1. At a Glance – The Comeback Kid With a Screwdriver 🛠️
Eureka Forbes Ltd, once the door-to-door RO salesman of Indian households, is now a ₹9,732 Cr market cap consumer durables company trading at ₹502, nursing a –8% three-month return and a P/E of ~50x. Expensive? Yes. Interesting? Also yes.
The latest Q3 FY26 numbers came in with ₹645.4 Cr revenue (+8% YoY) and PAT of ₹46.1 Cr (+32% YoY), despite a one-time labour code impact of ₹40.4 Cr. Operating margins cooled slightly to 10.45%, but context matters — this company was operating at ~6% margins in FY23. That’s not a typo.
The bigger headline?
This is no longer a leveraged, bloated, SKU-obsessed dinosaur.
Post Advent International’s takeover in 2022, Eureka Forbes has:
- Cut SKUs from ~200 to ~80
- Launched 30 new products in FY25
- Turned ₹177 Cr debt (FY22) into ₹695 Cr net cash
- Expanded service reach to 19,500+ pin codes
- Built a 14 million+ customer database
So the market isn’t paying 50x for the past.
It’s paying for a cleaned-up balance sheet, annuity AMC revenue, and robotic vacuum dreams.
But is the dream priced too perfectly already?
Let’s open the machine.
2. Introduction – From Doorbells to Data Warehouses 🔔➡️📊
If you grew up in India, Eureka Forbes didn’t need marketing.
The salesman rang your bell. Repeatedly.
For decades, the company lived off Aquaguard, emotional water purity ads, and aggressive doorstep selling. Then came private labels, RO commoditisation, Amazon, Chinese vacuums, and margin compression. By FY22, Eureka Forbes was bloated, indebted, and stuck in low-return territory.
Enter Advent International in 2022, paying ₹4,400 Cr to acquire the business from the Shapoorji Pallonji Group. This wasn’t nostalgia investing. This was a classic PE cleanup job.
What followed was ruthless:
- Product rationalisation
- Cost control
- Distribution re-engineering
- Focus on services & AMCs
- Push into higher ASP categories like robotic vacuum cleaners
The result?
Sales growth is steady, not
explosive — 11% TTM — but profit growth is doing parkour, up 37% TTM and 183% over five years.
Still, ROE is a sleepy 3.7%, ROCE just 5%, and promoter pledge sits at a spicy 53.7%.
So the story isn’t clean yet.
But it’s definitely no longer dirty water.
3. Business Model – WTF Do They Even Do? 🚿🌀😷
Eureka Forbes is not one business. It’s four revenue engines taped together.
1️⃣ Water Purifiers – The OG Cash Machine
Contributes 42% of FY24 revenue.
Brands: Aquaguard, Aquasure, Aquaguard Select
Market share north of 40%, but this is also the most competitive segment. Margins are okay, growth is modest, and differentiation is increasingly service-led rather than product-led.
2️⃣ Services & AMC – The Sneaky Profit Engine
36% of revenue and rising.
This is where things get spicy.
Annual Maintenance Contracts are recurring, sticky, high-margin, and data-rich. With 14 million+ customers, Eureka Forbes basically owns India’s largest water-purifier CRM database.
If consumer durables are a one-night stand, AMCs are a long marriage.
3️⃣ Vacuum Cleaners – From Dust to Dollars
14% of revenue, but fast changing.
Traditional vacuum cleaners are okay.
Robotic vacuum cleaners are the plot twist.
In H1 FY26, robotic vacuums contributed 59% of vacuum cleaner sales
