Earnings calls in India’s building materials sector tend to follow a familiar rhythm. Opening remarks on revenue and margins. Questions from analysts on volume guidance and raw material costs. Closing remarks on capacity expansion. Most of what gets said is predictable, and the trade press summarises it in three bullet points.
Buried in Kajaria’s Q1 FY27 call on July 31, 2026, was a comment that deserved more attention than it received.
Rishi Kajaria, Managing Director, speaking directly on the call: “At one side, we are strengthening our complete distribution strength, another lever for growth which we have now really started working on is projects, which will give us that additional volume. Just to give you the information that we have just had a major breakthrough with two of the very big builders of India, where we are getting a lion’s share.”
Ashok Kajaria, Chairman, followed up: “As already said in the meeting, we are also breaking on projects, which earlier Kajaria was leading due to various reasons. Now we are also embarking on retail as well as projects. With these breakthroughs, definitely we are looking at a very positive scenario going forward.”
Two sentences in a 60-minute analyst call. Neither named the builders. Neither specified the volume or the value of the accounts. No analyst followed up with a deeper question. The conversation moved on to margin guidance.
For investors tracking quarterly EPS, this was a footnote. For RSMs, field sales teams, and project specification managers in the tile industry, it is one of the most important signals that has come out of India’s market leader in the past several quarters. We looked at Kajaria’s broader operational discipline when we covered their Q4 FY26 results earlier this year — the builder account push is the next chapter of that same strategic story.
What It Actually Means When a Market Leader Says “We’ve Started Working on Projects”
The word “started” in Rishi Kajaria’s comment is the most revealing part of the sentence. India’s largest tile manufacturer, with ₹4,800 crore in annual revenue and nine manufacturing plants, is describing project sales as a channel they have “really started working on” — implying that until recently, it was not a primary focus.
This is not a surprise to anyone who has been in the industry. Kajaria’s historical strength has been its distribution network — a wide, deep dealer network across India that delivers consistent retail and contractor-level volume. The company’s sales machine was built around showroom presence, brand recognition at the counter, and a field team structured for dealer management. Project sales — the institutional channel of large builders, real estate developers, and specification-driven procurement — has always been a presence in Kajaria’s portfolio but not its primary growth lever.
That is now explicitly changing. When the MD of the largest tile company in India describes project sales as a “new lever for growth” and announces major builder account wins in the same breath, he is signalling a deliberate strategic reallocation of commercial energy. Not a pivot away from distribution — Kajaria is simultaneously investing in strengthening its dealer network. But a meaningful addition of institutional and builder account capability alongside the existing distribution strength.
The Chairman’s framing — “earlier Kajaria was leading due to various reasons, now we are also embarking on retail as well as projects” — is even more pointed. He is acknowledging that Kajaria, despite being market leader by volume, had historically been less active in the project specification channel than its own scale would suggest. That gap is now being closed.
For the rest of the industry, this is the signal that matters.
Why Builder Accounts Work Differently From Dealer Networks
To understand why this matters operationally, it helps to be precise about what a “major breakthrough with a large builder” actually means in practice.
When Kajaria secures a large builder account — one of India’s top-tier residential developers — it is not a single transaction. It is a relationship that generates recurring volume across multiple projects over multiple years. A developer like a Godrej, Prestige, Sobha, or DLF who specifies Kajaria tiles for a project is effectively committing to procure from that supply relationship across every tower, every phase, every possession cycle of that project. If the project is a 2,000-unit residential complex in Bengaluru or Pune with a three-year completion timeline, the tile procurement that flows from that single specification decision runs into tens of crore in value.
More importantly, a builder account win at this level changes the competitive dynamic in two ways simultaneously. It guarantees Kajaria volume that is largely insulated from counter-level competition — the dealer doesn’t choose which tile brand goes into a large builder project; the developer specification does. And it locks out competing brands from that volume for the duration of the project, potentially for the duration of the developer relationship.
Chetan Kajaria, Vice Chairman, added an important context note on the same call: “When a project is launched, to the point the tile gets used, it’s a 4 to 5-year cycle. Even if the real estate projects got launched in 2024, 2025, 2026, this is not the time that the tiles will get used in those launches.” This is management signalling that the builder account wins they are announcing today will generate volume through FY29 and FY30 — well beyond any single quarter’s numbers.
This multi-year procurement cycle connects directly to the housing completion pipeline story. The 5.4 lakh homes completing in 2026, and the larger wave through FY27 to FY29, represent the finishing procurement that today’s builder account relationships will capture — or miss.
The Competitive Gap That Has Just Started Closing
For mid-sized tile manufacturers and regional players who have been building project specification pipelines over the past several years, Kajaria’s entry as an active and structured competitor in the builder account channel is a meaningful development.
The project specification channel in India’s tile market has historically been more fragmented and brand-agnostic than the retail channel. Large builder procurement teams are price-sensitive and quality-conscious in equal measure. They run competitive tendering. They evaluate multiple brands. And because their procurement volumes are large and predictable, they have real negotiating power on price and delivery terms.
In that environment, mid-sized manufacturers with strong product ranges, flexible pricing, and attentive project teams have been able to compete effectively against Kajaria — sometimes winning accounts precisely because Kajaria was not aggressively pursuing them. That window is now narrowing.
A Kajaria that is deliberately deploying its brand equity, its balance sheet strength — ₹985 crore net cash — and its expanded manufacturing capacity toward the builder channel is a much more formidable project sales competitor than the Kajaria that treated builder accounts as secondary to its distribution business. The two “very big builder” wins announced on the Q1 FY27 call are the opening moves. The company has guided for double-digit volume growth for the remainder of FY27, and project sales are explicitly named as a key lever for delivering that growth.
The Q1 FY27 earnings picture showed that the industry is currently growing on price rather than volume. Builder accounts are one of the most direct routes to genuine volume growth — which is exactly why Kajaria is prioritising them now.
Every project specification team in the industry should be asking: which of our current builder account relationships would be vulnerable to a well-resourced Kajaria push?
What Field Sales Teams Should Do Before Kajaria Gets Comfortable
This is a time-sensitive strategic situation. Kajaria has announced the intent and the early wins, but has not yet built the full muscle of a systematic project sales operation. Building deep builder account relationships takes time — field presence, technical support, specification management, and the trust that comes from delivering consistently on large projects. The company is at the beginning of that journey, not the end of it.
For competing tile brands and their project sales teams, the next two to four quarters represent the window to entrench relationships that will be difficult to displace once Kajaria’s project operation matures.
Identify your builder accounts by vulnerability. Go through your current project pipeline and builder relationship list. Which accounts are solid — multiple deliveries completed, strong relationships at both procurement and specification level, price terms that the account is satisfied with? Which are superficial — a single project delivered, a relationship maintained primarily by one RSM, a procurement contact who has received Kajaria samples but not yet switched? The vulnerable accounts are your immediate priority.
Deepen relationships at multiple levels within each builder account. Kajaria’s advantage in builder accounts is brand recognition at the developer’s senior management and marketing level. The counter to that is depth at the procurement and project execution level — knowing the purchase manager personally, knowing which contractor is being used for each tower, being embedded in the site-level specification conversation rather than only the HO-level tender. A competitor’s brand reputation wins the initial evaluation. Your field team’s relationship and reliability wins the repeat purchase.
This ground-level relationship work is particularly important in the four cities we identified as priority markets for dealer and project network development — Gurugram, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Greater Noida. These are precisely the markets where large builder project activity is most concentrated right now and where Kajaria’s new builder account wins are most likely to be playing out.
Use the project completion cycle to create lock-in. Once your product is in the first delivered phase of a large builder project, the developer’s procurement team has a very high bar for switching — shade variation risk, re-specification hassle, and the preference for continuity across phases all work in your favour. Getting into phase one of a large project, even at a competitive price, creates the highest possible lock-in for phases two, three, and beyond. Kajaria’s new builder accounts will be in phase one right now. The brands that want to hold their own builder account positions need to be delivering phase two and three performance that makes switching to Kajaria seem risky, not obvious.
Track Kajaria’s project sales footprint through your dealer intelligence. Dealers who supply to large builder projects in your market will know when a new brand starts appearing on builder specification sheets. Build the habit of asking your project-linked dealers — the ones who supply contractors on large residential sites — which brands are being specified on new tenders. When Kajaria starts appearing on specification sheets where they weren’t before, that is early intelligence about which accounts are being pursued.
It is also worth remembering that Kajaria’s Nepal expansion was another signal of a company building systematic geographic and channel depth simultaneously. The builder account push fits the same pattern: a market leader methodically closing the gaps in its own distribution architecture while competitors are focused elsewhere.
The Larger Signal for the Industry
Kajaria’s Q1 FY27 builder account announcement is a data point about a company. But it is also a signal about an industry transition that has been building for several quarters.
India’s residential construction has premiumised — with homes above ₹1 crore now accounting for 54% of all sales. Institutional investment is concentrating in commercial real estate. Developer procurement teams are becoming more sophisticated. The era of specification decisions being made casually, with whoever showed up at the site first, is giving way to a more structured, relationship-managed institutional procurement cycle.
In that environment, the tile company that builds the strongest builder and developer account relationships — systematically, with dedicated account managers, technical support, and the supply reliability that large projects demand — will capture a disproportionate share of the residential and commercial construction volume that the FY27 to FY29 completion pipeline will generate.
And for specification teams thinking beyond tiles, the same principle applies across sanitaryware, adhesive, and stone. The GCC office fit-out channel operates on the same institutional procurement logic as large builder accounts — specification-driven, relationship-dependent, and largely inaccessible to brands that haven’t invested in the right channel architecture.
Kajaria has just publicly announced it is making that investment. The question for every other player in the industry is not whether to respond, but how fast.
Rishi Kajaria said the quiet part loud on July 31. The industry heard it on the earnings call. The field response needs to start now.
References
- Investing.com / Kajaria Q1 FY27 Earnings Call Full Transcript — https://www.investing.com/news/transcripts/earnings-call-transcript-kajaria-ceramics-posts-strong-q1-fy-2027-growth-93CH-4827940
- Yahoo Finance / Kajaria Q1 FY27 Earnings Call Highlights — https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/kajaria-ceramics-ltd-bom-500233-010432261.html
- GuruFocus / Kajaria Q1 FY27 Full Earnings Call Transcript — https://www.gurufocus.com/news/9000019/q1-2027-kajaria-ceramics-ltd-earnings-call-transcript
- Sahi / Kajaria Q1 FY27 Results Summary — https://www.sahi.com/blogs/kajaria-ceramics-q1-results-fy27
- Business Upturn / Kajaria Q1 FY27 Results and Expansion — https://businessupturn.com/business/kajaria-ceramics-announces-q1-fy27-results-and-expansion-plans/
- ScanX / Kajaria Q1 FY27 Net Profit — https://scanx.trade/stock-market-news/companies/kajaria-ceramics-q1-results-net-profit-rises-56-yoy/47229587
