On May 9 and 10, Asia's second- and third-largest paint producers – India's Asian Paints and Japan's Kansai Paint – released their annual financial data for fiscal year 2023 (both using April 1 to March 31 of the following year):
-In FY2023, Asia Coatings reported consolidated revenue of INR 353.82 billion (US$4.237 billion) (including operating income of subsidiaries), up 3.0% year-on-year (growth rate in local currency, the same below); Net profit after deducting minority interests was INR 54.602 billion (US$654 million), up 33.0% year-on-year.
-In fiscal 2023, Kansai Paint recorded sales of 562.3 billion yen (about 3.611 billion US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 10.5%; recorded a net profit of 67.1 billion yen (about 431 million US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 166.4%; It recorded an operating profit of 51.6 billion yen (about 331 million US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 60.8%. According to Kansai Paints, double-digit growth was driven by higher selling prices and higher sales in the Indian market, mainly automotive paints, and a significant increase in operating profit due to lower raw material prices and improved production efficiency, which absorbed fixed expenses.
With the release of the annual financial data of Asia Coatings and Kansai Coatings, according to the monitoring of the "Coatings Classic", the world's top 15 listed paint manufacturers have all disclosed their financial data or financial reports for the 2023 fiscal year, which also means that the latest list of the world's top 15 listed paint companies has been generated. Since 10 of the top 15 non-US companies in the world's top 15 listed coatings companies use local currencies for settlement, for the sake of comparison, the list uniformly uses the US dollar as the currency unit, so the company's performance must be converted according to the exchange rate at the time of release.
Compared with last year's list of the same type (referring to the "2023 Global Top 10 Coating Enterprises", but according to the listed coating companies that had already released financial reports at that time, it was extended to the 13th place), the 2024 Global Top 15 Listed Coating Companies have not changed in the ranking, and the top 13 are still Sherwin-Williams, PPG Industries, AkzoNobel, Nippon Holdings, Lipamai, Axalta Coating Systems, BASF, Asia Coatings, Kansai Coatings, MASCO, Jordan Coatings, Hempel, 3Trees; The two companies that added to the list were India's Berger Paints and South Korea's King Kong Korea Chemical (KCC).
Although the ranking of the top 13 has not changed, due to the exchange rate fluctuations between the US dollar and different currencies at different time points, these converted data may have certain deviations; In particular, the yen and the renminbi have depreciated to varying degrees in the past year, which has caused the performance data of Japanese and Chinese companies to "shrink" to a certain extent after being converted into US dollars. Taking Nippon Paint Holdings as an example, its sales revenue in fiscal 2023 will be 1,442.6 billion yen, a year-on-year increase of 10.2%; However, after being converted into US dollars, the amount of sales revenue did not increase but decreased, causing its goal of hitting 10 billion US dollars in revenue to be delayed again.
In order to more accurately present the development performance of the world's top 15 listed coatings companies in 2023, when we analyze their growth performance outside the ranking, we still respect their descriptions in the annual financial data or annual report disclosure, that is, use the local currency used by the company as a comparison. Under this premise, 12 of the 15 paint companies on the list recorded a year-on-year increase in sales revenue, and only 2 fell year-on-year.
The situation at the profit level (mainly operating profit, but there are exceptions, which will not be explained one by one) is a little more complicated. Since some companies (including BASF, Musco, and King Kong Koryo Chemical) only use coatings as a business segment, we only select the sales revenue data of their coatings business segments for ranking, but there are cases where companies do not list the profits of this sector separately (including BASF and Musco), so it is impossible to make a complete comparison. Of the 13 companies that showed profit growth, 11 recorded profit growth and 2 reported a decline in profit.
See the following figure for details:
As can be seen from the figure, the profit growth of the top 15 listed paint companies in the world is "better" than the growth of sales revenue - the top three sales revenue growth is 21.0% of King Kong Koryo Chemical, 20.6% of Berger Paints, and 14.4% of Jordan Coatings, in addition to Nippon Paint Holdings, Kansai Paints, Hempel and Three Trees also increased by more than 10%; The top three profit growth rates were 367.3% for King Kong Koryo Chemical, 72.1% for Jotun Paints and 65.6% for Hempel, and among the top five giants, Nippon Paint Holdings had the most impressive profit growth of 50.9%.
With the disclosure of the 2023 annual reports of China's listed/listed coating companies, and the release of 2023 results by most of the world's listed coating companies, the "Coatings" team has also entered the final stage of the production of the 2024 "Top 50 Chinese Coating Enterprises" and "Top 100 Global Coating Enterprises" lists. According to last year's practice, the "Top 50 Chinese Coating Enterprises" will be released in early June, and the "Top 100 Global Coating Enterprises" will be released in early July.