One of India’s Largest and Market-Leading FMCG Company

INTRODUCTION

“ITC is one of India’s largest FMCG market-leading companies since a long time and a brand old Indian conglomerate industry that has a presence in various sectors of the economy which includes manufacturing, agriculture, food, services, paper manufacturing, Packaging so on. The main headquarter of the company is in Kolkata, West Bengal India. The company was founded by Yogi Deveshwar. ITC is engaged in redefining its business model and sharpening its market innovation up to an extremely potential order. Today, ITC holds among the top 10 and most valuable, admiring companies in India and their mission is simple to enhance and create wealth by providing superior value. The company believes in creating mutual understanding as well as the most important thing that is to gain trust for the organization from customers and maintaining their customer relationship management. The company practices innovate in creating better products, services, and management practices for their customers. ITC aims to create various drivers of growth by creating a world-class portfolio that should match with their organizational capability in the both domestic and overseas market”. 

ITC was established on the year 24th August 1910 which was named Imperial Tobacco Company. The main operation of the business was to distribute and supply the tobacco products such as cigarettes, tobacco so on. In 1974, the company had abbreviated its name as Indian Tobacco Company. After that, in the year 1985, the company started to expand as well as diversify their business in neighboring countries such as Nepal and Bhutan. Later, ITC became one of the major players in the hotel chain industry and even today they even have more than 100+ hotel chains dominating the market.    

ITC Journey 

The journey of ITC Ltd started with the tobacco business. Since the company was very much dependent on Horticulture assets, they used to outsource their leaf tobacco from the ranchers of the southern part of India. The main production and processing plant of cigarettes was installed in Bangalore in 1913. Leaf tobacco was used as the main component to manufacture cigarettes and their manufacturing plant was at Munger with their own printing office installed in 1925. The company almost took six years to build that essence and devoted their time, effort to establish tobacco organizations through which the company entered printing and bundling business in the same year along with the cigarettes business. Even today, it is one of the largest complex bundling houses ever, and slowly over the years more and more numbers, industrial facilities were established. 

In the year 1928, ‘Virgin House’ started as the main organization central command at Calcutta. The ITC soon realized that to further modify and fortify its essence, they acquired Carreras Tobacco Company at Khidirpur, West Bengal. In 1946, they set up the paper production plant to minimize the import costs and the printing and bundling industry at Madras 1949. After four years, the company obtained its integral printing business ltd in 1953. As soon as one year had passed, the organization became a public limited company as ITC Ltd in 1954. The Initial move was taken by ITC Ltd with its objective to gain 6% of the Indian shareholding of the organization because they realized that they must give prior more importance and concentration on their innovation skills. ITC developed a shareholding component from 6% to 25% through which they entered brand sponsorship. In the year 1973, the company incorporated their research labs and they have further gone for expansion of some innovative work at Bangalore for bringing unique enhancement designs, logo, printing and soon their shareholding aspect increased to 40%. Later on, the company created a tourism industry framework for further expansion and boosting of the business to a greater extent. The shareholding aspect increased furthermore from 40% to 60% and with that more no of lodges were introduced in upcoming years. In the year 1986, ITC ltd made some of the largest moves of establishing 4 new organizations such as ITC Hotels Limited, ITC Classic Finance Limited, ITC Agro Tech Limited, and last but not the least cooking Oil industry such as ‘sun drop’. 

In 1996, YC Deveshwar had taken over the company’s administrator, and later on, a new corporate structure was adopted and reframed for its successful administration. 

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ITC Products 

India’s most valuable brand ITC has a wide broad diversified portfolio of their business. The products which are used to offer that contribute their success and they are as follows: –

• Cigarettes: ITC is incredibly famous for selling major brands of Cigarettes such as gold flake superstar, Wills Navy Cut, Silk Cut, India Kings, and so on.
• Packaged/ Prepared foods: In this context, we can say that ITC is ranked among the first in terms of packaged food brands such as Bingo, Sun feast Yippee noodles, Ashirwad Multigrain Atta, Maida, etc.
• Lifestyle Clothing: ITC sells its lifestyle clothing to targeted customers The brands are John Players, Will Lifestyle, and so on.
• Skin and Beauty care: ITC is also taking care of skincare products for their customer’s brands such as Fiama Di Wills, Vivel, Fiama Di Wills Shower Gels, and Superia.
• Stationery products: ITC also understands the student’s education and it is important to provide high-quality paper products such as Classmate’s notebooks, papercraft, Colour crew, pens, pencils, eraser, etc. 
• Matchsticks: ITC also provides the best quality red fire matchsticks such as AIM that can ignite fire very easily.
• License Sticks: ITC provides license sticks or aggravates for housewives and other people who worship gods, goddesses such as Mangal deeps, Temples, etc.
• Lodgings: ITC is already engaged in the hotel industry platform for many years and is recognized as India’s second-biggest network such as ITC Sonar Bangla, Fortune parks, and so on.
• Data Research and Technology: ITC infotech operates the entire business sector of every organization and maintains data records.

ITC Pricing and Promotion Strategy 

1. Pricing Strategy 

The pricing strategy of ITC Limited and as we are aware of it that the company is involved in various business interests and faces a lot of competition to sustain and survive in the market. ITC Ltd wants to upgrade the market segment in such a manner so that it can create its presence over India by introducing reasonable pricing policies. Some of the special luxurious products such as Sunfeast Digestive, all-rounder products, the company introduced new premium pricing policies to ensure that the company must generate enough volume of sales that can help the company to generate more revenue out of it and it can also add benefit satisfaction to customers. Similarly, the company adopted different pricing policies for different products (not premium) to generate more sales and revenue. 

Example of the Bingo Mad Angles packet product. When the Bingo product first entered the market, it adopted an aggressive pricing strategy at a reasonable price to capture the market by offering more quantity and more margin rates to retailers, distributors which gave them a unique competitive advantage. 

Since its products are sold in every retail store, the place also plays an important role to ensure that its demand must be huge enough to target customers including children, young adults, and so on. In this way only they can maintain their customer base at every place. 

2. Promotion Strategy

The promotional strategies of ITC Limited. In this case, the company must create and maintain its promotional strategy by keeping all the points clearly in mind to have a target audience and brand equity. The company used to promote its products with the help of social media platforms such as television, printing, Facebook to establish the main brand essence and to expand its product portfolio. 

The example of social media campaigns and advertisements of products to create better visibility of products such as celebrities. 

Competitors of ITC

The competitors of ITC Limited which is an Indian Conglomerate Company and facing large competition in the market. The main competitors are:

FMCG 

1. Nestle
2. Procter and Gamble P&G
3. Dabur 
4. Colgate 
5. L’Oréal

HOTELS

1. Taj Hotels
2. Oberoi group of hotels 
3. Novotel Hotels 

CIGARETTES

1. Golden Tobacco Company
2. Marlboro 

SWOT ANALYSIS

1. Strengths 

• ITC has a particularly good strong brand essence
• Various product diversification 
• Excellent research 
• Great and deeper distribution channel

2. Weaknesses 

•  The increasing tax rate on tobacco products
• ITC is dependent on Tobacco and customers have cheap alternatives 
• Hotel industries must capture a tremendous market share 
• Data reliability 

3. Opportunities  

• Various mergers and acquisitions take place to enhance brand
• The purchasing power of customers increases to stimulate demand
• There is more publicity in the hotel chain industry to enhance market share 
• Excellent in food processing and Hygiene factor.

4. Threats

•  Market competition is tremendous high from domestic and international 
•  Government regulations and policies 
• The audience is not there so much to capture Rural Market 
• Imitation of content 

CONCLUSION 

The ITC Limited is the leading FMCG sector in the domestic market and has been excellent in developing essence and customer base for many years. Although the company has various competitors and has to maintain its reputation and be consistent enough with its work. ITC is the leader in the FMCG portfolio, and it is successful enough to enduring value.

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