Royal House is a front-runner in the Indian transport flooring segment. The company is part of the Samsons Group of Companies, one of the leading manufacturers of vinyl coated fabrics and leatherette, vinyl flooring, and seating systems and components.
Founded in 1932, the Samsons Group has expanded over the last eight decades and has three production facilities in Gujarat with a workforce of over 2,000 employees. Royal House has emerged a preferred supplier of vinyl flooring to leading vehicle manufacturers in the country and also has some key breakthroughs around the corner. Ms. Jahnvi Shah, Senior Manager-Marketing, Samsons Group, tells us more in a tête-à-tête.
Royal House started with cushion vinyl flooring which explains the company name Royal Cushion Vinyl Products Ltd. (RCVP). Moving on, it shifted its focus to calendered flooring which currently forms the major share of its business. In addition to transport flooring, Royal House is also into commercial and retail flooring.
RCVP has two plants spread across 130 acres of land, at Garadia, Halol, Gujarat, for manufacturing vinyl floorings of different types for various end-users and rigid films. The company has a range of flooring brands such as Sonata, Octavia, Ecoplus, Gripper Plus and Gripper, Royal Classic, Tuff, Gold line and Jewel.
Royal House provides customized flooring solutions to its OEM customers. It has been a regular supplier to Tata Motors since eight years and caters to nearly 90 per cent of Tata Marcopolo’s requirements at Dharwad. It supplies to the entire Tata Motors product range at Dharwad where it has a warehousing facility for just-in-time delivery. Royal House also supplies to Tata Motors’ Lucknow facility.
Another big-ticket customer of Royal House is Volvo, to which it has been a 100 per cent supplier of flooring and leather cloth ever since the Swedish major started manufacturing buses in India independently. Royal House also supplies to SML Isuzu, catering to its requirements directly at its manufacturing facility and is likely to bag orders from Scania in the near future.
Leading the pack
Royal House was the first home-grown company to enter the premium transport vinyl flooring market in India at a time when it was dominated by two international players. Despite the huge cost difference the vinyl flooring and the typical material used in the market during its entry into the segment, the company was confident that the market would embrace higher performance based – premium vinyl flooring in the long run. Today, having leveraged on its first-mover advantage, Royal House has pioneered many new innovations in the market.
Says Ms. Jahnvi Shah: “We were the first Indian company to deliver international quality and match the required specifications in the domestic market. We started a revolution of sorts in the Indian transport industry after which many companies followed.”
The company has products at different price points to be able to cater to the requirements of a wide range of customers. The premium product comes with ingredients such as silicon carbide which adds anti-skid property to the floor and also gives it a sparkling effect. The product also has non-woven backing for strong adhesion to sub-floor and better dimensional stability. The high-end material offers superior performance with better resistance to wear and tear, while other materials in the more economic price range are also offered by Royal House, which is also the first and only company offering products with ‘R-10’ slip resistance in India.
RCVP is currently working on a new development which would drastically cut down the overall product cost for customers. “We are working on a new development which will be a major breakthrough in the industry. We are currently doing internal trials and will start customer trials soon. This new development will not just be a product enhancement, it will be a groundbreaking innovation”, adds Ms. Jahnvi.
In fact, Royal House had come up with an innovative replacement for aluminium chequered flooring which is commonly used by most of the public transport corporations in the country. The company’s Sonata Super flooring brand is a premium product which comes with superior features – four times stronger and lasts longer. In addition, with the vinyl weighing just one-third of the aluminium plates, fuel efficiency is improved as well. Most importantly the product comes at a cheaper cost than its aluminium counterpart.
The Sonata Super has successfully passed multiple tests for quality and durability and also has a French certification. It had even gone through field trials for nearly a year, producing excellent results when compared to the existing material. All said and done, owing to the resistance to change, the country is yet to part ways with the aluminium chequered flooring.
Despite having competitive products in its portfolio, Royal House’s efforts in bringing advanced products into the market went in vain during phase one of the JnNurm scheme. It however remains optimistic about its role in the impending second phase of JnNurm. “If there is an open forum where component suppliers could be invited to display their products, explain and justify why certain products and quality standards are mandatory, it would go a long way in developing our country’s bus market”, she asserts.
RCVP has a strong R&D team with sound technical know-how which pioneers the new developments after the necessary field study. The company also has a fully-functional lab in its factory premises for carrying out all the required testing operations. All its products come with basic properties such as being fire-retardant, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial and are approved by ARAI. They conform to the Research Design and Standards Organization (RDSO) norms as well.
In terms of presence across the country, Royal House has around 40 dealers who mainly cater to the requirements of bus body builders, while the OEM orders are handled directly by the company. The Samsons Group clocked a turnover of around Rs. 260 crores in FY12 and bettered it by achieving Rs. 300 crores in FY13.
RCVP supplies its products to nearly 40 countries across the globe with exports accounting for around 25 per cent of the company’s annual turnover.