Jindal Aluminium: India’s largest aluminium extrusion firm Jindal Aluminium, which controls over 30 per cent of market in the country will focus on the defence and aerospace segments, says a senior company official.
“We see a lot of scope to widen our focus on the defence sector with government allowing larger private participation in this. Another focus area is the aerospace segment, where also we see more business coming in,” said Pragun Khaitan, vice-chairman and managing director of Jindal Aluminium.
“Currently our revenue from these two segments is negligible. We want to really play big in these two areas,” Khaitan told media.
He, however, did not offer a revenue target from these new focus areas. Currently most of its business come from electrical, electronics, facade, solar and aviation, he said.
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The ₹3,000-crore Bengaluru-based company with over 50 years of history is also the second largest maker of aluminium flat rolled products, producing 50,000 million tonnes of rolled products, giving it 10-12 per cent of the market, and 1,20,000 million tonnes of extruded products per annum, according to an agency report.
Another focus area will be the packaging segment and also the metro/high-speed rails, Khaitan said.
“We also want to grow by catering to the packaging industry as well as high-speed and metro rail systems.”
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Khaitan said that ramping up capacity with the help of technology is what Jindal Aluminium is looking forward to and not in snapping up an existing plant because mergers have their own cultural and integration issues.
Though the pandemic-driven lockdowns had hit production in the initial months of the first quarter, the operations are close to 80 per cent of the pre-pandemic days now, Pragun Khaitan said as he expects this fiscal to be marginally better than last year when it had closed with a topline of ₹3,000 crore. He refused to share bottomline numbers since the company is privately held.
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He also ruled out taking it public saying they don’t need additional capital given the fact that they have been profitable from the very first year of operations.
Pragun said there is no plan to defer the annual capex which typically is under ₹80 crore because of the pandemic. A few of the projects have been delayed by a few months due to the pandemic but there is no curtailing of capex, he said.
Khaitan, who was recently promoted as the vice-chairman also ruled out increasing export focus saying the domestic market is too large, with per capita aluminium intake of 2.2 kilogram annually as against the global average of 42 kilogram.
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