Govt to sell 20% stake in NFL

The Government proposes to sell 20 per cent stake in National Fertiliser Limited (NFL). For this, it has floated a Request for Proposal for engaging merchant bankers and brokers.

Shares will be sold through ‘Offer for Sale’ (OFS) by promoters through the stock exchanges. NFL’s share closed at ₹41.60 on Wednesday with a gain of 1.84 per cent over Tuesday’s closing price.

NFL is a Schedule ‘A’ & a Mini Ratna (Category-1) company. It has an authorised capital of ₹1,000 crore and a paid-up capital of ₹490.58 crore of which the Government holds 74.71 per cent and the remaining 25.29 per cent is held by financial institutions and others. The company has 3,339 regular employees.. Half yearly (quarter ended September 2020) profit after tax for the fiscal year 2020-21 was ₹198 crore and it has a net worth of ₹2,117 crore.

NFL has five gas-based ammonia-urea plants — Nangal and Bathinda plants in Punjab, Panipat plant in Haryana and two plants at Vijaipur in Madhya Pradesh. The company currently has a total annual installed capacity of 35.68 lakh tonnes of urea (re-assessed capacity of 32.31 lt) and is the second largest producer of urea in the country with a share of about 15 per cent of total urea production in the country.

NFL is engaged in manufacturing and marketing of neem-coated urea, bentonite sulphur, bio-fertilizers (solid & liquid), certified seeds and other allied industrial products like ammonia, nitric acid, ammonium nitrate and sodium nitrite. Apart from manufacturing business, the company is also into the business of imports and trading of various agro-inputs like non-urea fertilizers (i.e. DAP, NPK, MoP etc.), certified seeds, agrochemicals, bentonite sulphur and city compost through its existing dealers’ network under single window concept.