The company currently has a total installed capacity of 120 million litres at three plants at Thane, Mohali and Hyderabad, but would run out of capacity by 2011, informed top company officials here. Rajiv Jain, managing director of ICI India declined to give out the investment figure. The location of the upcoming plant was yet to be decided. Its last plant came up at Mohali around ten years back. The company enjoyed a less than 15 per cent market share in the decoratives segment and was the market leader in the refinished paints segment.
As a step to abosorb the rising input costs on account of oil price rises, the company was planning to implement a 2-3 per cent price rise in the emulsions segment effective from August this year.
While crude oil prices had shot up by more than 50 per cent, the company planned to increase only 7-10 per cent of its prices, Jain told the media here. This apart, it also planned to alter its product mix to increase the proportion of water based paints from oil-based ones. Through a three-year de-bottlenecking exercise, the company had already expanded its installed capacity from 60 million litres to 120 million litres now.
Jain said that they were hopeful about augmenting the company's position in the Indian market as its holding company Amsterdam based AkzoNobel, world's leading paints major was taking keen interest in the Asian economies including India and China.ICI, India registered a cumulative growth of 20 per cent over the last five years. AkzoNobel became the owner of the entire share capital of ICI,UK, the holding company of ICI, India in January this year.