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Coimbatore-headquartered KPR Mill is in expansion mode with the focus on the garmenting sector.
Its Managing Director P Nataraj told BusinessLine that the company had, since inception in 1996, looked at an integrated facility with combined capacities in spinning, knitting, processing, and garmenting.
The mill at present has 10 modern production facilities at Sathyamangalam, Neelambur, Arasur, Karumathampatti, Tirupur and Perundurai in Tamil Nadu. Its spindleage has increased from 12,000 at start to 3.54 lakh spindles.
The company has in the last year or so stopped expansion in the spinning space and was looking more aggressively at the garmenting and knitting areas.
Expansion
The company took to brownfield expansion of its Arasur garment facility, upgrading the capacity by 10 million pieces on an outlay of Rs 25 crore last year.
It also took up greenfield expansion simultaneously at Thekkalur on an investment of Rs 75 crore and strengthened its total garmenting capacity from 37 million pieces a year to 59 million last year.
Nataraj said the increased capacity was fully backed by firm orders.
During the current fiscal, KPR Mill plans to add another 36 million pieces of garment manufacturing facility to take the overall capacity to 95 million pieces/ year. “This is also a greenfield project coming up near Thekkalur on an estimated outlay of Rs 175 crore. Three-fourths of this would be from internal accruals and the balance by way of bank finance. The project would be commissioned by March next,” the MD said.
Performance
Its net profit was up 28 per cent to Rs 50.49 crore at the end of the first quarter of 2015-16 fiscal against Rs 39.40 crore clocked in the corresponding quarter of the earlier year. Revenues shot up 5 per cent to Rs 623.26 crore (Rs 593.53 crore) and garment turnover went up 19 per cent to Rs 135.81 crore (Rs 114.12 crore)
Markets
The company has been exporting 30 per cent of its products to international markets. “Europe has been a major market for us, followed by the US and Australia. We would like to focus more on the US and other markets such as Brazil and Japan going forward,” Nataraj said, adding “we would like to increase our capacities in the downstream segment rather than in spinning.”
Diversification
While the mill has remained the flagship company for the (KPR) group, KPR is also engaged in wind and co-generation, education and sugar.
Asked about the group's foray into sugar, a rather unrelated diversification, Nataraj said he 5000 TCD sugar plant at Bijapur district in Karnataka is basically a co-gen-cum-sugar unit with 30 MW co-generation facility commissioned essentially to meet their energy requirements in 2012.
“We have at present 93 MW of green energy of which 63 MW is from the windmills and 30 MW from co-gen, meeting 75 per cent of our power requirement.
“Wind power is available between July and September and the energy from co-gen between October and March (start of sugar crushing season),” he said.
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