Decoding TTK Prestige’s rural surge

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Editor's note: When a kitchen equipment maker has been in business for four decades, you would expect them to know every nook and corner of their market. This will be especially true if the equipment in question is commonplace stuff like pans and cookers. On the odd day, you’d forgive the company for not knowing; well, it happens to the best of us. But we are not talking about just any company here; we are talking about TTK Prestige Ltd, the Bengaluru-based, Rs 2,000 crore ($270 million) company which is India’s largest kitchenware manufacturer. So when TTK Prestige in the 2018-19 fiscal year netted a revenue of Rs 140 crore ($18.9 million) from rural markets it had made no particular effort to access, its 71-year old non-executive chairman termed the income as "windfall".  A Rs 140 crore windfall.  Language enthusiasts would appreciate that in a much simpler time, “windfall” used to be associated with fruits unexpectedly falling from a tree, and hence unexpected good fortune. So, how did TTK manage the windfall? Particularly when the company had no real access to these …