Spl In Parleys With Us Companies For echnical Ceramics'

SPL Ltd, formerly Somany Pilkington Ltd, is set to become the largest ceramic tiles producer in the country during the current fiscal as the company's Rs 100-crore expansion programme nears completion after three years.

SPL's installed capacity for ceramic tiles is estimated to touch 10 million square metres.

SPL Ltd is negotiating with US and Japanese companies for a possible alliance to enter the area of technical ceramics, which find application in sectors such as auto and telecom industries.

It will also commission its Rs 20-crore floor tile plant by December 1996.

The company estimates its turnover to grow by over 40 per cent this fiscal from Rs 107 crore in 1995-96 because of the additional capacity created, said

 

R K Chudhury, president, SPL Ltd.

It also expects exports to grow by nearly 20 per cent in three years.

SPL exports 5 per cent of its total production.

The company has set up two state-of-the-art ceramic plants in Delhi and Ahmedabad with capacities of 5,000 square metre per day.

With the installation of these two plants later this year, our aggregate capacity for ceramic tiles would touch 10 million square metres, which is comparable with the scale of operations of leading foreign manufacturers, Chaudhury said.

The additional capacity will help us meet the high rate of growth of the housing sector in the years to come. For, housing is of tremendous shortage in the country at the moment.

And the use of ceramics is an integral part of all new as well the old construction, Chaudhury pointed out.

The company is in the process of removing bottlenecks in the production and the distribution network to raise its overall productivity.

The streamlining of our business will help us further consolidate our marketshare, he said.

The other major manufacturers of ceramic tiles include Bell Cement and HNR Johnson.

The company, which trebled its equity in January this year to Rs 6.40 crore through a 1:2 rights issue, has aggregated reserves worth nearly Rs 80 crore for the financial year ended March 31, 1996.