Cable Stocks Fall as UltraTech Copies the Paints Playbook

KEI Industries fell 8.1 percent to Rs 4,895.50 on September 4 after UltraTech Cement switched on Ultravolt, its new wires and cables brand. Polycab India, RR Kabel and Havells India sold off with it, while UltraTech itself traded slightly higher. The move is the Aditya Birla Group’s fourth new business in three years, housed inside India’s largest cement company and aimed at the house-wire counter that already buys its grey cement.

Investors have seen this script. Grasim’s Birla Opus did not ease into paints. It arrived at national scale, paid for dealers, and forced a multiple reset across the old leaders even as the category kept growing. Ultravolt is built the same way, only the product on the pallet is copper instead of emulsion.

KEI Drops 8.1% After the Ultravolt Launch

The selling on September 4 extended a slide that began on September 1, when UltraTech told exchanges the Gujarat plant had started commercial production. KEI took the sharpest hit among the large names. V-Marc India, a smaller listed cable maker, fell 7.37 percent to Rs 323, and RR Kabel dropped 6.83 percent to Rs 2,439. Polycab, the organised-market leader, was down 5.78 percent at Rs 8,298.

AFTERNOON PRICES ON SEPTEMBER 4

UltraTech changed hands around Rs 11,300, up 0.22 percent, with a market value near Rs 3.33 lakh crore. The stock is up 5.1 percent in 2026, against an 8.4 percent decline in the Nifty 50. Nuvama called the launch aggressive on capacity, product range and distribution, and said it could force an interim de-rating across cables and wires. That is the paints pattern in market language: earnings can still rise while the multiple paid for those earnings does not.

The Jhagadia Plant Opens With 1,098,000 Kilometres

UltraTech did not wait for a December start. Company secretary Dhiraj Kapoor’s exchange letter dated September 1 said the wires and cables plant at Jhagadia, Bharuch district, Gujarat, had begun commercial production that day. The annexure lists the products as house wires and light-duty cables, with 1,098,000 kilometres of installed capacity.

Jefferies noted that UltraTech entered the business just 18 months after announcing the plan, and that the stance looks more aggressive than the bank first modelled. Morgan Stanley flagged the same hurry, keeping an Overweight rating, and said about Rs 890 crore of the Rs 1,800 crore budget had already been spent by June. The brand launch itself came on September 3, two days after the plant went live.

THE ULTRAVOLT BUILD

1. June 2026: UltraTech has already put about Rs 890 crore into the wires budget, Morgan Stanley said, against Rs 1,800 crore approved.
2. September 1, 2026: The Jhagadia plant starts commercial production of house wires and light-duty cables at 1,098,000 km.
3. September 3, 2026: The Aditya Birla Group unveils the Ultravolt brand and a five-year push to sit among the top two.
4. September 4, 2026: KEI, Polycab, RR Kabel and peers extend losses, while UltraTech holds a slim gain.

Sriram Rangarajan, chief executive of Ultravolt, said the first range covers home wires, flexible wires and cables for homes, offices, factories and infrastructure, with electrical accessories to follow. The group also said it will move across the kilovolt range and into specialty cables over time. German and Korean machines, E-Beam Pro processing and an on-site laboratory are part of the Bharuch kit, according to the launch briefing around chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla.

Birla Opus Already Wrote This Script

Ultravolt is not a one-off. The Aditya Birla Group said the brand is its top two players within five years attempt in cables, and its fourth new business foray in three years after Birla Opus paints, Indriya jewellery stores and Birla Pivot, the B2B marketplace. Birla, speaking at the launch, tied the wires bet to the same logic he has used on those earlier cheques.

Wires and cables are becoming central to India’s next phase of development. They sit at the intersection of three mega trends in the Indian economy, urbanization, electrification and digitization. More than 100 million new homes over the next decade, expanding energy infrastructure, and the rapid rise of data centers are poised to fuel a boom in the category. Our distinctive advantage comes from a deep understanding of the product, its underlying components and the adjacent ecosystems.

Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman, Aditya Birla Group, September 3 launch statement

He added that new-business creation is now part of the group’s method, and that he sees the house as a platform for those bets. On paints, the method is no longer a theory. Grasim committed about Rs 10,000 crore, built plants before asking the market for permission, and put tinting machines and extra credit in front of dealers. Birla said Opus reached double-digit share within two years. Grasim later reported Birla Opus revenue of Rs 1,661 crore in the quarter to June 2026, up 64 percent from a year earlier, with more than 55,000 dealers billed at least once and a presence in 12,100 towns. Indriya, he said, has 90 stores in 54 cities. Pivot’s annualised run rate has reached about Rs 10,000 crore in three years.

Paint stocks spent that period learning a hard lesson. Asian Paints and its peers kept selling paint, but the multiple the market paid for that growth shrank once a conglomerate with a free-machine, longer-credit offer was standing at the same counter. Cable investors applied that memory in a single session. Motilal Oswal’s June note still had Polycab compounding cables revenue at about 22 percent through FY28, with KEI and RR Kabel near 21 percent. Those forecasts assumed the old field. Ultravolt is the new one.

Where House Wires Meet UltraTech’s Cement Channel

The first plant is not a full-line cable factory. It makes house wires and light-duty cables, the SKUs that move through electricians, retailers and building-material sheds. Motilal Oswal puts residential property at about 35 percent of cables and wires use, and calls housing wire one of the largest end-use slices. That is also the slice that sits closest to UltraTech’s existing buyer: the individual home builder, the contractor, the developer already taking cement, ready-mix and white cement.

Polycab’s own competitive assessment puts listed makers’ FY25 cables revenue in a tight ladder: Polycab at Rs 188,881 million, KEI at Rs 88,558 million, Havells at Rs 71,836 million, RR Kabel at Rs 66,888 million and Finolex at Rs 50,067 million. Motilal Oswal estimates Polycab held about 30-31 percent of the domestic organised market in FY26, up from 18-19 percent in FY20, after growing about 24 percent a year from FY22 to FY26. KEI and RR Kabel grew about 21 percent in that stretch, Havells about 17 percent.

Those shares were won in a market that was still consolidating, not defending against a cement major. Motilal Oswal sizes the industry at about Rs 1 trillion in FY26 after a 12.5 percent compound rate from FY22, with the organised share of 80% in FY26, up from about 67 percent in FY22, and looks for 13-14 percent compound growth through FY30. A growing pie is exactly what Birla said he wants. It is also what lets a new plant run hard without needing to kill the category. The pressure shows up in price, dealer margin and the multiple, not in a sudden drop in kilometres sold.

The gap in the first plant still matters. Extra-high-voltage lines, export lots and big utility tenders are not what Jhagadia was declared to make. KEI and Polycab have spent years on that heavier work, and Ultravolt will have to climb the kilovolt range before it meets them there. House wire is a different fight. Brand loyalty is thinner, the electrician often picks what is on the van, and a cement delivery already going to the site can drop a coil of wire on the same trip. That is why the selloff hit names tied to the retail wire counter as well as names with fatter industrial books. The market is pricing the channel, not waiting for an EHV qualification.

Cement Shops, Electricians and One Lakh Retailers

Dilip Gaur, director of Ultravolt, said the company is going national at once rather than testing one region. The group already has copper and aluminium in its metals businesses, the two metals that Gaur has described as about 80 percent of a housing wire’s cost. UltraTech has not disclosed a captive supply deal, so that is an option, not a published cost edge. The published edge is the route to market.

THE ROLLOUT ULTRAVOLT PROMISED

• Retailers: Reach more than one lakh shops, instead of a state-by-state trial.
• Cement counters: Put wire into more than 5,000 UltraTech Building Solutions outlets that already sell to builders.
• Geography: Open across more than 500 districts and 6,000 pin codes at the start.
• Warehouses: Back the launch with a network of more than 20 warehouses.
• Electricians: 1,600 already on the books before launch, with more than 40,000 to be trained over the next year under Skill India with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India.

Gaur said UltraTech’s ties to home builders, contractors, developers and EPC firms give the new brand a platform that a standalone cable start-up would have to buy. On September 4, that platform was already visible in wholesale markets. Yatin Mota, a Mumbai market journalist, posted photographs from Lohar Chawl, the city’s largest electricals market, and wrote that “Ultratech’s Cables and Wires Branding has Already Started,” with dealership slabs expected next. Wholesale traders in Indore were already talking about Maharani Road and New Siyaganj around Navratri. The factory announcement was two days old. The shop-front fight had started.

An Overweight on UltraTech and a De-Rating on Rivals

Houses that cover UltraTech treated the early plant start as proof of delivery. They did not, in the same notes, add a full cables profit line to the cement model. That gap is the whole trade: a small slice of UltraTech, a full reset of the multiple on companies that live on cables.

HOW HOUSES FRAME THE WIRES BET

Morgan Stanley’s Rs 14,700 target implied a little over 30 percent upside from the September 4 price near Rs 11,300. Jefferies said that once scaled, wires could contribute 3-7 percent of UltraTech’s FY30 revenue and EBITDA, a line it has not yet put in estimates, and that the venture fits the wider building-solutions push plus Grasim’s paints expansion. Motilal Oswal’s 5-7 percent share by FY31 is a direct claim on Polycab’s and KEI’s market. Nuvama still listed Polycab and KEI among preferred names even as it warned of the de-rating, which is another way of saying the businesses can keep growing after the multiple has been cut.

Birla put a demand kicker under that share fight. He said India’s established data-centre capacity should quadruple to about 8 GW over the next four years, and that large server halls take crores of cabling per megawatt. House wire from Jhagadia does not win that work on day one. It does put Ultravolt in the same construction stream that will pour those floors, and it gives the group a reason to climb into heavier cables later without building a brand from zero.

By the afternoon of September 4, the plant was running, the brand was on Lohar Chawl shutters, and KEI had already been marked down 8.1 percent. Ultravolt has not yet reported a rupee of wire sales. The multiple on the companies that do is already moving.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and market analysis for information only. It is not investment advice, a research recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any share, bond or derivative. Readers should consult a SEBI-registered investment adviser or their own broker and consider their risk limits before acting on any price move in UltraTech, Polycab, KEI, RR Kabel or related stocks. Share prices, brokerage targets and company plans are those published by the companies and research houses named above as of September 4, 2026, and they can change with the next session, the next filing or the next quarter of Ultravolt sales.