Crowd, how are you doing? All right, looking good. And this far extreme, hi guys, how are you? Are you good? Are you ready to go? Yeah, let's get on with the show, ladies and gentlemen. We are part of a very, very special evening, and this truly is going to be a momentous occasion. But before that, as a tradition, let's get warmed up. Now, I am told there are close to about a thousand people in this hall. I want to know what it feels like when a thousand people clap together and make some noise.
I am going to be a little demanding. I liked it, didn't love it. A little more energy, guys, once again! Can we get warmed up for this evening, please, ladies and gentlemen? Thank you so much for that. And once again, thank you all for joining us on this momentous occasion, and also to all those who are joining us virtually online—a big hi to all of you as well, a very special welcome to you. We are very delighted for all of you to be part of this wonderful occasion. Today, we are here to witness the beginning of a new journey—a journey that brings together the legacy created by one of India's most respected business powerhouses, the Aditya Birla Group, with a new category that shall change the way we build, connect, and progress. And the people who helped shape this journey from the very beginning, that's you, each and every one of you. Because the last part is totally important: all of you in this room are the partners—the partners of a business that is going to take the markets by storm. You are here at the point where a vision becomes a business, a business becomes a brand, and a brand begins to earn its place in people's homes, workplaces, and their daily lives. Tonight is about the foundation we build together as a group. It's about the scale, the trust, and the ambition that the Aditya Birla Group has been synonymous with for more than 150 years now. It is about what we can build for tomorrow. So welcome once again, and thank you for being here at this very first step of this epic journey. Requesting you all once again for a round of applause for yourselves. Thank you so much.
Now, like at the commencement of all auspicious occasions, at this auspicious beginning at the Aditya Birla Group, we will commence the evening with the Aditya Vandana and seek blessings for the journey ahead.
May I please now invite the Birla family to please come on stage and light the ceremonial lamp, please.
Truly one of the most beautiful things to do before the commencement of something big, something nice, something monumental. A lamp is a beautiful and the most relevant symbol of new beginnings. A single flame lit today has the power to light many, many more. And perhaps that is what a great institution like Aditya Birla Group does: it truly takes one idea, one beginning, and over generations turns it into something much, much bigger. We are at the onset of something really big once again.
Thank you for that. A lovely picture as well to mark the beginning of this new journey—a landmark moment once again as we seek blessings to move on in the right direction. The lamp has been lit, and I thank the Birla family for enlightening the evening, requesting them to take their seats. Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. All right, so the lamp has been lit. We are feeling blessed, we're warmed up with all the claps we've given, and we're geared up for a fantastic evening ahead.
I'll tell you what: new beginnings are always significant. When a storied business group has spent generations building trust, every new beginning carries with it something more than opportunity; it carries responsibility. The responsibility to build on what has come before, to create something worthy of the trust placed in it, and to leave behind something stronger for those who come after us. And that is what makes tonight extremely significant. We are not here merely to enter a new category; we are here to build something with the ambition to endure. Tonight is about understanding the ambition behind this decision and the vision that will shape the years ahead. And there is no one better to shed light on that than the man I am about to call on stage next. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together and welcome on stage the man himself, Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group.
Good evening, Namaskar. A very warm welcome to this evening's event. I want to specially welcome our 750 dealers and distributors from the wires and cables business. I call them our founding partners. Thank you so much for being here. As I stand here today, I feel a sense of déjà vu. The launch of a new business category is exciting and exhilarating, to say the very least. And we have had a few in the last two or three years. But when the launch is accompanied by a vision of becoming a category leader in the not-so-distant future—in fact, in the next two or three years itself—then the excitement is of an altogether different level.
In recent years, we have had some new business creations—successful new business creations that have been of great significance. I will come to that later. I am sure many of you over the decades have seen the Aditya Birla Group enter new businesses and scale in them. But I would say that in the last few years, this ability, this competence to think of a new business—literally a concept on paper—to scale rapidly and grow to be a category leader, is a competence that we have honed. Even more so in the last two to three years, I see this now as a new competence that we have developed as a group, and therefore a new competitive advantage for the Aditya Birla Group. I see ourselves more as a platform—a platform from where we take big bets, we make strategic bets, and the bets we make are backed with the intent of winning in the category.
We have had three such examples in the last two or three years, and let me quickly recount those. The first, as everyone in ABG will know, is in the category of paints: Birla Opus. Birla Opus has hit a double-digit market share in just two years. It is the most disruptive story in the paint category that the sector has ever seen. In jewelry retail, Indriya has grown very rapidly; they now have 90 stores in 54 cities in just under two years. This is the fastest growth not only in this category, but in any retail category that has been seen in India. And third, our e-commerce B2B business, Birla Pivot, has already, in its third year, reached an annualized revenue run rate of 10,000 crores, making it the fastest-growing B2B e-commerce player in India.
All of these businesses have certain common links, and I think the question that you would want to know is: what are the core considerations when we enter a new business? So let me take you through those very quickly. The first has to be the presence of structural tailwinds that support growth in the sector. And given the dynamism that we're seeing just now in the Indian economy—we just heard that the economy has grown by a very robust 7.8%, and per capita income is expected to grow for not just years, but the next two decades—there is no dearth of opportunities that pass this filter.
The second factor that is essential for us to select a business is that it must have the potential for us to clearly disrupt the market structure by playing to our strengths. These strengths can be in different forms, and very often they can reinforce each other. They include the brand and reputation of the Aditya Birla Group; they include our ability to leverage capital and scale from the outset and create new winning propositions that did not exist earlier in the category; they also include a deep understanding of the category, sometimes from an understanding of adjacent businesses where we already have leadership positions. And I like to call these our hidden power levers. So today, the Aditya Birla Group is an engine of big bets. It provides a platform from which these hidden power levers can be operated.
The wires and cables market therefore clearly ticks all three of these criteria. Firstly, it's an established and growing category that has been around for a long time. It has clearly defined structural growth drivers. At the same time, as the category is growing, as India is growing, the customer's needs and technical specifications of the product are advancing in a way that it creates the space for a large new challenger, which I think in this case is going to be us. Wires and cables today, as I see it, sits at the intersection of three megatrends which we see in the Indian economy, and these megatrends are urbanization, electrification, and digitization. Let me quickly talk about this.
First, we have urbanization. We are expected to add more than 100 million homes in the next decade itself. And as homes become more sophisticated with greater needs for power—for example, many more instruments, many more gadgets in the house—the need for power becomes more complex, more sophisticated, and the extent of reliability of high-quality wiring goes up exponentially. As I say: wire in every home, accelerating India's progress. Second, electrification has raised the stakes in terms of product complexity and performance parameters. The modernization of India's power grid, the rapid expansion of renewable energy, the build-out of metro rail networks, and the transition to EVs—all of these drive significantly the demand for high-performance specialized cables: from grid to vehicle, the power of cables. And third is digitization. The boom of data center build-outs, as we anticipate them, will create a massive amount of direct and indirect demand. Large server hubs themselves require crores worth of cabling per megawatt of installed server capacity. And as India's established data center capacity quadruples to 8 gigawatts in the next four years, the opportunity for cable demand staring at us is totally unprecedented: endless data, boundless opportunities.
And at the confluence of these three megatrends of urbanization, electrification, and digitization, the wire might look the same, but what it connects is beyond recognition. With the qualitative shifts that are underway, we believe that there is the requirement for a new kind of player who will win in the wires and cables market in India. What is our core right to win? Our core right to win is a deep understanding of the products, its ecosystems, and its underlying components. I am referring to our deep expertise in the copper and aluminum businesses, which will be crucial to ensuring quality, performance, and reliability. We understand the adjacent ecosystems well, both from the perspective of customers and sellers in the building materials segment. As we know, our cement, UltraTech Cement, builds one out of three houses built in India. And our presence in the value chain gives us nuanced insight into where the untapped demands lie and where the friction points lie across the construction value chain. We know the pulse of a home, and we know the strength of materials. Therefore, wires and cables presents a new opportunity for us in the Aditya Birla Group, but the underlying logic and the business drivers seem very, very familiar to us.
The credibility and trust of the Aditya Birla Group is a very powerful advantage. Wires and cables sit inside our homes for decades with a very direct bearing on reliability and safety. But historically, homeowners have paid little attention to what goes behind the walls. That, I believe, will change. As consumers become more and more discerning, trust will matter as much as performance. And today, very few names carry trust like Aditya Birla. After the first two legs of urbanization and growing electrification, the third leg of our strategy rests on our partner ecosystem and distribution relationships. I look to all of you in the room and many more beyond. As we have built our presence in several building material categories that are widely distributed, like cement and paints, our long-term partnerships with our dealer ecosystems have been a core differentiator for us. Our partners have repeatedly seen us as true co-travelers in their own value creation journey. For example, in the cement business, more than a thousand of our dealers have been with us for the last 20 years. Several of these relationships are multi-generational. In fact, in many instances, the next generation has joined another business in the group. For example, the next generation of a dealer in cement has joined as a dealer or distributor in Birla Opus Paints. This trust has been built over years and is becoming stronger with every new generation. Even before our products have hit the market, all of you are here to back us, and I am very grateful to you. Thank you all for being here against all odds. Thank you.
Some relationships don't just walk together till the destination; together, they create destinations. And our partnership for sure will be one that creates new destinations and new opportunities together. By way of keeping you informed, as with other new big business builds, we are making a sizable investment in the wires and cables category from day one, with the bold ambition of becoming at least the number two player within three to five years. Our state-of-the-art plant in Bharuch is equipped with equipment from Germany and Korea. It has advanced electron beam cross-linking technology and, obviously, a fully equipped, state-of-the-art R&D lab. Our proposition to you and to the ultimate customer will go well beyond price. We intend to differentiate ourselves through superior quality and technology, unfailing availability, and a consistently high standard of customer service. At launch, we will offer a comprehensive portfolio of wires, cables, and cords, with plans to progressively expand across the full KV spectrum, especially cable applications and a broader range of electrical accessories.
Supporting the product is a distribution and supply chain network built for national scale from the outset itself. We are seeking to create at launch, which is today, what has taken many incumbents decades to build. We are establishing a presence across more than 500 districts and 6,000 pin codes today itself, and over time, this will reach more than 100,000 retailers and 5,000 UltraTech Building Solutions outlets. More than 20 strategically located warehouses will enable us to reach critical markets in 24 hours. In some sense, this category itself has provided us with the guiding principles of building this venture: power enables progress, improves lives, and connects people, but it also carries consequences. Every decision, from manufacturing quality to safe installation, has consequences, and therefore power must be wielded carefully and responsibly. Today, we bring together these guiding principles, and on top of that, our expertise, our experience, and our ambition in a new national brand—a brand that is created to power progress responsibly. We have always believed that the brand grows only when our partners grow. As a group, we understand the language of scale, we understand the language of value creation, and most importantly, we understand the language of aspiration. And there could not be a more exciting time to bring these together. India today is a country bursting with energy, aspiration, and opportunity. Through this new venture, we want to turn that opportunity into growth not just for us, but for every partner here who is joining us on this journey. Because ultimately, progress has only one definition: growing together and winning together. Thank you.
Thank you, sir. Thank you so much for those lovely words and that inspiring vision. Requesting sir to stay back and kindly move towards the LED cube on that side as we are about to initiate the launch. So ladies and gentlemen, we heard about the ambition behind the new journey, and now we can't wait for the brand to come alive in front of each and every one of you. May I also request Mr. Dilip Gaur, Business Director, Wires and Cables, and Mr. Shriram Rangarajan, CEO, Wires and Cables, to join Mr. Birla on stage as well, right next to the LED cube. I was also going to request the entire leadership team to stand by here and get ready to be prepared to come up on stage when we click away those wonderful photographs to celebrate this moment. And to all the members in the crowd, we have given you bands on your hands. Can I see them? Can you put your hands up? As I said, you are our partners; you are going to be equally involved in the launch of this wonderful new product we are talking about. So prepare to go, ladies and gentlemen. I am going to request all three of our leaders to kindly put their hands on the cube for the launch. Put your hands up, ladies and gentlemen.
Ladies and gentlemen, presenting the UltraVolt! We have the leadership team on stage as well. Thank you for initiating this launch. And now, a photograph to capture this moment. And all of you present here in the crowd, you saw it first, for the very first time in front of you, ladies and gentlemen. On stage, Mr. Kumar Mangalam Birla—thank you so much, sir—and the entire leadership team and the founding partners in the room. This is the launch of UltraVolt. Well, a big thank you to Mr. Birla and all the leaders for this very, very special beginning. They have all sat down; they have taken their seats. Thank you so much for that. Thank you for joining us on stage.
All right, UltraVolt has come alive with king-sized ambition, so it also deserves the face of a king-sized brand ambassador as well. King—have I said too much? Any guesses? Any guesses? Well, here we do things in style and larger than life. Put your arms out like this and clap them all the way because that's right, the Badshah of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, will take the brand's promise to people with his voice, his face, and a story. People, let's have a look.
