Blue Star plans to start Andhra plant construction by 2021

Blue Star Ltd plans to start construction of the Sri City plant in Andhra Pradesh by 2021, a company official said on Monday.

The air-conditioning major had purchased 23 acres of land from a private developer at a cost of Rs 85 lakh per acre for the facility.

"We will start the Sri City plant by the middle of 2021... Construction work would be in two phases," CP Mukundan Menon, President (Sales and Marketing), told PTI.

Menon said the installed capacity of the Andhra plant would be five lakh units per annum, taking the overall production volume to 10.5 lakh units, including its two facilities in Himachal Pradesh.

The total capital expenditure for the new unit would be Rs 180 crore in phase one and Rs 30 crore in the second phase.

The company had earlier shelved the proposed Jammu plant owing to GST complications, he said.

Blue Star has a market share of 12.8 per cent in the air-conditioning segment and aims to take it to 13.5 per cent in the next fiscal, Menon said.

He said the company was looking at a growth of 15 per cent in the air-conditioning vertical this fiscal.

In the residential water purifier space, which the company forayed into recently, it has a market share of 2.5 per cent, and is keen to take the figure to 10 per cent over the next three years.