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1. At a Glance
Revenue for the June 2026 quarter came in at ₹268.63 crore, against ₹528.38 crore a year earlier — a decline of 49.2%. Operating Profit was ₹14.96 crore. PAT attributable to owners was ₹0.46 crore, with EPS of ₹0.02, which is the kind of number that rounds itself out of existence if you look away.
The cause is documented and singular. In February 2026 the Madhya Pradesh Excise Department suspended the manufacturing licence of the company’s Bhopal plant; in June 2026 the application for renewal of the excise licence for FY27 was rejected. The company disclosed it was pursuing legal remedies, and the auditor’s limited review draws attention to Note 4: the renewal process, pursuant to an order of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, is underway.
Meanwhile, in the same quarter, a brand-new brewery started up 700 kilometres away. Woodpecker Green Agri’s Uttar Pradesh facility commenced commercial production on 10 June 2026, adding 10 million cases of annual beer capacity. A company with four breweries spent the quarter running three of them — which is a sentence about geography, licensing and timing all at once, and beer companies do not usually get all three in a single quarter.
Total volume was 45.79 lakh cases. Beer accounted for 98.90% of volume and 93.29% of revenue. On 20 August 2026, Infomerics downgraded the bank facility ratings to IVR BB+/Stable and IVR A4+.
2. Introduction
Som Distilleries & Breweries Limited was incorporated on 26 March 1993 and is the flagship company of the Bhopal-based Som Group. It makes beer, and it blends and bottles Indian Made Foreign Liquor. That’s the whole thesis: fermentation, bottling, and the enormous bureaucratic apparatus that stands between the two and a consumer.
The scale-up is recent and steep. Sales went from ₹365.16 crore in FY22 to ₹806.68 crore in FY23 to ₹1,280.67 crore in FY24 to ₹1,442.90 crore in FY25. Beer volumes over the same stretch: 68.30 lakh cases in FY22, 149.60 in FY23, 214.00 in FY24, 234.40 in FY25. Installed beer capacity climbed from 76 lakh cases per annum in FY19 to 389 lakh in FY26, which is the kind of number that only moves if someone keeps signing very large cheques.
Someone did, repeatedly. Per Infomerics, the company infused preferential equity of ₹21.94 crore in FY26, ₹90.03 crore in FY25, ₹101.22 crore in FY24 via rights issue, preferential issue and warrant conversion, and ₹27.20 crore in FY23 through warrant conversion. Equity capital on the balance sheet moved from ₹34.99 crore in FY22 to ₹41.58 crore in FY26; reserves went from ₹254.58 crore to ₹736.99 crore.
FY26 then broke the run. Sales fell to ₹1,229.32 crore and PAT to ₹9.38 crore from ₹104.50 crore. Infomerics attributes the FY26 decline to the temporary licence-related disruption at Bhopal and subdued beer demand in Karnataka, along with higher input costs.
Recent corporate housekeeping: Jitendra Parihar was appointed Company Secretary and Compliance Officer effective 25 July 2026. A board meeting was scheduled for 5 September 2026 to consider preferential warrants or shares and AGM dates, with the trading window closed from 1 September — a company that raises equity often enough to have a house style for the announcement.
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3. Business Model: WTF Do They Even Do?
They ferment grain and water into beer, put it in glass or aluminium, and then hand most of the resulting price to a state government.
The beer brands are Hunter, Black Fort, Power Cool, Woodpecker, Legend and Sunny Beaches. Hunter, Black Fort and Power Cool have each crossed 1 million cases in annual sales. The IMFL side carries Black Fort, Sunny, Gypsy, Fox and Blue Chip, among others, plus Mahavat, a mid-premium whisky launched in July 2025 and now rolled out across Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh at a ₹1,000–1,100 price point. Power Cool is described in company material as running up to 8% ABV on a “Keep It Cool” platform, which is a bold thing to call a beer strong enough to be a mild anaesthetic.
Manufacturing sits across four locations, with installed capacity of 48.2 million cases of beer and 5.1 million of IMFL: Bhopal (15.2 beer / 1.8 IMFL), Hassan in Karnataka (14.0 / 2.7), Odisha (9.0 / 0.6) and Uttar Pradesh (10.0 / —). Hassan is run by Woodpecker Distilleries & Breweries, 78.87% owned; Odisha by a wholly owned subsidiary; UP by Woodpecker Greenagri Nutrients, incorporated January 2025 for a ₹600 crore greenfield brewery and distillery on 40 acres at Khimsepur, Farrukhabad.
Why four plants for one product? Because beer is heavy, cheap per litre, and every state border is a tax event. Infomerics notes the industry runs on a state-by-state licence regime with individual controls on production, marketing, distribution and pricing. Management’s own arithmetic on the call: exporting into MP from other states was evaluated and rejected because MP’s import fees make it loss-making.
