Titan Company Ltd (formerly Titan Industries Ltd), on Wednesday, indicated that its proposed retail joint venture (49:51) with Montblanc, German-based pen, watch and leatherwear maker owned by Swiss luxury group Richemont, will take off by early next year.
“The JV operations have not yet started. We are in the process of registering the JV. We hope it will start the operations in January 2015,” said Bhaskar Bhat, Managing Director, Titan Company Ltd., after launching new watch collections at its south India’s largest watch store here.
Titan hoped that the yet-to-be-named single brand retail JV would be a win-win venture and would help it learn about luxury retail from the global brand. Titan is expected to invest close to Rs.100 crore in the JV.
Montblanc already has about 18 stores across India through a distribution agreement. All these stores will come under the JV from January, and it will focus on expanding the further in the subsequent months. Montblanc is presently doing Rs.80-100 crore worth of business. It has estimated that the business potential for its products in India is at least three times more than the current size.
Earlier, Mr. Bhat pointed out that the company saw reasonably good growth in April and May in watch business. It seeks to achieve double-digit growth during the current fiscal as against single-digit rise in the previous fiscal. It is chalking out aggressive new product roll-out plans with a special focus on high-end segment, which is in the price range of Rs.5,000 to Rs.50,000.
It has also planned a capex of about Rs.250 crore to be spent on production as well as retail expansion. About Rs 150 crore is expected to be spent on production ramp up across categories.
He also indicated the company would restart its Golden Harvest scheme, a customer advance scheme of Titan's jewellery division Tanishq, in a right manner soon after approval from the Reserve Bank.
The scheme has been stopped now in view of the new Companies Act 2013. It has about Rs.13 billion under the scheme, and existing scheme would continue. This scheme contributes about 20 per cent to the total sales of jewellery business.
