LAFARGE PAKISTAN SALES INITIATIVES

Abstract

A lot of research nowadays is being conducted to study the banking, FMCG, Petroleum and Telecommunications industry of Pakistan. These industries in recent years have grabbed everyone’s attention with their strong branding and many success stories. One very strong industry that has barely been touched upon for study is the cement industry of Pakistan. It’s a robust and high potential industry with an average production of 9.403 million tons against a local demand of 20 million tons (figures of year 2007-2008). Recently Pakistan has also started exporting cement to its neighboring countries and even South Africa. The industry primarily consists of local players with an exception of one Multinational; Lafarge. The entrance of an MNC brought a lot of changes to this industry. For once it pushed the dormant industry to a realization that muscular International players might enter and capture the much ignored Pakistani market. This got the local competitors on their toes and they have been experimenting with out-of-the-box techniques for increasing and retaining their market share for past few years. We can delve into the various dimensions of innovations that Lafarge Pakistan has introduced and inspired in its short life span in Pakistan but that would highly broaden the scope of this research. Thus, this report mainly focuses on the recent initiatives taken by Lafarge Pakistan’s Sales division. Lafarge Pakistan is currently the only Multinational Company functioning in Pakistan’s cement industry. Even though Pakistan’s cement industry is mature and highly competitive it remains till date an unstructured industry widely distinguished from a FMCG industry. The industry still has room to adopt many FMCG techniques in Customer centricity. The norm of cement industry of Pakistan is to focus primarily on the distributors. Lafarge with a strong global exposure has introduced a globally appreciated norm of direct route to market. This company with its risk-taker approach has tried bridging the gap between the manufacturer and the customer thus eliminating the need of a middle-man (the distributor). This shakes the very core of the industry whose norm for last 100 years was to be distributor-centric. This pilot project of Lafarge Pakistan is called “Project Transformer”. It began in the markets of Rawalpindi and Islamabad and an expansion is under consideration for other lucrative markets. This is further discussed in detail in the following report. Apart from the Project Transformer, Lafarge Pakistan has also kicked off a Customer Call Center (CCC) to give voice to the end users and distributors. Cement industry isn’t as dynamic as the FMCG industry thus Lafarge Pakistan is taking the first step in bringing it at par with the developed and structured FMCG structure. It is well anticipated that Lafarge Pakistan is paving way for the other players of the industry to follow. Following the success of some of Lafarge Pakistan’s initiatives the industry rivals are mimicking the innovations and hence the industry in on a path to change.