Insecticides India completes Rs 200 cr expansion

Company plans to launch four more products; hike prices

Agro chemicals manufacturing company Insecticides (India) Limited (IIL) stated its Rs 200-crore expansion programme, spread over four years, would be completed with the commissioning of its sixth production unit at Rajasthan in January 2014.

Following this, the company’s total earnings could touch about Rs 1,600 crore a few years down the line. In 2012-13, the company’s turnover stood at Rs 650 crore and is expected to cross Rs 900 crore in the current financial year, IIL managing director, Rajesh Aggarwal, told mediapersons here on Tuesday.

According to Aggarwal, IIL will be launching four new products — two herbicides and two insecticides — next year. Its Rs 50 crore-worth research and development (R&D) centre in Rajasthan, set up as a joint venture (JV) with Otsuka AgriTechno Company Limited of Japan, has also developed 5-10 products to begin with and will start filing for patents from 2014. It might, however, take another 3-4 years for commercialisation of these products

Meanwhile, the company has decided to increase the prices of 30 of its products by 10-15 per cent on account of a 10 per cent rise in the cost of raw material. It had already increased the prices of these products by 4-5 per cent this month. Similar hikes in prices will be made in the next two months as a further 5 per cent rise in raw material prices is expected.  

Aggarwal said the sixth unit in Rajasthan, being set up at a cost of Rs 10 crore, would have a capacity to produce pesticide formulations of 13,000 tonnes per annum (tpa), both in granules and powder form. With this, IIL, which has its production plants in Rajasthan and Gujarat, would have a total installed capacity to produce 300,000 tpa of formulations and 12 tpa of technical products.

Stating that patents of several agro chemical products were set to expire in the next 4-5 years, he said the patent expiry would provide an estimated $ 3 billion (over Rs 18,000 crore) opportunity worldwide by 2019. With an eye to capture a portion of this potential, IIL was continuously investing in R&D. In the next five years, an additional  Rs 50 crore would be invested in the JV with the Japanese company.