The Hindu Business Line : Kanoria Chemicals plans greenfield ventures abroad

Kanoria Chemicals and Industries Ltd (KCIL) is looking at geographical expansion by setting up greenfield plants overseas. The company plans to invest anywhere between $25 million to $50 million (in the range of Rs 100 crore to Rs 200 crore) for this, company Chairman and Managing Director, Mr R.V. Kanoria told Business Line.

"We do not want to diversify from our core areas. We are planning to set up a greenfield project and essentially looking at countries that have low energy costs and high availability of salt," he said.

"We have identified certain countries for this purpose. These are non-traditional choices," said Mr Kanoria, refusing to divulge their geographies for competition reasons.

The company plans to fund the major portion of its foreign venture through internal accruals and is not keen on heavy borrowings for its overseas ventures.

"We would be setting up greenfield ventures over a few year, may be by 2009. So fund flow would not be a problem. We do not want to dilute our balance sheet by heavy debts," he said.

Environment management

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, the company is focussing on environment protection. While the company is planning to double its capacity by 2008, it intends to eliminate environmentally hazardous mercury cell technology for manufacturing caustic soda with the environmental friendly membrane base technology, he said.

The company is also improving on its bottomline by making use of the wastes. "The fly ash we get from our power plant is of very fine quality. Apart from selling it we are also making use of this fly ash to make bricks and other finer artefacts such as flower pots, vases etc," he said.

"The fly ash bricks are used for the housing project that we have undertaken for our contract labourers. The entire construction is with fly ash bricks and in the first phase we have already built 128 dwelling units and would eventually provide housing to all the contract labourers," he said.

He said that the project primarily seeks to provide clean, comfortable, hygienic, and aesthetically designed housing and would help to remove the temporary hutments outside the township.

The company had recorded gross sales of Rs 285.93 crore during the first half of the current financial year and has posted a profit before tax of Rs 9.40 crore and a net profit of Rs 6.63 crore.

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