Balmer Lawrie looking at organic growth across businesses

Diversified PSU Balmer Lawrie & Co Ltd is eyeing organic growth across all its six strategic business units (SBUs), a top company official said.

“We are looking at organic growth in all SBUs since inorganic growth was not possible as the funds available for buy-outs were limited,” Chairman and Managing Director Prabal Basu said.

The company was facing challenges at the Kolkata plant of industrial packaging (IP), owing to lack of demand from the private sector as government orders were restricted only to the MSMEs, and not the PSUs.

Basu told PTI that the networth of the company was ₹1,000 crore and only 15 per cent of that could be used for funding acquisitions. “This amount of ₹150 crore was little for buy-outs,” he said.

Almost a debt-free company, Balmer Lawrie was also not too keen on leveraging, Basu said.

“At present, all the SBUs were on growth path. We are shortly going to commission one IP plant (steel drums) at Gujarat at a cost of ₹25 crore to ₹ 30 crore,” he said.

Regarding the Kolkata plant, Basu said challenges were being faced due to lack of industrialisation in the state, leading to dearth of private orders. “We are looking for newer product lines at the plant.”

The container freight stations (CFS) business of the logistics SBU had also been suffering because of the Centre’s directive of direct delivery to import points from the plants, the top company official said.

“This has led to a dip in the CFS business volume by 40 per cent leading to a loss of ₹ 14 crore to ₹ 15 crore.

Despite this, the logistics SBU contributed maximum to the turnover,” Basu said.

Balmer Lawrie has begun operations of a temperature- controlled warehouse. “If this becomes successful, we will replicate this by several numbers,” he added.

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