Orient Bell is a pure-play branded tiles company that has spent nearly five decades turning the messy, fragmented business of buying floor and wall coverings into something simpler - its stated vision is “to simplify tile buying and selling”. Born in 1977 and reshaped by the 2012 merger of Orient and Bell, the company transformed itself starting in 2018 from a manufacturer that pushed products into a customer-first organisation that builds solutions, digital tools and demand around the end user. That recurring approach - invest in owned manufacturing to control supply, then wrap it in technology and brand-building that the rest of the industry has not matched - explains everything that follows. # Business segments A single-engine business built entirely around branded ceramic and vitrified tiles, where the company makes its own product, buys from associate plants in Morbi to fill the range, and then sells through a nationwide network of dealers, exclusive showrooms and digital platforms - all supported by a technology backbone that competitors have been slow to copy. ## 1. Branded tiles: making, sourcing and selling floor and wall solutions **Orient Bell is a single-reportable-segment company that manufactures, trades and retails ceramic and vitrified tiles under one brand, serving both retail homeowners and institutional projects through a network it has digitised end-to-end.** - **Makes its own tiles across three owned plants** - the company operates factories at Sikandrabad (Uttar Pradesh, 14.8 million square metres of annual capacity), Hoskote (Karnataka, 6.6 MSM) and Dora (Gujarat, 5.5 MSM), giving it a multi-location manufacturing base with comparatively low dependence on the Morbi trading cluster. - **Sources the rest from associate plants in Morbi** - two associate entities in Gujarat add another 15.5 MSM of capacity, so the company can offer a full basket of over 4,000 SKUs without having to make every tile itself; own manufacturing accounted for 68% of total sales in FY22. - **Shifted the mix toward higher-value vitrified tiles** - vitrified tiles now account for 59% of sales, up from 41% five years earlier, with Glazed Vitrified Tiles (GVT) alone contributing \~41% of sales, driven by a new GVT line at Dora commissioned ahead of schedule and under budget. - **Sells through dealers, exclusive showrooms and digital leads** - a network of over 2,000 channel partners is supplemented by 350-plus Orient Bell Tile Boutiques (franchise and company-operated showrooms) that now deliver 40% of sales, while the company’s website generates leads for more than 350 dealers every month. - **Patented products create differentiation in a commodity market** - the company holds a patent for antimicrobial and antiviral tiles and another for anti-static tiles, with four more patent-pending innovations including germ-free tiles that kill 99.5% of bacteria and cool tiles with a solar reflective index of 98. ## 2. Adhesives: an early-stage extension under the same roof **A small, recently launched tile-adhesive business called Masterbond that rides on the same dealer and mason relationships the core tile business has already built.** - **Sold to the same customers who buy tiles** - the adhesive is used for fixing tiles and stones, sold domestically through mason meets and a private Facebook group for applicators, with one plant operating from end-July 2025. - **Still measured in millions per month** - as of late 2025 the business was generating only a few million rupees in monthly revenue, making it a nascent add-on rather than a separate engine. # Technology and digital backbone **Orient Bell has built a proprietary digital stack - from AI visualisation tools for dealers to a fully digitised order-to-dispatch system - that the company itself describes as “light years ahead” of industry norms, and it touches every part of the business.** - **Dealers use AI to close sales** - the company’s room-visualisation tools let channel partners add 50,000 new tile designs every month, showing customers exactly how a floor or wall will look before they buy. - **Quicklook turns browsing into quoting** - this visualisation tool allows dealers to place OBL tiles in realistic room settings and generate customised quotations on the spot, an approach recognised as the ‘Best Omnichannel Retail Model’. - **Internal processes run on a single digital spine** - order-to-dispatch, manufacturing and payments are all digitised, a transport management system collapsed despatch time to a few hours, and a business-intelligence tool gives leadership a drillable view of every micro detail. - **Tilekart and OBL Connect extend the platform** - Tilekart is positioned as an industry-first tile-commerce platform, while OBL Connect serves as a dedicated digital channel for partners to check invoices, stock, schemes and product images. # Group structure and partners **Orient Bell is a standalone listed company with two associate manufacturing entities in Morbi, a dormant trading subsidiary, and a captive renewable-energy arrangement that powers its largest plant.** - **Associate entities supply a big chunk of the product range** - the company holds 20.86% of Proton Granito Private Limited and 26% of Corial Ceramic Private Limited, both in Morbi, and continues to buy and sell tiles with them, giving access to 15.5 MSM of capacity without owning the assets outright. - **A wholly owned subsidiary exists for future trading** - Cestrum Enterprises Private Limited was incorporated in June 2024 for import, export and trading of tiles and sanitaryware, but had no material business activity as of FY25. - **Captive solar reduces energy cost and carbon footprint** - a power purchase agreement with Sunsure Solarpark Sixteen Private Limited supplies renewable energy to the Sikandrabad plant, with Orient Bell taking up to 11% equity in the supplier as a captive user under the Electricity Act. - **Banking relationships are spread across four lenders** - State Bank of India, Axis Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and ICICI Bank provide the company’s working capital and term facilities.