Eveready Q1 FY27: Revenue Up 9% to ₹407.7 Cr, a Jammu Alkaline Plant That Woke Up on 29 May, and 1.3 Billion Cells a Year

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1. At a Glance

Revenue of ₹407.71 crore for the quarter ended 30 June 2026, up 9.0% on ₹374.14 crore a year earlier. Operating Profit ₹61.21 crore against ₹53.68 crore. Net profit ₹36.97 crore against ₹30.23 crore. EPS ₹5.09 against ₹4.16, not annualised, as the filing takes care to point out twice in the same table in case anyone got excited.

Management described this as the seventh consecutive quarter of year-on-year revenue growth — a streak counted with the quiet pride of a company that has been selling the same cylindrical object since 1934 and has learned to celebrate carefully.

The quarter’s operational headline arrived on 29 May 2026, when commercial production began at the Jammu alkaline battery facility, installed capacity 456 million units a year. Batteries grew 11.9% to ₹267.6 crore. Lighting grew 13.7% to ₹87.5 crore. Flashlights fell 6.7% to ₹63.0 crore, which management attributed to soft demand and a delayed monsoon — the rare business where the rain not arriving on schedule shows up in a segment table.

Other Income for the quarter was ₹0.26 crore, a figure so small it barely qualifies as income and is closer to a rounding gesture. This matters because the previous quarter’s Other Income was ₹103.34 crore. Zinc, the raw material that makes the whole enterprise possible, sat at roughly USD 3,500 per ton against under USD 3,000 a year earlier, per the CEO.

Sitting behind all of it: a CCI penalty of ₹171.55 crore, stayed, unprovided, with a hearing date in the last week of September.

2. Introduction

Incorporated in 1934, Eveready Industries India Limited has been putting portable electricity into Indian hands for over ninety years, which means it predates the Republic it sells into. The brand’s older tagline, “Give Me Red,” achieved the rare status of being understood by people who could not name a single other battery company. In 2023 it became “Give Me Power, Give Me Red,” alongside a new infinity logo and the Ultima alkaline range — a rebrand that added words rather than replacing them, in the manner of a company that knows exactly how much equity is sitting in the original three.

The controlling shareholder is the Burman family — the Dabur promoters — who announced an open offer at ₹320 per share on 28 February 2022 for a 26% holding, a year and a half after becoming the largest shareholder in what was then a Brij Mohan Khaitan family-controlled company. Dr Anand C. Burman is Chairman. The statutory promoter table still lists the legacy Khaitan and Williamson Magor entities, including McLeod Russel India at 2.29% — a shareholding pattern that reads like two eras sharing a lift.

The company’s recent history includes an episode that still shapes the balance sheet’s memory: during FY21 a provision of ₹489 crore was created against inter-corporate deposits given to certain promoter-group companies, along with a ₹68 crore write-off of accrued interest and recoverables. That is why the Other Income line for FY21 in the long-run P&L reads minus ₹628.36 crore, a number that arrives in a column of single digits like a piano through a ceiling.

Since then the arc has been rationalisation. The Noida operation was closed during FY26; leasehold rights including built-up structures and fittings were transferred, generating exceptional income of about ₹105.2 crore in Q4 FY26. A February 2026 filing put the Noida leasehold land sale at ₹251.55 crore with completion expected by 30 September 2026, and the CFO noted on the August call that of two plots, one has been executed and the second should close shortly. Production has been consolidating into fewer, larger sites while Jammu was built — roughly ₹200 crore of greenfield, inaugurated 22 April 2026.

3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?

They sell you a thing that runs out. Then they sell it to you again. Approximately 1.3 billion times a year.

Eveready makes dry-cell batteries under Eveready, Powercell and Uniross, and FY26 revenue split three ways: batteries 65%, lighting and electricals 23%, flashlights 12%. Within batteries, carbon-zinc is the volume base — the mass-market, replacement-demand workhorse with a 58.4% share — while alkaline is the premium end, share 16.5% in FY26 and, per the Q1 FY27 presentation, about 18% now. The CEO’s framing for why households need better chemistry is the most cheerfully specific piece of consumer research in the deck: remotes and wall clocks are giving way to “toys, blood pressure machines and optical mouses.” An entire capital-allocation thesis resting on the domestic drift from clock to mouse.

Flashlights: more than 17 million units a year, and by Q1 FY27 the portfolio was split 50/50 between battery-operated and rechargeable by value, up from a rechargeable-heavy tilt of ~54% in the FY26 Q4 mix. Rechargeable revenue grew 20%+. There is now a hybrid torch — patent applied — that is rechargeable and takes conventional batteries, which is either elegant engineering or a company hedging against its own product roadmap. There is also the SHOR farm-protection flashlight, which pairs a 100-decibel alarm with a red UV strobe to deter animals; somewhere a product manager successfully argued that what the Indian torch market needed was volume in the audio sense.

Lighting and electricals is the third leg: LED bulbs and battens, emergency LEDs, downlights and panels, consumer and professional luminaires, festive lighting, MCBs, wires and accessories, roughly 36 million LED products a year. Within the Q1 FY27 lighting mix, emergency LED is 33%, professional luminaire 15%, luminaire 13%, other LED and accessories 39%. Adjacencies keep arriving through the same pipes — mosquito racquets, power banks, mobile accessories, small appliances, and a first-of-its-kind patent-applied portable rechargeable liquid mosquito vaporizer, because a company that already owns the socket and the battery has decided it may as well own the mosquito.

The physical machinery: plants at Matia, Lucknow, Haridwar, Maddur, Kolkata and now Jammu, with capacity for 2,250 million batteries and 12.7 million flashlights annually. Distribution is the moat management points