ICI India Ltd, a subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries plc, has planned a Rs 1000-crore investment in the paints and explosives field in the next five years.
The terms of financing the investment have not yet been fixed.
However, Aditya Narayan, managing director of the company, said ICI may come out with a public issue.
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ICI has focussed its attention on a ten-fold rise in sales by 2005, said Narayan.
The company already has made substantial investments in explosives, paints, polyurethanes and surfactants.
A new paint plant was opened near Mumbai last month, while another near Chandigarh is expected to start commercial operations early next year.
The plant near Chandigarh is currently under construction at a project cost of Rs 80 crore, generated from the companys internal accruals. The plant will have a capacity of 20 million litres per year.
The company also has plans to make investments in rubber chemicals and is steadily expanding its range of pharmaceuticals. ICIs explosives unit at Rourkela was inaugurated recently.
The plant presently has a capacity of 5,000 tonnes per year. The Rourkela plant, which has zero effluent discharge, is ICIs third major explosives facility in the country after Gomia in Bihar and Singrauli in Madhya Pradesh. The company also has more than a dozen smaller explosives operations around the country.
Rajiv Jain, vice-president of the explosives business, said: Essentially the Rourkela plant is not an explosives plant in the traditional sense.
It is a chemical plant where ammonium nitrate, the principal raw material that will be procured from the fertiliser plant of the Rourkela steel plant, will be converted to an emulsion matrix.
The company is closing its nitroglycerine unit at Gomia. Already a large section of the plant has been closed, and the entire plant will be shut completely by June 30, said Jain.
In place of the nitroglycerine plant, the company is setting up three emulsion explosive plants in the region. Two plants are already working and the third will be operational from May.
Last year, the company increased its dividend for the fifth year in succession..
It made a profit of Rs 72.4 crore and reported a sales turnover of Rs 600 crore.
For the first half of the financial year ending September 1996, the profit from operations of Rs 46.7 crore was a 22 per cent improvement over the corresponding period in 1995.