FILE PHOTO: A worker arranges consumable goods inside a Patanjali store in Ahmedabad, India, March 28, 2019. REUTERS/Amit Dave
And in the last fiscal year, it likely deteriorated further, say company sources and analysts. Provisional data indicated sales of just 47 billion rupees in the nine months to Dec. 31, CARE Ratings said in April, based on information from Patanjali. But the company is owned by his business partner Acharya Balkrishna, who met Ramdev at a Sanskrit school three decades ago and holds 98.55% of Patanjali’s shares, according to a 2018 company filing.
Balkrishna declined to give sales estimates for the current fiscal year or last but said future results would be “better”. India’s food regulator FSSAI, which oversees Patanjali’s processed foods, declined to disclose data on quality tests, saying it only did so in the event of safety concerns.Reuters reviewed 81 Patanjali products in a Mumbai Patanjali store and found that 27 of them had labels that listed the goods as partially or wholly manufactured by other Indian producers.
Faced with the threat from Patanjali, competitors such as Hindustan Unilever and Colgate Palmolive India Ltd have launched ayurvedic products themselves, adding to competition.