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Chemtura Corporation is targeting $100 million sales from its crop protection solutions business in India by 2015.
The $2.8 billion American company — a global leader in seed treatment and mite-control chemicals — now grosses nearly $35 million from its crop protection products in the country.
Products
These include ‘Moolah' (a wheat herbicide with clodinafop-propargyl as active ingredient), ‘Provax' (a carboxin-thiram combination seed treatment fungicide used in cotton, corn, soyabean and hybrid rice), ‘Masta-Mite' (a propargite-based miticide for tea plantations) and ‘Rango' (based on quizalofop-P-tefuryl, a post-emergence herbicide to control weeds in soyabean, groundnut and sunflower).
Besides selling these products under its own brand names, Chemtura also supplies carboxin-thiram and propargite to the Delhi-based Dhanuka Agritech Ltd. The latter manufactures and markets formulations from these active ingredients in India under the ‘Vitavax' and ‘Omite' labels (which are owned by Chemtura and used in markets other than India).
“We already have a clodinafop-propargyl active ingredient manufacturing facility at Gajraula (Uttar Pradesh) that we acquired in 2008 from Crop Health Products Ltd. We will certainly be looking at investing more, be it in greenfield sites or through joint ventures and further acquisitions,” Mr Craig A. Rogerson, Global Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Philadelphia-headquartered corporation told presspersons here on Wednesday.
While Chemtura manufactures ‘Moolah' in India, it imports all its other products either as direct formulation (‘Rango') or in active ingredient form (‘Provax' and ‘Masta-Mite'). The company has also applied for registration of ‘Rancona' — a seed-treatment fungicide containing a proprietary molecule, ipconazole — in India, which is undergoing regulatory trials.
Crop protection chemicals account for $35 million out of Chemtura's total sales of nearly $100 million in India. The balance comes from a host of speciality chemicals from urethanes, petroleum additives and antioxidants to flame retardants and organo-metallics.
“In all, we are targeting revenues of $500 million from India by 2015, of which $100 million will come from crop protection. This is part of the plan to increase Asia's contribution to the corporation's total revenues from the current $500 million (19 per cent) to $2 billion (33 per cent),” said Mr Bharat Kumar Pandey, Director, Chemtura Chemicals India Pvt Ltd.
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