Expect 10% volume growth ahead: Dabur India

Dabur India's third quarter consolidated net profit rose 12% from a year ago to Rs 172.82 crore. The FMCG company reported higher-than-expected 34.5% year-on-year rise in consolidated net sales at Rs 1,452.68 crore in the October-December quarter.

In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Sunil Duggal, chief executive officer of Dabur says, the company expects 10% volume growth in the coming quarters. He also expects margins to improve in the Q1 of next year. Below is the edited transcript of his interview with CNBC-TV18's Udayan Mukherjee and Sonia Shenoy. Also watch the accompanying video. Q: Your margins have come under pressure in the current quarter. Can you take us through why it happened and whether you see sustained pressure going forward? A: Inflation, atleast in the Q3, continues to be pretty adverse. Coupled with that was very unexpected depreciation of the rupee. That put further pressure on margins. Having said that, both these factors seem to be disappearing a bit with the rupee strengthening and the inflation seems to be tapering off a bit. So, with a bit of a lag perhaps in the Q1 of next year, we should see some margin improvement happening. Q: What kind of volume growth you did this particular quarter? What could you extrapolate for the second half of the fiscal? Do you think you get back to those high single digits volume growth? A: We have done a bit better than that. The 21% growth, net of the acquired businesses, is driven by 11% volume and 10% by price. Going forward, the pricing component will go down because the pace of price increase is going to now dramatically come down. So, therefore, the volume growth should continue at the current pace. We do look forward to around 10% volume growth happening even in the coming quarters. Q: Can you split that up between categories and tell us what will drive that 10% volume growth? A: It comes from different categories at different times. There is not any firm pattern there. But the high growth drivers in this quarter have been the healthcare piece, the supplements, the digestives. The food business continues to fire very consistently and there have been pockets of growth in HPC, particularly in hair care, shampoos has revived considerably. So, most categories have done pretty well. Q: What about the international business, what kind of growth are you looking at over there? A: For the non acquired business, we would look at growth somewhere between 20-25%. I think that level of consistency growth we should be able to generate over the next few quarters. Layer on to that will be growth from the acquired businesses and that would be little bit ahead of this. So, sum total around 25% growth in international business is something which we believe we can deliver. It