has been a Partner at Sequoia for 32 years now - he doesn’t do a lot of interviews - but his track record is incredible - ServiceNow ($187bn), Nubank ($73bn), Medallia (acq. $6.4bn) and he continues to serve as a board member to many companies.

Doug did a rare interview on the Training Data podcast where he answered some key Qs about investing in AI today; sharing a few notes from the same: (1) Where will value accrue in the AI stack? Applications!

“Values always accrues up at the application layer - near the customer, money & the business user.”

(2) Can you sit out of AI as an investor? Nope
”You are at the front end of a cycle, which doesn’t mean you have to invest in everything but you have to invest.”

(3) What to do about round prices in AI today?

“You see a small company with very good momentum in a front end of the market; you lean in and you hold your nose on price.”

(Arguably, Sequoia did this with Google back in the day; a $100M post money valuation for a Series A)

GFF is an annual circus show for Financial Services professionals, founders & entertainers. Hence, I chose to wear my customary Papa Pump outfit (IYKYK, comment below).

I spent most of my two days in meetings (managed to get 17 done!) and a bit of time at the exhibition booths; sharing a few notes from these meetings: (1) AI first collections agencies are emerging 🗣️

- Lazy VCs wrote this space off when Credgenics raised a $50M Series B from WestBridge in August 2023
- Collections is evergreen - stress emerges in each pocket at different times (e.g. unsecured PL, MFI etc)
- Due to competition now, Collections has moved from Software + Service to Outcome i.e. pricing based on ROR uplift delivered; this is a great pricing model for AI services
- The prev. gen of Collections companies were either offline agencies or human call centers or a hybrid of both
- The modern Collections agencies are building AI enabled Credit Engines i.e. a full funnel process to manage cases from pre-due to NPA; Voice AI to call || agents to email, WhatsApp etc || route optimization to direct field force etc

At a private event, the CEO of a leading Indian bank highlighted that over the next 3 yrs, they will spend ~10% of their IT budget on AI.

For context: The IT budget (headcount, Tech, outsourcing etc) at this size of bank would be ~₹2,500 to ₹3,000 crore per year

Single bank spend on AI is therefore ~₹250 crore per year (there are approx. 25 odd banks of this size or larger).

Now, there are 2 ways to interpret this ~₹6,000 crore ($750M) per year AI spending ⤵️ This depends on whether you are an optimistic or critic:

(1) Optimistic view: In 3 yrs, the actual spend would be X2 or X3 higher i.e. > ₹15,000 crore because some of the AI deployments will eat into the labor budget (check the example in this Thread below)

Indian banks are lighthouse customers (for SEA banks & rest of Indian Enterprise); therefore it would catalyze X5 further spending on AI - HUGE (~₹50,000 crore p.a.) opportunity within India itself - great for startups!

(2) Critical view: ~₹6,000 crore in AI spending is not sufficient to catalyze a new set of FinTech Infra vendors (centered around AI); maybe all of the incremental spend will go to incumbent service & Tech vendors

But, for the critics, I have 2 interesting examples from BFSI:

From 0 to $15M ARR in 90 days of launch - Emergent Labs is India’s fastest growing AI startup🤯

Emergent was founded a year ago by Dunzo’s former CTO Mukund Jha - they now have 57 team members (75% of headcount) in India

The velocity of product shipping & pace of ARR addition is insane; last month they were at $10M ARR - they’ve grown 50% MoM!

Sharing a few mind blowing facts about this company⤵️ The metrics are off the charts 📈
(a) 1.5 million+ unique apps created
(b) 1 million+ sign-ups to date
(c) 25,000+ paying customers
(d) 180+ countries represented in user base

Above was reported this month by the company during interviews with TBPN & with their early investor Together Fund (anchored by Freshwork's founder Girish)

Emergent is a great example of “Globally competitive product, built with love from India”

Reliance & Meta are together investing ₹855 crores to build AI Infra in India

RIL is also partnering with Google to build an AI data center in Jamnagar

At RIL’s 48th AGM, Mukesh bhai stated: “Jio promised and delivered digital everywhere and for every Indian. Similarly, Reliance Intelligence promises to deliver AI everywhere for every Indian”

“Reliance Intelligence” is RIL’s next bold bet after Jio ⤵️ Remember: RIL has partnered with both Meta & Google in the past for Jio

Jio raised ~₹150,000 crore from strategic & PE investors in early 2020 which included:

(1) Meta, who invested ₹43,574 crore (~$5.7bn) for 9.99% (announced April 22, 2020)

(2) Alphabet, who invested ₹33,737 crore (~$4.5bn) for 7.73% (announced July 15, 2020)

Btw, these two investments were strategic in nature e.g.

JioPhone Next was built with Pragati OS - a collaboration with Alphabet in Oct ‘21

Meta owned WhatsApp launched a deep e-commerce integration with JioMart in Oct ‘22

Jio is expected to IPO in the ~$110bn valuation range i.e. an acceptable 13% $ IRR for Meta & Alphabet

Meta & Alphabet may sell down some stake in the IPO (liquidity always helps drive re-investment decisions)

Btw, I had written about Jio’s upcoming IPO almost a year ago (nothing much has changed in the analysis) - bookmark for future reading:

x.com/Rahul_J_Mathur…

I read Ruchir Sharma’s new book “What Went Wrong With Capitalism?” earlier this week

Ruchir spent 25 years at Morgan Stanley & headed up their Emerging Markets investments ($20bn+ in AUM across funds)

He’s also a great writer on macroeconomics & history; there are 3 great points which he has made in this book ⤵️ First, I think it is important to set the premise of this book:

Ruchir highlights how constant intervention (bailouts, interest rate drops, welfare programs) from the Govt & Central Bank has altered the normal functioning of key economies:

(1) Recessions are less frequent but more severe

(2) Wealth is more concentrated (Top 1% of US controls 40% of wealth)

(3) Economies are becoming financialized (10% of income flows to Finance)

(4) Debt fueled economy: 80% of US lending happens in the shadow bank economy

(5) Big companies dominate: Low interest rates & high regulatory compliance requirements perpetuate oligopolies & monopolies

The funniest acronym used in the book was NINJA - a loan customer who has No Income (NI), No Job (NJ) and no Assets (A) - which is apparently Ruchir’s characterization of sub-prime lending in USA.

The 3 points most relevant to the common man are:

KFC’s sales per store in India is down 5.7% to ₹98,000 per day as compared to ₹1.04 lakh last year

The pressure isn’t just on KFC—McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Domino’s are feeling the heat too.

“Maintaining last year’s sales numbers has become a big challenge” said Rajeev Varman, CEO of Burger King India

Yet, individual KFC franchise store operators struggling - KFC India has still managed to post ₹1,500 crore in profit (v/s ₹1,425 crore last year: First, let us understand why this dichotomy has arisen: Store owners are struggling but the franchisor (KFC India) is making healthy profits.

(i) KFC India is primarily run by 2 franchises : Devyani International (DIL) Sapphire Foods India Private Limited
(ii) DIL runs 70% of KFC India outlets with around 700 stores. On paper they posted 6.6% YOY increase in revenue to ₹2,178.7 crores from KFC - but this was driven by new store opening
(iii) DIL’s avg sales per KFC outlet has fallen. The profit margins has fallen to 15.1% from 18.3% - primarily due to higher advertisement spending & discounts.

KFC rolled out the “Epic Savers Deal” — 9 fried chicken pieces (7 boneless strips + 2 leg pieces, the most popular cuts) for just ₹299.

And, they launched a “Wednesday Special” - for ₹100 extra , customers could upgrade to a bucket with 6 additional wings

“It’s one of our boldest & most compelling value propositions to date” - Aparna Bhawal, chief marketing officer, KFC India

And, they spent a BUNCH on advertising - roping in The Great Khali plus Mrunal Thakur and comedian Danish Sait!

Therefore, total Sales rose - store margins took a hit; but here lies the nuance of the franchisee business:

Karnataka has become the 3rd state to pass a bill to protect Gig Workers

Soon, every transaction you make on Swiggy, Rapido or Ola will result in ~1% to 5% of the total bill being deposited into a “welfare account”

India is projected to have 2.3 crore Gig Workers by 2030

Here’s what you need to know about this bill 👇 Firstly, do Gig Workers need a separate labor protection law?

(1) These riders are called delivery partners - they are NOT employees and collect their payments as “commissions” from the company for completing an order; therefore, the traditional employee laws do NOT apply

(2) These riders work for 12 hours/day - due to (1) they don’t get PF, ESI & other social security benefits given by government/employers as they are not classified as employees.

(3) There is some gray area: An Instamart delivery person completing 10-12 orders can earn ‘minimum guaranteed income’ of around ₹1000. But, it comes with lot of terms and conditions.

(4) Since their income is highly variable - so skipping a Sunday, taking a medical leave for family or relaxing on a public holiday leads to loss of income (unlike all of us who get a stable monthly salary)

(5) Their job is high risk - road accidents, dog attacks & injuries from carry objects - while they don’t have Govt provided insurance - most platforms today have a Personal Accident cover for their delivery partners

Therefore, I do think passing these Gig Worker Laws is akin to the Factories Act (1881) - a new class of labor needs a new set of protections

According to MIT, 95% of organizations are getting zero return from GenAI pilots

MIT conducted 50 interviews, surveyed 150+ leaders & studied 300+ AI projects to highlight the “GenAI Divide” i.e. despite $40bn+ in spending on AI projects, only 5% of companies are able to extract real value.

Sharing 5 key takeaways for startup founders from this report ⤵️ Which functions are getting the largest AI budget allocation?

Per MIT, 50% of GenAI project budgets are going towards the “front-office” i.e. Sales & Marketing which includes:

(a) Outbound emails & calls
(b) Lead scoring & lifecycle follow-ups
(c) Competitor & sentiment analysis

Why? Outcomes in S&M impact top-line, output is measurable & deployments are visible (to customers & management)

The best anecdote (highlighted below) says:

"If I buy a tool to help my team work faster, how do I quantify that impact? How do I justify it to my CEO when it won't directly move revenue or decrease measurable costs? I could argue it helps our scientists get their tools faster, but that's several degrees removed from bottom-line impact."

As you’d expect - front office is a LOT of show - AI is unlocking real gains in the back office (more on this later)

Let’s start by seeing what Product Principles a startup needs to follow in order to succeed:

India’s ₹70,000 paints industry has shrunk for the first time

Market leader Asian Paints has several problems at hand: Revenue remains flat, a legal suit from Birla Opus and the merger of JSW Paints & AzkoNobel (Dulux)

Analysts had dismissed Birla Opus saying it would get ~2% market share; the company is at > 8% market share in less than 2 years of launch.

Asian Paints has started to show some signs of recovery - Q1 FY26 PAT was ~₹1,000 crore i.e. over 50% higher than Q4 FY25

But, the story is yet to fully unfold⤵️ Asian Paints grew to dominate the industry with a 50%+ market share because it did a few things right:

(1) Installed Tinting Machines at distributor's shops

Asian Paints discovered early that installation of tinting machines helps increase throughput per dealer by 3x; they were the 1st to install these machines at distribution points

(2) Repeatedly won over hearts & minds with Marketing

From Gattu (1954) with cartoonist RK Lakshman to “Don’t lose your temper, use tractor distemper” to the legendary 2002 TVC :Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai” - Asian Paints dominated share of mind

(3) Enforced Working Capital discipline across its distribution network via the Regular payment performance discount (RPPD)

Asian Paints gave discounts for early re-payments by distributors; 3.5% rebate for 30 day payment & 5% rebate for 3 day payment. In a low margin industry (< 5%), this was a huge incentive!

Birla Opus took on Asian Paints by using the company’s playbook against itself: