The Hindu Business Line : STC aiming at 25% growth in turnover

New Delhi April 24 State Trading Corporation of India (STC) is aiming at turnover growth of 25 per cent in the current fiscal over the Rs 14,000-crore turnover it clocked in 2006-07.

Speaking to Business Line, Dr Arvind Pandalai, Chairman and Managing Director, said that STC is leveraging its expertise in bulk procurement and marketing of commodities to enter new businesses to sustain high growth and improve per employee profitability.

STC ended the fiscal gone by with profit of Rs 100 crore and profit after tax of Rs 69 crore.

Mr Panadali said that recently, the corporation signed an MoU with Metals Scrap Trading Corporation (MSTC) Ltd for use of MSTC's e-commerce services for procurement and disposal of commodities.

A novel feature of the MoU is that STC and MSTC would adopt a consortium approach when dealing with big customers.

This not only helps in sharing risks and market information pertaining to common areas of trade, but also enables both companies to explore the possibility of joint ventures in marketing, infrastructure or new businesses.

He also said that STC has the expertise to foster a private-public partnership (PPP) approach and has tied up with other public sector undertakings such as NTPC and BEML.

According to Mr Pandalai, the objective is to leverage the strengths of associate organisations and evolve complementarities to ensure a win-win situation. (STC has inked an MoU with BEML for pooling of resources for trading of coal and iron ore.)

Once the tie-up for sharing business is in place and makes progress, the corporation would go in for similar arrangements with grower co-operatives to diversify into agri products, cotton seed oil processing and organic vegetables, so that the benefits of big company partnership would help small growers in realising better price for their produce and get enhanced market access. In this regard, STC's move to purchase tea leaf from small growers, which was started a few months back, is already yielding results in terms of better price recovery and smooth operation of sales of small tea growers in the Nilgris in Tamil Nadu.

The corporation has plans to undertake import of rough diamonds for export after processing and adding value.

Recently, it also made a foray into export of gold jewellery. Besides, STC is negotiating offset arrangements against purchase of aircraft by Indian/Air India, he added.