IFFCO sells over 10 million tonnes fertiliser in FY18

Fertiliser major IFFCO sold over 10 million tonnes and produced 7.87 million tonnes of soil nutrients last fiscal despite difficult market condition, its MD U S Awasthi today said, and announced plans for cost cutting as well as consolidation of businesses for long term growth.

In 2016-17, IFFCO had sold 10.7 million tonnes and produced 8.4 million tonnes of fertilisers.

"... our technical team managed to produce a total of 78.71 lakh tonnes of fertiliser (41.09 Lakh Tonnes of Urea and 37.61 Lakh Tonnes of Complex fertilisers) during FY 2017-18 in spite of a difficult market scenario," Awasthi said in his message to its cooperative members, farmers and employees for the new financial year.

In the letter that he shared on Twitter, Awasthi said that all its manufacturing plants achieved their target production and capacity utilisation with the lowest ever energy consumption.

"Our dedicated sales force also did well and were able to register sales in excess of 100 lakh tonnes, a decent number considering the prevailing economic and environmental conditions," he said.

The new products like Sagarika, bio-fertilisers and water soluble fertilisers have been accepted amongst the Indian farming community.

"These products are doing extremely well in the market and we will continue to focus on these ingenious agro inputs in the forthcoming years as well," Awasthi said, while expressing confidence that it would achieve a profit of over Rs 1,000 crore in last fiscal.

IFFCO, which celebrated its golden jubilee last year, had approved the revision of remunerations to employees.

"...post the revision, the pay structure at IFFCO is the best in the Indian fertiliser industry. Keeping in mind the long-term growth prospects of the organisation we would need to adopt some tough cost rationalising measures in the years to come," Awasthi said.

As a first step in this direction, he said we the cooperative has tweaked the marketing structure to increase the profitability of its marketing channel.

"We are also looking at cost rationalising measure in our plants, consolidation of our businesses and introduction of new products.

"These measures will continue in the forthcoming year and will go a long way in ensuring that we continue on the growth trajectory and will prepare us to take a quantum leap into the future," he added.

IFFCO's turnover stood at Rs 22,597 crore in 2016-17 while net profit after tax was Rs 684.70 crore.

The Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO) is one of the country's biggest cooperative societies.

Founded in 1967 with just 57 cooperatives, IFFCO is today an amalgamation of over 36,000 Indian cooperatives. It has diversified business interests ranging from general insurance to rural telecom apart from its core business of manufacturing and selling fertilisers.