Comments
GVFL Ltd on Tuesday announced its investment of Rs 40 crore in a Mumbai-based integrated cold chain operator Schedulers Logistics India Pvt Ltd under GVFL's Golden Gujarat Growth Fund - a SEBI registered close ended fund.
The transaction marks the second round of growth financing for GVFL's first exposure in the logistics sector. Schedulers operates a fleet of reefer vehicles and temperature controlled warehouses across India.
Started in the year 2013 with a fleet of 33 reefer vehicles, Schedulers operates 200 reefer trucks and manages 13,000 MT of temperature controlled warehousing space. It operates trucks across 18 MT to 1 MT truck-load.
Colonel Arvind Gangoly, Co-founder & CEO of Schedulers added, "This investment by GVFL reflects their confidence in building infrastructure to support food, fresh produce and pharma products in India."
The funding will help Schedulers to go aggressive in capacity additions and furthering pan India presence including Gujarat by augmenting reefer fleet as well as cold storage capacity.
As per National Centre for Cold-chain Development, there is a requirement of 62,000 reefer vehicles as compared to the existing capacity of 9,000 vehicles.
In terms of reefers, the company is planning to grow its current fleet of 200 vehicles to over 500 in next 2 years. The company is also planning to reach to 18 cold storage locations with 35,000 MT capacity by year 2020.
Sanjay Randhar, MD, GVFL commented, “The demand-supply gap is working in favour of the cold chain sector. There is a huge opportunity to build-up capacity and cater to the burgeoning demand which will have positive social implications too.”
It is estimated that the cold chain industry, currently worth Rs 195-200 billion, is going to increase at a five-year CAGR of 16-17 per cent to Rs 400-450 billion in 2019-20, driven by proliferation of organised retail, pharma, horticulture, rising demand for processed foods,quick-service restaurants, etc, GVFL stated here.
Support from government policies and schemes in the form of capital subsidy, grant of infrastructure status to the industry and viability gap funding is expected to boost this industry's growth, it added.
Comments
COMMENT NOW
Comments
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of TheHindu Businessline and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.