On Monday, Asian Paints’ woes piled up when the Supreme Court rejected its plea against a probe by the antitrust regulator into alleged abuse of its market dominance. 

Earlier this year, Birla Opus, a feisty rival, persuaded the watchdog to investigate Asian Paints’ attempts to offer dealers incentives—such as foreign travel—in return for exclusivity and for upping sales targets for those who also sell Birla Opus. 

When the Aditya Birla Group’s Grasim Industries made its high-decibel entry into paints with Birla Opus in early 2024, analysts knew better than to write it off. 

Asian Paints is still the protagonist in decorative paints. But Grasim has been the perfect foil, leaning into its white-cement dealership network and undercutting Asian Paints. It notched up a 7% market share within a year of its launch at Asian Paints’ expense. Asian Paints shareholders are clearly rattled. The company has lost a quarter of its market value in the past year, while the Nifty 50 index has been flat. 

If the Birla Group could definitively win round 1 of its fight with a veritable colossus, it had to be taken seriously when it set its sights on any new business. Which it did when Ultratech Cement, another Birla company, announced the launch of its wires-and-cables business in February, with an investment of Rs 1,800 crore ($203 million) over two years. Weeks later, the Adani Group followed suit.

With 400 companies, a third of the industry being unorganised, and no company with more than a fifth of the market, wires and cables is fragmented enough to appeal to a large entrant. Naturally, shares of incumbents such as KEI Industries and Havells tumbled. 

Polycab India, the market leader, plunged to its lowest in a year during that month. But this was little more than a knee-jerk response by its shareholders. 

Polycab shares have since leapt 60% and reached their highest on 10 October. Last month, Polycab dethroned Havells as the most valuable company in consumer electrical goods. The rally in Polycab—whose market cap is now Rs 1.15 lakh crore—has made its chairman and managing director, Inder Jaisinghani, the 22nd richest Indian on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.