Dalmia Bharat Sugar to invest Rs 150 crore on expansion

Dalmia Bharat Sugar and Industries Ltd will invest about Rs 150 crore on expansion of existing sugar plant at Kolhapur in Maharashtra.

The company has five sugar plants in Uttar Pradesh and Maharasthra with cane crushing capacity of 29,250 tonnes. Its power co-generation and distilleries capacities at these plants are 94 MW and 120 kilo litre per day.

"We are expanding the capacity of our Kolhapur sugar plant," Dalmia Bharat Sugar chief operating officer Pankaj Rastogi told PTI.

The cane crushing capacity is being expanded to 6,000 tonnes per day from the current 5,000 tonnes per day, while co-generation capacity to 26 MW from current 15 MW.

That apart, Dalmia Sugar is setting up a new distillery with capacity of 60 kilo litre per day.

Asked about investment on expansion, he said it would be about Rs 150 crore.

The expansion will be complete before the start of the new crushing season in October this year.

Delhi-based Dalmia Sugar had entered Maharashtra by acquiring Kolhapur sugar mill in 2012 for about Rs 135 crore.

Then, it invested another Rs 200 crore to double the cane crushing capacity of this plant to 5,000 tonnes per day.

Last year in September, the company acquired another sugar plant at Sangli, Maharashtra having a cane crushing capacity of 1,750 tonnes per day for Rs 24 crore.

On Sangli plant, he said the company was able to achieve crushing capacity of only 1,000 tonnes per day in the current 2014-15 marketing year (October-September). It expects to achieve the full capacity in the next marketing year.

In 2015-16 marketing year, Dalmia Sugar's total cane crushing capacity will reach 30,250 tonnes per day.

Post-expansion, the co-gen capacity will reach 105 MW while distillery capacity will be 180 kilo litres per day.

"Our sugar production is expected to increase to 3.6 lakh tonnes in 2015-16 marketing year from 3 lakh tonnes in the current year," Rastogi said.

Dalmia Bharat Sugar posted a revenue of about Rs 1,150 crore in 2014-15 financial year.