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The Weekend Playlist
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Good morning.
This week’s interviews return to an old business question: what makes something travel?
For Sharad Malhotra, the answer lies in channels, product credibility and local manufacturing reach, as Nippon Paint looks at a market where both homes and industrial users are asking for more specialised products. For Imtiaz Ali, it was the audience. His film gathered strength because viewers trusted it enough to recommend it to others.
Both conversations point to the same larger idea: growth does not come only from having a large market. It comes from understanding how that market actually behaves.
WEEKEND EDITION
The Paint Market’s New Coat
Why has one of India’s quietest consumer-industrial sectors suddenly become so crowded?
In this episode of Weekend Edition, Govindraj Ethiraj speaks with Sharad Malhotra of Nippon Paint India, about why India’s ₹80,000-crore paint industry is drawing large business houses, private capital and new capacity.
The answer lies in the gap between what India consumes today and what it could consume as incomes, housing, infrastructure and manufacturing expand. Malhotra points out that India’s per capita paint use is still only a fraction of developed markets, while the industry remains heavily tilted towards decorative paints.
For Nippon, that creates two opportunities at once: build a wider consumer brand across India, and use its industrial coatings strength in areas such as automobiles, railways, wood coatings and specialised surfaces. Growth, therefore, depends on products, factories, channel partners and localised supply chains moving together.
Key Insight
India’s paint opportunity is not just larger volumes, but a shift towards products that solve for heat, durability, odour, hygiene and speed.
THE CORE QUIZ
In which year did the Indian govt pass the MGNREGA? |
THE MEDIA ROOM
When The Audience Takes Over The Release
Can audiences become a film’s most powerful distribution channel?
In this episode of The Media Room, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar speaks with Imtiaz Ali about Main Wapas Aunga, its unusual theatrical momentum, and what it reveals about film marketing in a post-COVID media environment.
The conversation moves beyond the idea of a sleeper hit. Ali says the team did not fully know how to promote the film, and that audiences effectively rescued it by bringing others to theatres. For him, marketing is not only a media-buying exercise but also an emotional function. In a world of fragmented feeds and “media bubbles”, the people who follow stars online are not always the people who buy tickets.
Key Insight
Theatrical success may now depend less on opening-day noise and more on whether a film creates enough shared feeling for audiences to become its distribution network.
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The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.
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