Shree Cement to invest Rs 7,000 crore to add 12 million tonnes of capacity

The company has also decided to diversify into ready mix concrete business and will start setting up five RMC units in the country by the end of this financial year

Shree Cement Ltd on Wednesday announced that it will invest Rs 7,000 crore to add 12 million tonnes to its current production capacity in India. In a regulatory filing, the company said that it has also decided to diversify into ready mix concrete (RMC) business and will start setting up five RMC units in the country by the end of this financial year.

Shree Cement will set up a clinker manufacturing plant with a capacity of 3.65 million tonnes at Pali, Rajasthan. Another one, with the same capacity, will be added in Kodla, Karnataka.

It will also set up cement plants with capacities of 6 million tonnes in Pali (Rajasthan), Etah (Uttar Pradesh), Kodla (Karnataka), and Bangalore (Karnataka).

The proposed clinker and cement manufacturing capacities are expected to be set up by March 2025. These plants will also have waste heat recovery-based power plants.

"The existing cement capacity of the company (including that of the wholly owned subsidiary) is 49.90 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) in India. During the year 2022-23, the utilization rate was 70 per cent," it said.

84% jump in PAT in June quarter

The company also reported an 84 per cent jump in its profit after tax (PAT) to Rs 581 crore in the quarter that ended on June 30 as compared to Rs 316 crore in the same quarter last year. On a sequential basis, the PAT was up 6 per cent from Rs 546 crore reported in the March quarter.

Its net revenue was up 19 per cent year-on-year (YoY) from Rs 4,203 crore to Rs 4,999 crore during the period.

"We have started the trial commissioning of our new unit at Purulia, West Bengal, and are confident to commence operations of new plants at Nawalgarh in Rajasthan and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh within scheduled timelines. We are also happy to announce our next phase of capacity expansion projects of 12 million tonnes that will take the group's cement capacity to 72.4 million tonnes," said Neeraj Akhoury, managing director at Shree Cement.

"We have set an ambitious goal of taking our capacity beyond 80 million tonnes in the coming years and are aggressively charting out action plans to implement the same," Akhoury added.