The Hindu Business Line : Tanflora's biz blossoms with Valentine's week

Future plans
Tanflora is in the process of enlisting in all the major auctions centres in Germany, Holland and Japan.
Setting up overseas offices in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney and Dubai.

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Hosur (Tamil Nadu) Feb. 5 Tanflora, the agri export zone for cut flowers, expects to kick off its business with the export of a million rose stems for the coming Valentine's week.

This would be the first large consignment for the AEZ, touted as one of the largest of its kind in the world for rose exports, marking the formal launch of a project that has been in the making for over five years.

Quality roses

According to Mr Najeeb Ahmed, Managing Director of Tanflora, which is a joint venture between the private promoters and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO), the facility when in full production will have a capacity to export about 70 million rose stems to major markets in the West and East. Its processing facilities will have a spare capacity of about 30 million stems that would be available to other cut flower exporters in the region.

The Rs 24.85 crore facility with equity of Rs 5.82 crore shared equally between the partners, is a common infrastructure facility that provides the technology for cultivating export quality roses, the planting material and post harvest processing to rose growers. Tanflora has sold five acres of developed plots with green house facilities to each of the 25 growers.

Mr Ahmed told a group of reporters on a tour of Tanflora's facilities that it was ideally placed to exploit the cut flowers export opportunity that is opening up to countries like India, Israel and Africa. These countries could tap markets in Europe, Asia and Australia. The tour was organised by Tanflora.

Learning phase

India has gone through an extended learning phase since the 1990s when cut flower exports were seen to have a rosy future. But things had not panned out as expected and many a cut flower exporter had lost due to high costs and lack of economies of scale.

Tanflora had addressed these critical issues and was well set to exploit the export opportunities, Mr Ahmed said.

Initially, exporters had invested Rs 3 crore to Rs 9 crore a hectare to set up green houses with imported material, logistics posed a bottleneck and costs were high because there was not sufficient material.

Best prices

Tanflora has brought down the project cost to about Rs 65 lakh a hectare through the use of indigenous materials; it has brought in the best of technologies, including irrigation systems from Israel and European varieties that would fetch the best prices, according to Mr Ahmed. Now there are over 28 flights a week out of Bangalore to various European destinations. The output from Tanflora would continue to increase to full capacity by 2008-09.

Also, Tanflora is in the process of enlisting in all the major auctions centres in Germany, Holland and Japan. It is also setting up overseas offices in London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, Sydney and Dubai.

Mr S. Ramasundaram, Chairman and Managing Director, Tidco, said Tanflora is in discussions with breeders in Holland to get exclusive rights to some varieties of roses. Olij-Rozen of Holland, has for instance, agreed to name one rose variety the Taj Mahal. Tanflora is now testing over 130 new varieties and 35 of them are now in commercial cultivation.

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