Shampoo bears the brunt of high import costs  ( February '27,2001, HBL)

CONSUMERS who buy their favourite brand of shampoo in larger pack sizes have had a rough time over the past one year. Between February 2000 and February 2001, most of the leading brands have jacked up the maximum retail price (MRP) of their larger packs.

Excise duty on shampoos was pegged up marginally in the 2000 Budget, from 30 per cent to 32 per cent. This apart, depreciation of the rupee is likely to have led to an escalation in the cost of imported inputs such as surfacants and the conditioning additives used in shampoos. Leading brands such as Clinic Plus, Sunsilk Black, Pantene Normal Hair and Head & Shoulders have hiked the MRPs of their 200 ml and 300 ml packs by between 5 and 7 per cent.

The Sunsilk Pink 300 ml pack has seen a sharper hike of 18 per cent in its MRP, from Rs 120 to Rs 142 per pack. Nyle, a herbal shampoo brand, was one of the few brands to leave prices unchanged. Click here for Table Over the same period though, marketers kept the prices of their sachets and small sized packs (of 100 ml or less) unchanged. Sachets of brands such as Clinic Plus, Sunsilk Pink and Sunsilk Black continued to retail at Rs 2. This has actually lead to a paradoxical situation, where the larger pack sizes now cost more on a per ml basis, than the sachet versions of the same brand.

With companies trying to rope in new users at the lower end of the market, price competition in the smaller pack sizes and in the sachet segment has been intense. New brands in this segment of the market have been in a position to rapidly expand their volume shares. This probably explains the marketers' attempts at maintaining the MRPs on these packs at previous year's levels, while hiking prices on the larger pack sizes.

(The data has been sourced from Subhiksha, a Chennai-based retail chain. The data pertains to Chennai alone).