Asian Paints and Berger plan a second price hike as crude crosses $100
Paint prices could rise 3 to 4% before Diwali. Here is why oil, a samosa stall and your bedroom wall are all connected.
Picture this: your family has saved up to paint the house before Diwali. The painter is booked, the colours are chosen. Then the shop says the same tin of paint will cost a little more from next month. That is what is about to happen across India. On 16 October 2026, Mint reported that Asian Paints and Berger Paints, India's two biggest paint companies, are raising prices for the second time this financial year. The reason sounds strange at first: oil.
Who is raising prices, and by how much?
Asian Paints, the country's largest paintmaker, told its dealers it will raise prices by about 3% across its products from 1 November. A dealer is the local shop that buys paint from the company and sells it to you. The company's letter to dealers was dated 25 September and said full details would come in October.
Berger Paints, the second biggest, has told its dealers to expect a 3 to 4% rise, starting between late October and the first week of November. Birla Opus, the newer paint brand of the Aditya Birla Group, is also planning a 3 to 4% increase. It has not shared the dates yet, and it told dealers to buy more stock before the new prices kick in.
Other big names, like Kansai Nerolac and JSW Dulux, usually follow the market leader when it changes prices, Mint said.
Wait, what does oil have to do with paint?
Quite a lot. Paint is not just colour mixed with water. A tin of paint has a few main parts:
- Resins: the "glue" that makes paint stick to the wall and stay there.
- Solvents: the liquid that keeps paint runny so it can be brushed on, and then dries away.
- Pigments: the powders that give colour and cover the wall.
Mint explains that things made from crude oil are key parts of solvents and resins. Crude oil is the raw oil that comes out of the ground, before it is turned into petrol, diesel, plastics and many chemicals. Paint companies also use titanium dioxide, a white powder used in paint.
Think of a samosa stall. If the price of cooking oil shoots up, every samosa costs more to make. Sooner or later, the stall owner has to charge a bit more. Paint companies are in the same spot.
How high has oil gone?
Very high. The world tracks oil prices using a few benchmarks, which are like a standard price tag everyone agrees to watch. The best known one is called Brent crude.
On Friday, 16 October 2026, Brent touched $110 a barrel for the first time since May and closed at $109.86, up 3.7% in a single day. CNBC linked the jump to attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea route that carried around 20% of the world's oil and fuel before the Iran war, and to strikes on oil facilities elsewhere.
Just a few weeks earlier, Mint noted that crude had already jumped about 70% so far in 2026 to near $98 a barrel. On 8 October, Moneycontrol reported Brent climbing above $102.
It is not only oil. Business Standard reported that prices of titanium dioxide were up 10.6% from a year earlier and 23.3% from three months earlier. The Asian Paints letter also blamed higher costs of packaging and transport.
Why is this called the "second" hike?
Because paint companies already raised prices once this year. Mint says they began staggered price hikes from 1 April, which means small steps one after another instead of one big jump. Over March to July, those steps added up to around 12 to 14%.
Berger Paints' managing director, Abhijit Roy, had told Mint in September that the earlier increases did not fully cover the rise in raw material costs, and that the company was waiting for prices to settle before deciding on more.
A quick word on margins
Here is a business word worth knowing: margin. Margin is the part of the price a company keeps after paying for what went into the product. If you sell lemonade for Rs 20 and the lemons, sugar and cup cost Rs 12, your margin is Rs 8. If lemons suddenly cost more and you do not raise your price, your Rs 8 shrinks.
That is the fear for paint companies. Mint reported that an analyst at Systematix expected Asian Paints' gross margin to fall by 400 basis points compared with the quarter before in July to September 2026. A basis point is one hundredth of one percent, so 400 basis points means 4 percentage points. A price hike is one way to protect that margin.
Investors noticed the oil link too. On 8 October, as oil rose, Kansai Nerolac's share price fell 4.8% and Asian Paints fell 1.4%, alongside fuel companies and airlines.
Will people stop painting their homes?
Probably not, at least according to one expert. Diwali falls in November this year, and the festive season is the busiest time for home painting. Manoj Menon, head of research at ICICI Securities, told Mint that the hikes are unlikely to hurt demand, because families who have planned to paint will mostly go ahead.
His other point is a smart one. When you paint a house, a big part of the bill is the painter's wages, not the paint itself. So a 3% rise on the paint adds only a small amount to the full job. That is like the price of tea leaves going up a little: the cup of chai at the stall barely changes, because most of the cost is milk, sugar, gas and the chaiwala's time.
Competition matters too. Birla Opus and JSW Dulux have been fighting hard for buyers, and Mint reported that companies now compete through bigger discounts and rewards for dealers and painters. So each company has to balance two things: raise prices enough to cover costs, but not so much that buyers switch brands.
Watch: how paint gets made
This episode of How It's Made shows how house paint is produced in a factory.
And in this ET Now interview from earlier this year, Berger Paints' chief talks about crude oil, raw material costs and price hikes.
The big lesson
Oil is hidden inside far more things than petrol. When a war or a blocked sea route pushes crude past $100, the effect travels all the way to the paint on your bedroom wall. Next time a price goes up at a shop, it is worth asking: what is this made of, and what happened to the price of that?
Sources
- Mint: India's top paintmakers plan second price hike this year as crude crosses $100
- Mint: Paint makers face a crude shock as competition stays fierce
- CNBC: Brent oil touches $110
- Moneycontrol: Oil-sensitive stocks tumble as crude prices surge
- Business Standard: Muted demand, higher oil prices to cloud paints sector outlook
- Cover photo: Open Soy Paint Cans, by United Soybean Board, CC BY 2.0
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