Q2 FY26–27 — growth, and its cost

This is the third of these letters. Q2 of FY26–27 was the fastest-growing quarter in Unived's history. It was also the quarter in which that growth outran us. Those are the same fact, and this letter is largely about it.

How the quarter went.

Q2 grew 45% over Q1, and 61% over the same quarter a year earlier.

It is the steepest year-on-year quarter we have recorded — steeper than the 40% I reported in May, which I had taken for an outlier. I will not set revenue figures beside these rates; a growth rate conveys direction and pace, and the absolute number stays private, for the reasons given in the first letter and on the Financials page.

Growth at that rate is not free. I wrote that line in the last letter as a caution. This quarter it stopped being a caution.

What went wrong.

In September, several products went out of stock. We forfeited a meaningful volume of business — orders we could have filled, buyers who arrived and left without what they came for. My estimate is that our numbers would have been higher by about 18%, if we had every product in stock during September. 

The cause deserves precision, because it would be convenient to file this under demand and move on. Demand did rise, faster than we had forecast. But demand did not cause the shortfall. We did. Operations failed to intimate an MIS increase — a call that should have been made, and pressed, and was not. The surge was the good news. The failure to produce against it was ours.

What we are doing about it.

For two quarters now we have grown faster than we expected. The correction is threefold: tighter connectivity between sales and production, better forecasting, and deeper planning; enough inventory held to absorb a growth rate at this level rather than chase it. That work is underway.

What we launched.

Two products shipped.

Elite Gel 360, which I committed to in the last letter and which arrived on schedule: the 2:1 formulation of our Gel-180, two servings in a single spout sachet, 360 kcal per pack, for the endurance athlete who would sooner carry one thing than two.

And seven new flavours for Gel-100 — not a new product, a wider range of an existing one. Flavour fatigue is real across a long effort; the remedy is simply more choice.

The Daily Supergreens reformulation and Athlete Meal remain in development and will follow shortly. I would rather hold them than ship them early.

The factory.

The capital project from the last letter, the one I said would earn a letter of its own, is under construction. The building is nearly complete. It will be three to four months before it is operational; we expect it to go live around the end of Q3 or the start of Q4 of this financial year.

I am still withholding the numbers, the location and the funding. Not out of secrecy, but because the full account belongs in one complete letter, written when the facility is live; the real figures, the real timeline, and whatever we got wrong in building it. That letter will carry the official announcement. For now: it is happening, broadly on the schedule I implied, and the whole of it is close.

A new athlete.

We signed Harith Noah this quarter — the first Indian to win a class at the Dakar Rally (Rally 2, 2024), and a TVS rider. He is now under contract with Unived.

This signing matters to me for an unusual reason. Harith has bought our products for ten years. He was our customer long before he was our athlete; a rider paying for our fuel and hydration out of his own pocket, through training and through the most punishing endurance event in the sport, because it worked. The contract was the logical next step. I can think of no stronger endorsement than a decade of someone paying for the product before we ever asked him to stand behind it.

And as with any athlete at this level, we gain more than a name. Rally raid is the harshest trial our products will meet, successive days in the heat, no tolerance for a formulation that sits wrong, and Harith reports, without flattery, what holds and what fails. That is worth more than the logo.

Closing.

That is the quarter. We grew faster than we ever have, and we failed to keep pace with our own growth; forfeiting September sales we should have booked, because we were still planning as the smaller company we no longer are. We shipped a gel we had promised, signed a rider who paid for our products for a decade before he represented them, and we are months from commissioning the project the last letter described.

I hold no flattery about this run of growth, and I do not take it for granted. I wake up knowing it can slow. It will slow; we have been through enough cycles to understand how this works. What the new unit and this demand give us is a chance to raise the fundamental base of the business, so that when the slowdown comes, we are standing on higher ground than before.

Next quarter I would prefer to tell you we handled it better. Ask me then.

If you've read this far, thank you.