KPR Mill spending nearly ₹400 crore on modernisation and expansion

The Coimbatore-based textile company KPR Mill Ltd, one of India’s largest vertically integrated companies with diversified business focus spanning across yarn, fabrics, garments and white crystal sugar, is spending nearly ₹400 crore in various modernisation and expansion plans.

In the current fiscal, it expects the plans to set up a vortex spinning mill at an outlay of ₹100 crore to be completed. It also expects the modernisation plan at an outlay of ₹100 crore in the textile segment to be over during the year, according to the company’s FY23 annual report.

It will commence ethanol capacity expansion at a cost of ₹150 crore before the sugar season 2023-24. The processing and printing expansion at a cost of ₹50 crore will be over in the first half of the current financial year, the company’s chairman KP Ramasamy Chairman, said in the annual report for 2022-23.

Textile varieties

The company manufactures textile varieties such as readymade knitted apparel; fabrics; compact, melange, carded, polyster and combed yarn. For the fiscal ending March 31, 2023, the company reported a net profit of ₹814 crore on revenue of ₹4,909 crore.

The company said the textiles sector needs to act fast and grab the huge opportunity opening up due to a change in global textiles trade patterns. While the opportunity is huge, the government and the industry need to act in coordination, as the world will not wait.

After the covid-19 disturbance, the world is aggressively diversifying outside China and looking for a reliable, sustainable, and scalable partner in textiles trade. Empowered by the significant advantages in availability of raw material and labour, India should capitalise the opportunity to increase its share in global apparel and textiles trade with a quantum leap, rather than the incremental gains that it achieved in the past.

The Government has an ambitious target of taking textile and apparel exports to $100 billion in FY28 and taking encouraging efforts for promoting and supporting the textiles sector such as Free Trade Agreements, Production Linked Incentive scheme, development of textile parks, and its exports-promotion schemes. Its initiatives are focused on promoting technology upgradation, creation of infrastructure, skill development and sectoral development in the textile sector. These initiatives are likely to create a positive environment and provide a conducive environment for textile manufacturing across the globe.

The historical high demand for cotton resulted in spiralling prices in both domestic and international markets. However the consequential increase in yarn prices was not commensurate with the increase in price of cotton thereby impacting the margin in the yarn segment.

CARE Ratings in a report in September 2022 said that under the garment division KPR Mills manufactures knitted garments for mens, ladies and children wear, which includes casual wear t-shirts, nightwear and pyjamas. It has installed capacity of 100,000 MTPA of yarn; 40,000 MTPA of fabrics, fabric processing capacity of 25,000 MTPA and garmenting facility of 157 mn pieces per annum of readymade garments.

Its subsidiary KPR Sugar Mill Ltd company operates a sugar plant with capacity of 10,000 TCD and ethanol with 130 KLPD. The improved revenue from the sugar segment has also contributed to overall improvement in KPR’s operational performance.

KPR has presence across the textile chain value from manufacturing of cotton yarn to processed fabric to garments which imparts strong operational flexibility, the Ratings agency said.

The company’s share price on Monday closed at ₹699.80, up 2.17 per cent.

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