Toys that think

Venkatachari Jagannathan
06 April 2002

Chennai: “Selling toys is certainly not child's play. One has to address - and impress - three individual minds with three different attitudes,“ says Funskool India chief executive Raphael Kuriyan.

“While the customer is the child and the mother is the executor of the child's wishes, it is the father who holds the purse strings,“ he says. “Apart from bargaining with the toy-seller, the father strikes a deal with his child, that s/he will secure good marks in school exams before parting with his money.“

Divya Ragunathan, a tenth standard student, smiles: “[What Kuriyan says] is true; I had to face such situations several times.“ And, of course, the mother cannot be ignored. “If you have to sell babies' toys, it is she who has to be targeted,“ says Kuriyan.

Funskool is a 60:40 joint venture (with a Rs 4-crore equity-base) between the Chennai-based tyre major MRF and Hasbro International, the world's largest toy manufacturer. Funskool, which has a turnover of Rs 45 crore, used to import moulds for making toys for the domestic market earlier, but recently it reversed that trend.

Competing with several companies in China and other markets, Funskool developed a mould for the 'Action Hero' toy, one of Hasbro International's fast-moving children's fancies. “When major Indian toy players are importing the product, we are exporting it to the global market,“ says a beaming Kuriyan.

An engineering graduate and a business management post-graduate, Kuriyan is arguably the most-experienced person in the domestic toys industry. Recently he spoke to domain-B  about his company's future plans and other issues pertaining to the industry. Excerpts:

What is this industry's domestic market-size? And at what rate does it grow?
The industry is dominated by small-scale units, so it is difficult to give you an exact figure. Based on the market feedback I would conservatively estimate the market-size to be in the region of Rs 500 crore. There are others who estimate it at Rs 1,000 crore. Talking about Funskool, our sales and profit grew by 20 per cent during 2001-02, while exports went up by 30 per cent.

How is Funskool planning to cater to Hasbro International's global market needs?
We have designed two toy moulds for Hasbro's popular toy range, Action Man, a $800-million brand. We did this after obtaining the concept from our foreign partner. Competing with us were Hasbro's other outfits located in countries like China. Hasbro will need at least 5 lakh numbers of each toy and we will stamp them out with our moulds. This is the first time that an Indian company has designed a mould for toys and exported them.

As you know, toys and dolls do not possess a strict geometric shape, and they have lots of moving parts, thus complicating the mould designing. The standard procedures of mould making do not apply to our industry. We started our exports in 1995, assembling the imported components and taking advantage of the cheap labour. Going up fast in the value chain, we started to import moulds to manufacture and export toys. With the cost of moulds increasing constantly, we decided to design the moulds ourselves with concepts borrowed from our collaborator. Our next step is to make toys for international markets with our own concepts.