“The acquisition deal was made at the top-level. We were informed about it by the executive director,” said A K Singh, vice president, JCL. According to sources, Aditya Birla Chemicals (ABC) has taken over the JCL plant for a cash consideration of Rs 212-crore.
Though the details of the deal is not known, a senior JCL official ruled out the possibility of retrenchment of existing staff of the plant by its new owners. “Who will run the plant, if the employees are retrenched,” he asked.
JCL had recently ramped up its caustic soda production capacity from 22,500 tonne per annum (tpa) to 53,200 tpa. The company had also invested Rs 150 crore on switching over to membrane cell technology from mercury cell technology.
Apart from caustic soda, the company was manufacturing of liquid chlorine, hydrochloric acid and sodium hypo chlorite. Among its customers are Emami Paper Mills, Ballarpur Industries Ltd (BILT), J K Paper, Hindalco Industries and National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), etc.
It may be noted, the JCL unit was facing a serious financial crisis due to escalating costs of inputs like salt and power. The company had incurred Rs 18-crore loss last year, sources said.
“The company had been incurring loss of around Rs 1.5 crore every month during the last one and half-years. The key raw material— salt is mostly imported from Gujarat as the locally produced salt could not meet its requirement. Moreover, the salt production in the area had reduced sharply due to the Phailin storm last year,” said an officer of the company.
The company had urged the state government to waive electricity duty imposed on it for 10 years. It argued that hike in power tariff had nullified its gains from reduced power consumption, which was achieved through installation of membrane cell technology.
JCL is the only unit in Odisha manufacturing caustic soda since 1967. Odisha government had leased about 80 acres of land to the company for setting up of its plant as well as residential quarters in 1963 near Ganjam town.