Vivek Gambhir, managing director and CEO of Godrej Consumer Products Ltd (GCPL), expects volume growth for the industry to improve going forward due to efforts being taken to improve liquidity in the market.

“The factor that makes us feel optimistic is a lot of effort to improve liquidity in the market. Hopefully, with further reduction in Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rates, I think liquidity should improve in the market. All of these factors make us believe that the volume growth should be much better for the industry going forward,” he said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

Discussing the Q1 earnings, Gambhir said, “June was definitely much stronger than April and May. Definitely, I feel that things have bottomed down and going forward given the actions that we are planning along with our new innovations focus, things should be much better in the quarters ahead as far as India is concerned.”

“Internationally we delivered a constant currency growth of 9 percent where I think Indonesia has been steady, though slightly below expectations. Africa had some challenges, but the team is taking lots of corrective actions to get growth back into double digits,” he added.

Gambhir believes that the pickup in monsoon will alleviate rural stress. “The consumption slowdown has been persisting over the last 6-9 months, but hopefully with the kind of pickup that we have seen in the monsoon over the last couple of weeks, that should alleviate some of the rural stress which is one of the biggest factors as far as the slowdown was concerned."

Speaking about price cuts, Gambhir said, “For insecticides, we have already taken some price cuts in certain parts of India. We will keep on evaluating it. On the soap segment, we have already taken enough pricing cuts. Let us see how the demand environment pans out. On the hair colour side, we do not expect too many pricing actions. However, in insecticides, certainly, we will evaluate and see how the demand environment pans out.”