“Natural segment continues to plateau and has even started to decline a little bit. A segment which got a little bit of a fillip due to Covid has now gone back to levels that are about three years earlier,” Colgate India managing director and CEO Prabha Narasimhan said on an analyst call. “We firmly believe that consumers buy benefits and are very confident of our ability to deliver all benefits across the entire oral care spectrum.”
Between 2016 and 2019, the natural market was on an upswing and it grew by 900 basis points. However, since 2020, it has plateaued and fell 40 bps last quarter. However, Colgate Palmolive India said its own natural portfolio continues to grow.
The maker of the eponymous toothpaste controls about half the oral care market. It lost share to the Baba Ramdev-led Patanjali in the oral care segment as consumers shifted to natural products. While Colgate has been selling herbal variants such as salt, neem and clove in the country, it also launched Vedshakti ayurvedic toothpaste to regain the lost market share.
By volume, the country’s overall toothpaste market was down 2-3% in the March quarter due to a slowdown in rural areas. Colgate said its strategy is to grow ahead of the market and a high single-digit sales growth in FY24 looks feasible.
Oral care consumption in India is low. Other developing markets such as the Philippines and Brazil, respectively, consume 1.8 times and 3.1 times more oral care products than India despite their much smaller population. Within India, more than half the rural population do not brush daily while 20% of consumers in cities brush just once, indicating growth potential.
