Madhukar Parekh and Family

Fevicol is synonymous in common parlance with glue – a stage each brand wants to reach in their respective industries.

That kind of brand penetration requires distribution network that reaches every hardware store and carpenter's workshop in the country, which is precisely what Balvant Parekh built when he founded Pidilite and what his son Madhukar Parekh expanded over subsequent decades. Fevicol holds over 70% market share in the adhesive category, a figure that reflects both the depth of that distribution and the difficulty any competitor faces in displacing a product that tradespeople have used for their entire working lives.

Pidilite has since extended into construction chemicals, waterproofing and arts materials under the Fevicryl brand, all of which run on the same distribution infrastructure that made the original business defensible. The family's approach has been to identify products that require specialist application knowledge, build relationships with the tradespeople who apply them, and expand the portfolio through those same relationships. This is a slower compounding strategy than acquiring large businesses, but it has produced genuinely durable competitive positions across each core category.