We have ended the year with a superlative quarter for top line growth, perhaps our best ever in the recent past.”
That comment, by Ajoy Chawla, Titan Co. Ltd’s managing director (MD), during the company’s earnings call on 8 May, couldn’t have been more ironic.
Between 11 May, the first full day of trading after Titan’s results were announced, and 15 May, the end of the week, Titan’s stock tanked over 7%, wiping out more than ₹30,000 crore in investor wealth at one point.
What happened?
The company’s strong result—it generated revenue of ₹20,300 crore in the quarter ending March 2026, up 46% over the year-ago quarter—was quickly overshadowed by macro concerns around gold consumption and imports.
On 10 May, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly urged Indians to avoid buying for a year, and on 12 May, the government raised import tariffs on gold and silver.
These developments underline the contradiction at the heart of Titan’s growth story. No company has benefited more from India’s shift towards organised jewellery retail than Titan. In 1996, the year the company launched its first jewellery store on Cathedral Road in Chennai, its revenue was just above ₹350 crore. Its transformation into an $8-billion or ₹76,000 crore retail behemoth has been driven almost entirely by jewellery, which accounts for 90% of its revenue. And jewellery drove 94% of its incremental revenue growth in 2025-26.
The macro concerns also indicate that the company must press the accelerator on diversification. Indeed, Titan has resisted becoming solely a jewellery brand. Over the last two decades, it expanded into eyewear, fragrances, women’s ethnic wear and handbags, betting that the capabilities that helped it scale jewellery—namely trust, branding, retail execution and organising fragmented markets— could spill over into adjacent lifestyle categories.
But these efforts have had limited success.
Naveen Trivedi, an analyst with Motilal Oswal Financial Services, says that for years the market has assessed Titan primarily through the lens. Despite its scale, the category will not drive the same level of incremental growth indefinitely.
“Jewellery will eventually become more of a steady-state business. You need to stay ahead of the curve and prepare for that scenario by creating new opportunities to drive growth,” he said.
What can Titan do to move the needle?
Value vs volume
When you look at value contributions, you cannot beat the math of gold and diamonds, because that math will always prevail,” acknowledged Chawla, who took over as Titan’s managing director in January this year. He was previously the chief executive of the company’s jewellery division.
That said, the non-jewellery categories do play a more immediate role—they bring in the volume.
The numbers are telling. Titan served about four million jewellery customers last fiscal year, including and Damas. But it catered to 16.5 million watch customers and over a million eyewear customers. Fashion and fashion accessories, including emerging businesses like fragrances and women’s bags, also reached more than three million customers.
“About 9% to 10% of Tanishq (Titan’s jewellery brand) buyers are first-time customers coming from the Titan ecosystem,” said Chawla. “Jewellery may account for 90% of value, but not of customer interactions.”
Apart from large customer bases, the non-jewellery businesses are also about repeat purchases, high gross margins and better profitability, he added.
String of pearls
The company is not necessarily trying to build another -sized business outside jewellery. Titan today sees itself as a ‘lifestyle adornment’ brand that follows what Chawla calls a ‘string of pearls’ approach.
One non-jewellery business where Titan has consistently performed is watches. It is this template that Titan wants to replicate across newer categories.
Titan launched watches in 1987, and its manufacturing, design and retail prowess were first built through watches. Chawla says that for Titan’s employees, “our souls are steeped in the watch category.”
“Whether it is the margin profile, the design differentiation approach, the channel strategy or the portfolio strategy, the learnings from watches are very much there,” Chawla said.
Titan’s jewellery business operates at an Ebit (earnings before interest and taxes) margin of roughly 11%. Watches, on the other hand, delivered Ebit margins of around 15-16% last fiscal year.
Unlike jewellery, watches are not exposed to volatile commodity costs. Watches also benefit more from branding and design differentiation. Premium analogue and mechanical watches carry stronger profitability.
Watch these moves
Kuruvilla Markose, chief executive officer (CEO) of Titan’s watches division, says the portfolio of brands approach has allowed the company to play in many different spaces.
At the lower end, the company has brands like Sonata and Fastrack. Titan watches also operates in the mid-premium space. And then there is Edge, Nebula and Xylys—premium and luxury brands. “Helios and Helios Lux (brand stores) allow us to participate in international luxury as well,” said Markose, who puts India’s watch market at ₹26,000 crore. Titan’s watch division generated revenue of ₹5,267 crore last fiscal year.
This strategy gives Titan a stake across multiple consumer segments and price points while allowing it to benefit from India’s ongoing premiumization trend. Markose describes Titan’s watches strategy through three broad priorities: defend and dominate its core mass and ‘masstige’ (a portmanteau of mass and prestige) segments, scale and grow in premium, and “earn the right to play” in luxury.
Titan dominates the sub- ₹25,000 watches segment with an almost 50% market share, according to Markose. Here, it has doubled down with watches at the lower and upper ends of the segment with a goal to retain its lead.
The company is also strengthening its presence in the premium ‘scale and grow’ segment with products like a diving watch, priced at over ₹75,000. In addition, it is making a play in the luxury space, particularly in the ₹1 lakh to ₹5 lakh segment.
“You can’t suddenly wake up and decide to play in premium watches,” said Markose. “You need strong capabilities both below the dial and above the dial. The consumer in these segments evaluates the movement, the mechanics, the craftsmanship, the finishing and the design language. That capability-building takes years, and you have to earn the right to play there.”
Titan has increasingly used premium mechanical launches as proof points of its horological and mechanical capabilities. It launched the Titan Edge Mechanical collection in 2021, priced around ₹2 lakh, before expanding into higher-end horology. In 2025, it launched the Nebula Jalsa Flying Tourbillon, priced at ₹40.5 lakh, the most expensive watch Titan has ever created.
Then there’s the underlying retail muscle that powers the watch segment’s growth. Titan today operates one of the broadest watch retail networks in India, with over 1,250 stores across formats like Titan World, Helios and Fastrack outlets.
Watches today combine clear segmentation, manufacturing depth, design differentiation and retail scale. It is this complex, multi-level differentiation that Titan is still figuring out for its newer businesses.
Smelling success
Like watches, Titan’s newer categories—fragrances, handbags and Indian ethnic wear—are also highly retail-driven businesses where merchandising, assortment and presentation are key.
Titan has begun to replicate the portfolio approach for its 13-year-old fragrance brand Skinn with sub brands spanning price points from under ₹500 to over ₹5,000. The category, which includes Fastrack fragrances, registered 38% year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter ended March.
The growth in fragrances is driven by customers like Alok Soni, who fell in love with Skinn’s Amalfi Bleu perfume, priced at around ₹2,500 for a 90 millilitre (ml) pack. A friend gifted it to him. “Typically, Indian perfumes in that price range are very strong and overpowering. That was not the case with Amalfi Bleu. I have bought it a few more times since,” said Soni, a consultant from Bengaluru.
Manish Gupta, CEO of Titan’s fragrances and fashion accessories division, estimates that India has nearly 100 million deodorant users. That leaves significant headroom for premiumization.
That’s both an opportunity and a challenge as Skinn’s own customers graduate to more premium options. Soni says he recently started using MYSLF by Yves Saint Laurent, priced at around ₹11,000 for a 100 ml pack. “But, I do plan to buy another Amalfi Bleu and use it as a daily wear perfume.”
The goal then is to bring in as many customers into the fold as possible. Hence, the category’s rather straightforward distribution strategy, as Titan retails its fragrances across e-commerce, q-commerce, general trade, and through Titan World stores.
Eye opener
That’s not the case with handbags, which are proving to be more operationally intensive. Gupta estimates the organised women’s bags market at roughly ₹3,300 crore, but the category remains deeply fragmented across international brands, regional labels and digital-first startups.
Titan launched its premium women’s bags brand IRTH in 2022 and has expanded cautiously. Chawla believes IRTH needs to expand to 200 to 300 stores to establish strong visibility and presence, which will directly drive growth. Today, it has a physical presence only in around eight cities through 17 of its own stores and other department stores. It also retails online through its own website and through Myntra.
On the other hand, Taneira (women’s ethnic wear) and Titan’s eyewear division illustrate the limits of the strategy in different ways.
Launched in 2017, Taneira was supposed to be a replication of its jewellery strategy of creating a national brand among a sea of regional competitors. The brand has worked largely in the handwoven sarees space, says Chawla, but has struggled to be relevant for a broader set of customers or occasions. Revenue has stagnated and the company has paused store expansion as it revamps strategy.
Together, these emerging businesses increased revenue by 25.2% year-on-year to cross ₹500 crore last fiscal, a drop in Titan’s ₹76,000 crore ocean.
In eyewear, Titan faces the reality of missed opportunities. Titan was the first mover in the organised eyewear space, having launched EyePlus in 2007. Yet, Lenskart, launched three years later, eventually emerged as the category’s dominant player, growing 32.5% to over ₹8,800 crore in operating revenue in 2025-26. In contrast, Titan’s eyecare business, which also includes Fastrack Eyewear, is still a fraction of Lenskart’s scale with reported revenue growing 14.4% to ₹916 crore last fiscal year.
Chawla acknowledges Titan underestimated how aggressively technology and digital-first retail would reshape the category.
“Lenskart has demonstrated the opportunity of this category in the country,” acknowledged Chawla, adding that the startup’s scale has helped raise Titan’s own ambitions.
Titan is in the middle of an eyewear category revamp, expected to be completed in the next six to nine months.
Needed: ‘Potential energy’
Put together, the broader diversification strategy clearly remains a long-gestation exercise.
Angshuman Bhattacharya, partner and national leader for consumer products and retail at consulting firm EY India, points out that Titan is betting on an underlying consumer shift, from unorganised to organised, from unbranded to branded. “But these transitions take time. You have to build scale, trust and credibility gradually,” he said.
That is the core challenge facing Titan today. It has demonstrated that it can build category-defining businesses in watches and jewellery. But, it did so over decades and with many a stumble in between. The newer businesses are still small, still evolving, and will take years of investment to achieve the kind of scale or category leadership Titan enjoys in jewellery and watches.
“To continue growing, we need to build the potential energy of our brands, not just chase momentum,” said Chawla. “It is easy to generate short-term kinetic energy. Building long-term potential energy is much harder.”
For now, Titan’s diversification story is still being written. Scale, or the lack of it, will determine how Titan is viewed over the next decade–as India’s dominant jewellery brand or as a genuinely diversified lifestyle company.