Last year’s heatwave was great for the AC business—demand was over the roof and inventories were wiped out. Voltas, which sells the most room air conditioners in India, saw revenue jump 60% in the March quarter. Contract manufacturers like Blue Star, Amber Enterprises, and PGEL made 50–100% more money. This year too is going to be a long, hot summer. Air-conditioner makers know this. But they also know that, despite all their efforts to prepare this time, they might run out of air conditioners by mid-April.

The same thing that happened last year will happen in 2025.

You see, there are tiny but really important things that make an AC an AC like compressors, cross-flow motors. Suddenly, they were in short supply last year. Some manufacturers ended up airlifting emergency shipments—instead of regular shipping. You could think of this as the business equivalent of ordering from a quick-commerce platform at midnight: expensive, kind of desperate, but necessary. Overall the industry lost the sale of a million and a half units because of this.

And this year could be worse because AC sales are projected to jump another 20%, crossing 12 million units.

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