The Hindu Business Line : V-Guard’s cable plants in TN, Uttarakhand to start this year

Ahmedabad, Aug. 27 The new manufacturing units of V-Guard Industries Ltd in Tamil Nadu and Uttarakhand will start commercial production by the end of this year, an official of the Kerala-based company said here on Tuesday.

The building wire cable plant of V-Guard at Kashipur (Uttarakhand) is set to start production by December.

The company has invested Rs 24 crore on this plant having a capacity of 200 tonnes a month, Mr Mithun Chittilappilly, Executive Director, told reporters.

It would cater to the company’s emerging markets in northern and western States.

The other plant, near Coimbatore, will start commercial production of aluminium cables by November. V-Guard has invested Rs 22 crore on this plant whose capacity would be 3,000 tonnes annually.

It already has an electrical cable division at this facility.

The company had raised Rs 65 crore in February through an IPO for these plans. V-Guard, whose turnover in 2007-08 was Rs 291 crore, expects it to reach Rs 400 crore this fiscal, a quarter of which would be from the cable business, he said.

The company would be launching a new product, gas geisers, in Gujarat next year. V-Guard, which manufactures stabilisers, UPS, pumps, cables, fans and electrical and solar water heaters, provides direct employment to 700 people and indirectly to over 5,500 people through outsourcing a major part of its production to those companies. In Gujarat, where V-Guard began business activity last year, it plans to capture 10-15 per cent of market in the next couple of years to the tune of Rs 10 crore.

In India, the market size of the products V-Guard makes is around Rs 8,000 crore a year, half of which is organised, Mr Chittilappilly added.