Air-conditioning and commercial refrigeration major Blue Star Limited plans to build a greenfield plant in Jammu first and later take up another plant in Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, to meet the company’s growing requirement and add new line of products.

B Thiagarajan, Executive Director and President, Blue Star, said: “The setting up of these two manufacturing units will take up the total manufacturing plants under the company fold to seven. In fact, we would be reverting to seven plants which we once had.

“However, two of the older plants were closed.

These two units will make us future ready and also enable us to take up some backward integration — that is manufacture some of the products that go into air-conditioning products.”

New range of ACs Addressing a press conference here to announce the launch of new range of ACs in the market, taking the portfolio up to 135 from 87 earlier, Thiagarjan said the room AC market in India grew by about 10 per cent during 2015, wherein Blue Star outperformed the market, growing at 20 per cent.

The market for room ACs is expected to grow by about 15 per cent in the financial year 2017 and Blue Star is aiming to increase the market share up from 10 per cent to 12 per cent, he said.

Apart from investing ₹215 crore in setting up of manufacturing plants, the company plans to invest over ₹30 crore on new product development as well as research and design during FY 2017.

In addition, keeping in view the increasing demand for marketing and advertisement spend, the company plans to spend about ₹40 crore next fiscal, he said.

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