Bosch eyes to enter every Indian home: Neeraj Bahl, MD & CEO, BSH Home Appliances (India & SAARC)

European home appliances firm BSH Home Appliances Group is going big on the mass premium segment in the country under Bosch, even as its premium and luxury range under Siemens and Gaggenau respectively, continues to expand and grow. Neeraj Bahl, MD & CEO, BSH Home Appliances (India & SAARC) tells Shubhra Tandon that the company is eyeing a 3x growth in value terms by 2026 in India, and has an ambition to enter every Indian household starting with cook top to refrigerators. Excerpts:

Under the Bosch brand we will be introducing a lot of new products in 2023 and in 2024.

What are the gaps in the Indian market for BSH Home Appliances that the company is looking to fill?

We want to take leadership position in washing machines and be in the top two players in the next three years. We are not present in the biggest segment itself which is semi-automatic, that stands at a tall 55% of the Indian market. We will be entering the segment in 2023. The second gap is the single door refrigerator, and we are seriously contemplating launching that from our Chennai frost free factory, provided it makes commercial sense, because single door is always struggling on margins as there is hardly any cost difference between manufacturing of a single door and a frost free.

What is the strategy in India with the three brands that you have here and growth targets?

We intend to grow 3x in terms of value in the next four years in the India market from where we are right now. That will not be possible only with our global portfolio, so it is very clear strategy that we enter India with three brands — Bosch for mass premium, Siemens for premium and Gaggenau will be luxury. Under the Bosch brand we will be introducing a lot of new products in 2023 and in 2024. In the small appliances category we have already entered the hand blenders, we have a road map for free standing coffee machines and also hand stick vacuum cleaners, because that is a big market as well. Right now our products are confined to only 5% of the top Indian households, so the overall pie has to increase.

Your competitors are going towards premiumisation, while you are moving a notch below. Why is that?

We have our premium-ness maintained in Siemens, and luxury maintained in Gaggenau. Premium will remain premium and will grow 30–40% year after year for us, but we are absent from mass premium, so we are trying to enter that segment under Bosch, because the kind of volume growth we aim for will only be possible if we are democratising premium.

What kind of investments are you looking at in India in terms of capacity expansions?

We have already done investments in our Chennai factory this year of close to €15 million. It entails capacity expansion of our laundry business from 300,000 to 600,000 for front load washing machines. We are also shifting our platform for 9 and 10 kg machine to India which was getting imported so far from Make in India perspective and enhance our localisation to 75% to 80%. Also, a small part of the investment is for the new cook top range that we are launching now.

Bosch is launching products in the Indian market which is not part of its global portfolio. What are the reasons?

India is a different market. Top load washing machines for instance still continue to be the biggest contributor to sales of fully automatics, and delta is almost three times. We call it Asian top loads and those are not our global products, so we do not manufacture in our factory, but get get it manufactured. In future, we can think of exporting it to SAARC countries from India if demand is there, however, majority of the market in SAARC is also front load.

What is the plan with the new cook top range?

Cook top is the first product any Indian family buys for all the reasons — traditional, religious and the need for it. It is a 50 million units market. Bosch’s dream has been to enter every Indian household whether from mixer grinder, to our washing machines, but this can be the first product from Bosch in every Indian household. We can leverage on our premium kitchen where we are the leaders in the built-in segment. Our three burner range starts from 13,990, which is slightly higher than the7,000-Rs 9,000 products from competition but it has premium features like brass burners from Sabaf, apart from a few other patented features.

What is the importance of India in the global business of BSH Appliances?

We are on track with our €500 million Euro ambition on revenue is concerned for 2025–2026. India becomes a very important market for our global range and board also because India is growing at fastest speed and one of the major markets after China. We also come under emerging markets region in our scope of things and in the region also we are number two player for our region, so India remains top priority for Bosch for marketing and investments and the overall scope of things. Our contribution to overall revenue is small, but it is growing. Globally, our major contributor to turnover was the cooling category and the results are similar in India too where the category grew at over 55% in 2021. In the laundry category, while we grew over 9.3% globally, in India we witnessed double-digit growth at 15% plus.