Paint Wars II: Three Seats, One Fight, Same Quarter

Three companies filed three separate transcripts this month, and without meaning to, described the same fight from three different sides of the table. Berger Paints, the established number two, talks about a new entrant it never quite names. JSW Dulux, itself a recent aggressive re-entrant under new ownership, insists it won't price-match "new entrants" — while posting the numbers of one. And Grasim, parent of Birla Opus, admits on its own earnings call to a structural weakness no incumbent has to deal with. Read together, in the companies' own words, the shape of the paint wars this quarter is clearer than any single transcript shows.

Berger: naming the fight without naming the entrant

Berger's Q1 call spends real time on a competitor referred to only as "the new player," in response to a direct question about whether that company is copying Berger's own tinting-machine design:

"Our aspiration is to try and touch 10,000 machines. For the year. Last year, we were very close to that figure. This year, we expect that we should be able to again touch 10,000 numbers. That's a number which will be equal or more than the new entrant."
— Berger Paints Q1 FY27 earnings call transcript, 05-Aug-2026, p.18

On market share, Berger's CEO gives an unusually candid, almost self-deprecating account of a "gain" that is really about starting from a bigger base, not outrunning the field:

"There we would have gained market share in quarter one, once again. It will sound strange that the leader has actually grown faster, and we haven't grown as much. But our... we will gain market share, actually, a little bit, because our proportion of base of the first quarter is always much higher."
— Filed transcript, p.43

And, on where this could all go if margins recover further:

"Then there will be, again, discounting and price wars, which is not desirable. So, therefore, there might be some sort of a drop in prices at that point of time."
— Filed transcript, p.45

The clearest structural admission, though, is about what the category's growth composition has done to margins industry-wide:

"If you look at the earlier figures, the volume growth used to be 8-9%, and the growth used to be 3-4%... Now, if you look at it, it is reversed... we are getting an 8-9% volume growth, but a 13-16%, 14%, 15% value growth, largely because of the price increase."
— Filed transcript, p.61

Volume growth used to lead value growth in this category. Now price does — the entire industry, Berger included, is growing mostly by charging more per litre rather than selling more litres.

JSW Dulux: the other new entrant, refusing to play the same game

JSW Dulux is easy to overlook in this story because it's rarely framed as a "new entrant" itself — but this quarter it posted 25% volume growth against roughly 8-9% for the established players, on the back of a deliberate town-expansion push:

"We are present in more than 5,000 towns, but our meaningful presence is roughly about 3,400-3,500 towns, which we call active presence. So what we are doing is we are first taking that to about 4,500 this year."
— JSW Dulux Q1 FY27 investor call transcript, 12-Aug-2026, p.5

Asked directly about the competitive dynamics — and specifically about discounting from "new entrants" — CEO Rajiv Rajgopal's answer is worth reading twice, since JSW Dulux is itself running an aggressive town-expansion strategy in the same quarter:

"It will continue to be very competitive for the next 1-2 years... there is a lot of discounting that the new entrants are still sort of pursuing as a strategy. So, hence, for us, building a brand, making sure that we are driving continuous sell-out is the only way that we will be able to sustain ourselves in the long term."
— Filed transcript, p.8

And, distinguishing its own pricing behaviour from the discounting it just described:

"We are not looking at benchmarking on pricing versus the new competitors. We benchmark ourselves on pricing versus the market leader, because we believe that the industry is fairly pretty disciplined."
— Filed transcript, p.8

That is a genuinely interesting position: an aggressive expander that grew volume 3x faster than the market leader this quarter, choosing to frame its own competitor set as "the market leader," not the other new entrant everyone else in the sector is describing.

Grasim: the entrant admitting what it can't do yet

The counterpoint to both is Birla Opus's own parent, on its own earnings call — not the AGM chairman's speech already covered on this site, but the analyst Q&A, where the admissions are sharper. Asked why Birla Opus's sequential growth looked merely "at par" with established players this quarter, management's answer named a specific structural disadvantage:

"Being a new operator, we don't have the power to be able to get extra stocking in the channel which the old operator based on their past trends have capability to get more stocking done. This is the only factor which has dramatically changed in this quarter."
— Grasim Industries Q1 FY27 earnings call transcript, 12-Aug-2026, p.9

Every incumbent in this piece can push extra inventory into the channel ahead of a price hike; Birla Opus, two years in, still cannot — a structural gap that has nothing to do with product or price and everything to do with dealer trust built over decades. On the path to profitability, the target hasn't moved:

"Our consistent stand has been that once we reach INR10,000 crores, we will become profitable. At this point of time, we're not changing that stand."
— Filed transcript, p.10

Analyst commentary on the same call, unprompted by management, notes paints EBITDA losses "nearly halving versus past few quarters" — real progress, but progress toward a fixed revenue-based finish line, not a moving one.

Reading the three together

Line the three transcripts up and the picture is more specific than any one call suggests. Berger is defending share with scale (tinting-machine count) and pricing discipline, worried aloud about a return to price wars. JSW Dulux is the quarter's actual volume-growth outlier — expanding town coverage aggressively while explicitly declining to benchmark its own pricing against "new entrants," even though its own growth profile looks like one. Grasim's Birla Opus is candid about the one lever it structurally lacks — channel stocking power — and is holding a fixed revenue target as its profitability trigger rather than chasing share at any cost. None of the three describe a market that has stabilised. All three describe a market still actively being fought over, just from different positions in the fight.

The sceptic's reading

Each company's framing serves its own narrative, and none of these calls is neutral. Berger's "we gained a little market share" is qualified enough to be nearly a non-claim. JSW Dulux's refusal to benchmark against "new entrants" is easy to say when your own volume growth already beats theirs. And Grasim's ₹10,000cr target has been repeated, unchanged, across multiple quarters — consistency is either discipline or an unwillingness to update.

Related: Paint Wars: Birla Opus Claims Third Place · Kansai Nerolac's Answer to Birla Opus · Does Berger Paints Have a Moat? · JSW Dulux's scorecard · Grasim's scorecard

Educational research, not investment advice. All quotes are verbatim from each company's filed transcript, extracted and verified against the source PDFs linked above. No buy/sell recommendations, no price targets. Moat & Margin is not a SEBI-registered Research Analyst or Investment Adviser.