Amul Acquires An Ice Cream Plant At Hingna, Nagpur

Amul, the diversified Gujarat-based dairy cooperative, has bought out an ice-cream plant belonging to the New Delhi-based Jaipuria group in the Hingna industrial area here.

The Jaipurias, who were franchisees for Kwality from 1989 and later represented Hindustan Lever Ltd (after the consumer product giant took over Kwality and launched Kwality Walls), parted ways with HLL over a year ago.

The ice-cream manufacturing plant here has been lying idle since then. The Jaipurias, however, run a separate bottling plant for Pepsi at the site.

A spokesman for Amul said the acquisition "will give us tremendous advantage over our competitors."

The spokesperson did not divulge financial details of the deal, but said the plant will serve markets of West Bengal, Orissa, north Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.

 

Amul has been servicing these markets from Mumbai and Anand (Gujarat) and expects to save over 1,000 km of transportation cost by shifting the supply source to Nagpur.

It also intends doubling the capacity here to 20,000 litres per day shortly. The spokesman said a manufacturing plant at Nagpur made a lot of sense as it was in the heart of the country.

The Jaipuria unit at Hingna has Cattabriga machines manufactured in Italy. Industry sources said Amul could easily upgrade the semi-automatic plant by purchasing indigenously made machinery.

Amul is determined to cross the 30 million litre mark in ice cream sales per annum in 2002-03 for which it needs to expand capacity.

The cooperative, at present, has seven plants and plans to add three more to cover the country barring the north east and a few pockets in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.

Amul does not sell its ice cream in New Delhi due to a mutual arrangement with Mother Dairy. The increase in capacity by the acquisition route is part of Amul's ambitious strategy to trump HLL in the ice cream business.

The additional manufacturing facilities will see Amul raise its capacity by an estimated 40 per cent.

Amul's investment in the region comes at a time when local leader Dinshaw's is also on an expansion overdrive.

Dinshaw's state-of-the-art Butibori plant will see its capacity increase from 40,000 litres per day to one lakh litres per day. With significant presence in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, Dinshaw's is looking for newer markets for achieving its targetted Rs 175 crore from the ice cream business in the next five years.

Like Amul, Dinshaw's is also into the dairy business. However, ice creams came later for Amul than Dinshaw's, as the cooperative was solely into milk and butter earlier.