Sanjay K Pillai

Chennai, 18 December

ITC Ltd's greeting cards business unit is aiming to more than double its market share in the next fiscal. The strategic business unit (SBU) which retails its cards under the "Expressions" brand name currently has a five per cent share of the Rs 300 crore per annum Indian greeting cards market.

The company will also soon be entering the vernacular language card market in a big way, a senior official of the company said.

ITC Ltd. greeting cards business, chief executive, Chandan Das said the division was aiming at market leadership in the next five years, which is dominated currently by `Archies' with a 40 per cent market share. "We in ITC have set a clear target that we need to be market leaders in all the businesses that we are in. In the greeting cards division we are looking at a market share between 10 to 15 per cent in the next year" Das said.

The Indian greeting card industry has grown at a CAGR of about 15 per cent in the last ten years. ITC has been very effectively using its massive distribution strength to retail its cards and is now present in over 500 locations across the country. While the SBU expects to break even only in the next three years on the anvil are forays into the vernacular greeting card market and stationery. "We are planning to bring out routine day to day cards in vernacular languages. This is a big market and it is waiting to be opened up" he said.

The SBU he said would be entering the Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bengal and the four southern state markets by the middle of next year. "There is a need for greeting cards in vernacular languages and we plan to meet it in a sustained manner". The greeting card industry's biggest costs are design and distribution. On the design front ITC has outsourced most of its needs and now has a library of more than 4,500 designs. On the distribution side the SBU has been able to completely web enable operations and has achieved considerable savings in time. "Now retailers have just to log in to our web site and choose the designs that they want and we get to save tremendously on time as earlier we were couriering the design brochures" Das pointed out. The SBU has completely outsourced its logistics needs to the Singapore based Semb Corp and plans to continue retailing through multibrand shops.

The business unit is also planning to branch out into stationery in the next fiscal. "Stationery is a very logical extension of the business that we are in and we plan to retail notebooks and address book and the like in the next year" he said.