Titan Company Ltd is a joint venture between the Tata Group and Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO), having commenced operations in 1984 under the name of Titan Watches Ltd. It is the fifth largest integrated own brand watch manufacturer in the world. Over the last three decades, Titan has expanded and explored into under-penetrated markets and created leading brands across categories. The World of Titan is an exclusive chain of Titan stores with over 1,480 stores and a presence in over 120 cities. It is India’s largest watch retailer. The company brought about a paradigm shift in the Indian watch market by offering quartz technology with international styling being manufactured in a state-of-the-art factory at Hosur in Tamil Nadu. The company’s main watch brands are Titan, Sonata and Fastrack among others, with over 60% market share in the domestic watch market. Titan has diversified into jewellery, eyewear, perfumes and precision engineering segments. The company’s flagship jewellery brand Tanishq offers a premium range of gold jewellery studded with diamonds and precious and semi-precious stones. Its platinum jewellery business division is also a growing segment within the space. On the other hand, the Titan Eye division offers a variety of differentiated products to the consumers consisting of frames, lenses, contact lenses and accessories. The company has manufacturing facilities at Hosur, Dehradun, Roorkee, Pantnagar and an electronics component manufacturing plant in Goa. Its business performance for the financial year 2017-18 has been remarkable in terms of excellent sales and profits. It recorded a top line growth of 205% on a stand-alone basis, with an income of Rs 15,655 crore for the year ended March 2018. This performance came in the backdrop of a changing environment and regulatory moves like GST implementation. Its total income for Q4FY18 stood at Rs 3,916 crore, against Rs 3,538 crore of last year, registering a growth of 10.72%. Its stand-alone profit before tax for FY17-18 was extremely encouraging and grew by 520% to Rs 1,571 crore, while net profit stood at Rs 1,163 crore, registering a growth of 526%. The key highlights of the year were encouraging growth in the modern large format stores and e-commerce. The year also witnessed aggressive expansion of its retail network with a net addition of 114 stores by watches, jewellery and eyewear businesses. As of March 2018, Titan has 1,480 stores with over 19 million sq ft of retail space.
Rajiv Kapoor is a share broker, certified mutual fund expert and MDRT insurance agent.