A 'healthy' growth in cigarettes vertical helped ITC beat earnings estimates

ITC on Wednesday posted an 11.7 per cent rise in consolidated net profit during Q4FY22, at Rs 4,196 crore, as against Rs 3,755 crore recorded in the year ago period.

On quarter on quarter basis, the profit rose 3.4 per cent.

The company's earnings beats estimates of several market analysts.

Besides, consolidated revenue rose 15.3 per cent on year to Rs 17,754 crore as compared to Rs 15,404 crore a year-ago.

On a QoQ basis, however, the revenue declined 3.3 per cent.

The better performance was pushed by healthy growth across its business of cigarettes, FMCG, hotels, and paperboards.

Robust broad-based recovery in cigarettes business was witnessed despite disruptions due to the third wave and volumes too surpassed pre-pandemic levels.

For entire fiscal FY22, the consolidated profit after tax grew 15.8 per cent to Rs 15,243 crore year on year, and consolidated revenues jumped 22.7 per cent to Rs 65,205 crore.

After a challenging FY2020-21, and despite repeated disruptions this year, the business progressively recovered on the back of improved mobility and easing of restrictions, surpassing pre-pandemic levels in the latter half of the year.

ITC effectively leveraged institutional strengths, digital technologies and learnings from previous waves to respond with agility across all nodes of operations.

The company recommended a final dividend of Rs 6.25 per share for FY22, which will be paid between July 22-26, 2022. This is in addition to the interim dividend of Rs 5.25 per share declared earlier this year.

The company said it remains focused on building purpose-led brands powered by agile innovation and anchored on larger consumer needs. The businesses continue to increasingly leverage 'Sixth Sense', the Marketing Command Centre and Consumer Data Hub - an AI powered hyper-personalised platform backed by a robust partner ecosystem for content and data - to gain insights on market trends and consumer behaviour, and synthesise the same to craft contextual and hyper-personalised brand communication and product development, it added.

In order to effectively leverage new routes-to-markets and meet the assortment needs of emerging channels, the company executed over 110 new product launches across target markets.

The robust innovation platforms of the Company's Life Sciences and Technology Centre (LSTC) were instrumental in accelerating speed to market.

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