Amul to invest Rs 4,000-4,500 cr in two yrs on expansion

Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), which sells products under Amul brand, is going to invest around Rs 4,000-4,500 crore in next two financial years for processing higher quantity of milk.

GCMMF has already increased its milk processing capacity to 230 lakh litres per day from 170 lakh litres per day in last three years.

"We are looking to invest around Rs 4,000-4,500 crore by the end of 2015-16, mainly on setting up new milk processing plants and other dairy products processing units," GCMMF Managing Director R S Sodhi told PTI.

As per expansion plans, the company has proposed to set up 11 new milk processing plants across the country, including five in Gujarat, three in Uttar Pradesh, two in Haryana and one in Kolkata, he said.

In Haryana, the company will set up a plant each at Rohtak and Faridabad of 10 lakh litres day and 15 lakh litres per day respectively while it will put in place in Uttar Pradesh a plant each of 5 lakh litres per day at Lucknow, Kanpur and Varanasi.

Besides these plants, the company will also establish five milk processing plants of two lakh litres per day at Saurashtra region in its home state Gujarat.

"The aim is to with increasing milk procurement, raise the milk processing capacity and explore new markets," Sodhi said.

Other than milk, Amul has plans to set up a cheese factory and a milk powder plant of 120 tonnes per day at its Banas cooperative dairy in Palanpur in Gujarat.

Sodhi added that work on all these proposed new units has already been started.

For this financial year, the cooperative plans to achieve a turnover of Rs 21,600 crore.

Amul had reported a sharp 32% growth in turnover to Rs 18,143 crore during 2013-14 from Rs 13,700 crore in 2012-13 on the back of strong sales.

"There was substantial increase in sales in both volume and value terms in 2013-14 which was the main driver of our growth," Sodhi said.

Amul is at present associated with about 33 lakh farmers and has around 50 milk processing units. Besides milk, the company deals in all other major dairy products like butter, cheese, paneer, ice-cream and others.