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Informist, Friday, Aug. 14, 2026

By Rajesh Gajra and Shakshi Jain

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI - The buoyancy Voltas Ltd. saw in the room air conditioners segment within the unitary cooling product segment in the June quarter was not seen in the other two categories, commercial refrigeration and commercial air conditioning category, a senior official of the company said in a post-earnings conference call with investors and analysts Friday. The commercial refrigeration category includes deep freezer water coolers and dispensers, while the commercial air conditioning category covers ducted variable refrigerant flow products and chillers, he said.

Steep price hikes were the main reason why these two commercial segment categories recorded a muted performance in the June quarter, the company said. In commercial refrigeration, particularly, the prices "... went up a little more significantly like for freezers by 10%, of water coolers by around 15%, and water dispensers again by 10%," a senior official said. "So very steep price increases, cost increases forced all the major brands to increase selling prices... and probably the channel was not fully ready to absorb that cost, so they played the wait and watch game," he said.

In commercial refrigeration, the industry "seems to have declined by around 15% or so, and I think we did a little better than that, I suppose, compared to that," the official said. Going forward, the company expects things to settle down if the channel accepts the fact that there is no other way to manage but pass the costs, he said. In the overall unitary cooling products segment, the company weathered the impact of input cost inflation during the June quarter better than peers, he said.

In the room air conditioners category too, the company saw two factors at play. "One was the there was a table change which happened and that took up the prices of all the 3-star ACs by roughly 5% and the 5-star by 15%, a weighted average of somewhere around 7-8%," a senior official said. Commodity price increase, rupee depreciation, increase in ocean freight charges, and some increase in plastic costs made up the second factor, he said.

This led to an increase of 10-12% in overall costs, and Voltas passed on very close to this, "maybe a percentage or two less," the official said. The company had "a reasonable stock of these units before all these disturbances started and we were blessed with the fact that we did not have any disruption in our production during the peak summer months," he said.

The company said it had ramped up its production capacity in room air conditioners before the summer season started. In terms of own manufacturing and outsourcing portion in room air conditioner manufacturing, the company said for split air conditioners, it will continue with broadly 75% own manufacturing and 25% outsourcing. But in the case of window air conditioners, which make up for around 10% of the company's room air conditioner sales during the peak summer season, it will continue to fully outsource the manufacturing, a senior official said.

Earlier on Friday, Voltas announced it had signed a binding term sheet with air conditioner compressor motor specialist manufacturer Atomberg Technologies Ltd.'s subsidiary to establish a joint venture company, on an equal shareholding basis, for manufacturing in India high efficiency room air conditioner compressors and parts related to such compressors. Addressing questions on this joint venture in the conference call, a senior official said this was a major step to secure the supply chain of such compressors. "We did not want to leave this very important component unhinged," he said.

Post execution of definitive agreements between Voltas and Atomberg, it is expected to take 18 months for the joint venture to start full-fledged commercial production, the official said. Though the terms are not finalised yet, Voltas would ideally want the capital expenditure for the setting up and maintenance of the joint venture's manufacturing facilities to be split equally between the two partners, he said. The joint venture was necessitated since Voltas has "never gone into a component manufacturing so far", and does not manufacture air conditioner compressor motors on its own, the official said.

For the June quarter, Voltas reported a consolidated net profit of INR 2.14 billion, up over 52% on year. Its consolidated revenue from operations rose 19% on year to INR 46.74 billion for the three months. On Friday, shares of the company ended at INR 1,320.50 on the National Stock Exchange, up 2.4% from Thursday.  End

Edited by Avishek Dutta

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