Castrol has room to grow in all businesses

With India’s mobility landscape evolving rapidly, Castrol India is looking well beyond its traditional lubricants business for growth, managing director Saugata Basuray tells Kalpana Pathak. Edited excerpts:

What are the growth areas for Castrol?

Castrol is one of the oldest multinationals in India and, in many ways, our growth has tracked the growth of India. Castrol lubricants sell around 8 litres every second in this country, and we think there is still a lot of headroom for growth. We work with a network of over 400 distributors, reaching more than 60,000 retail outlets. The real value-adding asset, though, is the brand and the innovation behind it. That is where we have stepped up investment over the last several years. Our advertising and brand spend was around 164 crore in FY2025, up from about 146 crore the year before.


In addition to our consumer business, we have the industrial and manufacturing business, serving sectors such as cement and infrastructure that are currently in a capacity build-out phase. We see our industrial business on a strong growth trajectory. We have roughly doubled volumes there over the last couple of years, and we think there is more room to run.

Of the manufacturing, institutional and consumer segments, which do you see growing fastest?

We have a solid industrial business serving applications such as corrosion prevention and working fluids. We have recently stepped into cement and steel in a bigger way because we are seeing a lot of capacity-driven investment in those sectors. That business is likely to grow at double digits, although it is still a relatively small part of the overall business.

Our second-largest business is institutional, where we work directly with OEMs such as Tata Motors and Maruti, supplying products for their factory-fill and service channels. This business continues to grow at high single digits to low double digits, tracking new-vehicle sales fairly closely.

The largest business by far is consumer, covering personal mobility—two-wheelers and cars—and commercial mobility, including trucks and tractors. Two-wheelers are a bigger and more mature part of our business. We see branded two-wheeler oil growing at ahealthy double-digit pace in smaller towns. Commercial vehicles will track freight and logistics activity, and we expect efficiency gains—better fleet utilisation and longer service intervals—to mean that value grows faster than volume. Overall, we expect to grow consistently at one-and-a-half to two times the market’s underlying volume growth. Third-party estimates put India’s lubricant volume growth at roughly 3-4% annually, and we aim to grow at 6-8%.

Is Castrol expanding into new segments?

We are actively looking at whether we remain purely an ‘under the bonnet’ brand or expand into products used more broadly across the vehicle. We are moving into interior and exterior care and car-detailing products such as polishes and waxes, as well as performance-enhancing products like engine flushes.

How is Castrol looking at electric vehicles and ICE/ethanol?

We think both (electric and internal combustion engines) will coexist for a while. EV penetration in two-wheelers is meaningful and rising, although it varies considerably by city and use case. For cars, we think it will be a multi-powertrain story for longer. ICE, hybrid, ethanol-blended fuel and EVs, all operating in parallel.

How is Castrol balancing volume growth with pressure on margins and input costs?

There will always be near-term volatility from commodity and currency cycles, but this tends to even out over a medium-term horizon. We want to keep our volume growth ahead of the market and continue improving our premium mix year on year to protect or improve unit margins. We aim to maintain our Ebitda margin at around 21–24%, while sustaining volume growth at one-and-a-half to two times the market.

We have taken price increases over the past six months and, given where commodity prices are at the moment, we believe we are well placed.

How does Castrol see India’s infrastructure boom as a business opportunity?

We certainly are looking at it. Our parent company already has products certified for use in data centres, and a couple of products were certified by Nvidia recently. We are speaking with major players and have some trials under way. Given how quickly the industry is evolving, we want to be available and participate, but we are not yet building a fixed model for what the opportunity will look like.