Green Shoots are visible in many sectors: Balfour Manuel, Blue Dart

Balfour Manuel, Managing Director, Blue Dart Express Limited, talks about the performance of the current quarter and e-commerce market during a candid chat with Swati Khandelwal, Zee Business. Edited Excerpts: 

Q: There's been a lot of interest in your stock lately. We have seen a rally of over 40% in just 2 months. Give us an update and how will you summarize the performance of the current quarter for the company? Have you seen trends normalise to pre-COVID levels or is there still some way to go?

A: Although we are a listed company but will not be able to make forward comments because we are in the mid of the second quarter. All I can tell you is that several green shoots are visible to us and the future of our business is quite optimistic and green shoots are visible in many sectors like e-commerce and pharmaceuticals. Volumes of most of our products are above pre-COVID, as of now.

Q: Which segments are showing traction currently? How have e-commerce volumes been for the company?

A: Amid the pandemic, e-commerce broadly across the globe has shown tremendous resilience because of the new norm of people not living their homes. Similar volumes were seen in India as well and they are quite resilient. E-commerce has been performing well even for us. So, I will say, e-commerce is here to stay and it is a profitable large vertical for Blue Dart. In this pandemic you will have to say that Blue Dart is a very resilient organization, so we haven’t closed our business even for a day in the pandemic. Our six Boeing 757 fleets and ground network were working and around 19,000-20,000 were in attendance at our place. So there has been a lot of resilience in it due to which there will be a consistency in the business and our future outlook is very optimistic. Apart from this, we are seeing volumes in consumer electronics and slight stress is visible in banking and finance. There are many sectors where green shoots are visible to us.