Chennai
The company was also looking at ‘‘substantially’’ expanding its distribution network in rural areas, Funskool India CEO, R Jeswant said.
“We intend to widen our domestic offerings and will target to introduce well over 100 products over the next one year. We expect several policy initiatives promoting local manufacturing to come from the government in next few months,” he said.
On future plans, he said, “we are also seriously looking at developing some of India’s traditional games and have plans to work closely with manufacturers of traditional Indian toys and artisans.”
The initiative would also help artisans to improve the quality of their products and also help scale up in manufacturing, he added.
On the impact of COVID-19, he said though April and May were big months for toy business (in terms of sales), they ended in a ‘‘total washout.’’ “All our three factories (2 in TN and one in Goa) were closed for almost all of April and all stores remained closed,” he said. With demand picking up, “we are back on track,” he added.
On those measures taken to tide over the impact caused by the pandemic, he said, Funskool focused on exports business and the grew in shipping its products between April and August. On the Prime Minister’s recent comments on the toy industry in his ‘Mann ki baat,’ Jeswant said India, which had a miniscule share in the $90 bn global business, welcomed it.
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