Kallam Reddy
Analyst · Saion Mukherjee from Nomura
Okay the growth has been disappointing, yes. We indicate that nothing should improve from this year -- this financial year onwards, but quarter 1 results have not certainly reflected that, all right? So we do expect a sense of disappointment toward that. So if you -- looking to the some of the reasons why and what do we expect going forward -- so we will simply look at some initiative we have undertaken about, say, 2 years back. One was field force expansion. We also wanted to redeploy some of the peoples of Albany. But I think the deployment after the expansion have not yielded that sales increases that we expected it would, right, so that's one issue which need to be still tackled. And we're still working on it, right, so that's one. After that initiative goal, the expansion to rural markets while the [indiscernible] there was a good scale-up in the previous year. There's been some issues with that in terms of field source, attrition and things like that, which was somewhat beyond our control, right, but that's something we also had to anticipate. So I mean, while these are 2 primary reasons in terms of where we have seen -- first quarter was also hit with somewhat lower growth in some of the top brands, so that's another issue. So these are broadly what I see as the issues for the first quarter compared to, say, what we anticipated in the previous quarter. Now while we -- while it's work in progress in terms of trying to sort of the execution issues, I would expect that things to start looking up in the second quarter -- sorry, in the second half of the year, right, so this will be based on some of the interventions, which we have started plugging in early enough this quarter. But again, I would still like to see the performance of the second quarter. Once that improves, I would be able to comment more on that. I will be able to say with much more confidence on what happens in the second half, which I'm sure will definitely start recovering.