The Hindu Business Line : ‘Transafe Services will not be hit by downturn’

Kolkata, Dec. 2 Undeterred by the present economic slowdown, Transafe Services Ltd, a joint venture between the public sector Balmer Lawrie (29 per cent) and ICICI Venture (71 per cent), has ambitious plans for container manufacturing.

Turnover target

“We operate in the niche market not affected by any major let-up in demand for our custom-built products,” Mr G.K. Mukerjea, Managing Director & CEO of the company, told newspersons here on Tuesday, pointing out that in the first half of the current fiscal, the company posted 55 per cent growth in turnover at Rs 51.66 crore and 130 per cent in earning after tax at Rs 5.01 crore.

For the whole year, the turnover is targeted at Rs 115 crore (Rs 85.11 crore in 2007-08) and earning after tax at Rs 14 crore (Rs 8.69 crore).

Higher capacity

Transafe Services, as the Managing Director pointed out, manufactured specialised custom-built containers for railways, both Indian Railways and the private container train operators, for oil exploration by oil companies, defence and space research, among others. “We’ve in hand firm orders worth Rs 70 crore,” he said.

The company recently commissioned a new container manufacturing unit at Nimapura Industrial Estate in Kharagpur, West Bengal. Built at a cost of Rs 8 crore, the unit has a capacity of 500 TEUs a month.

“With this, the company’s total manufacturing capacity goes up to 1,150 TEUs a month,” he said, pointing out that it would rise further to 1650 TEUs a month with the commissioning of the Daruhera unit in Haryana, due soon.

The other units are located at Ranihati, West Bengal (150 TEUs) and Coimbatore (500 TEUs). The capacity of all these units could be stepped up depending on the demand. “In fact, we’ve plans for expanding the capacity of the Coimbatore unit by 1,000 TEUs per month and the Kharagpur unit by another 500 TEUs per month but we’ll take a call sometime in July/August”, he said.

Mr Mukerjea pointed out that the company’s container leasing business, i.e., buying containers from China for leasing them out to railways, coastal operators and shipping companies, remained intact; its share in turnover remaining unchanged at 30 per cent in the first half vis-À-vis the whole of last year.

However, the logistics business, covering warehousing, stockyard management, transportation of specialised items and container repairing, suffered a little, its share in the turnover having dropped to 19 per cent in the first half from 22 per cent in 2007-08.

The share of the manufacturing activity in the turnover was likely to rise to 55 per cent by the end of March 2009 from 35 per cent in the first half of the current year and 48 per cent in 2007-08. “For the first time, we did some container trading, i.e., buying containers from China and selling at a handsome margin to local customers to meet their pressing demands.”

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