India Foils likely to revive facility at Kolkata

India Foils Ltd, a company managed by Sterlite, is considering reviving its foilstocks producing unit at Hoera, Kolkata, which was closed two years ago because of management policy of not competing within group companies.

The Hoera project was supplying foilstocks - the only raw material - to its Kamarhati plant for foil manufacturing and directly competing with one of the group companies Bharat Aluminium Company Ltd (Balco).

Currently, Balco supplies approximately 1000 tonne foilstocks per month to India Foils Ltd.

The leader of early nineties - India Foils is currently producing approximately 10,000-12,000 tonne of aluminium foils per annum out of India's total production of approximately 100,000 tonne.

"India Foils is a cash crunch company and currently we are concentrating on how to turn around the company significantly. We all are whole heartedly working towards turning this company into profit making instead of loss-making company till last year. We showed a net loss of approximately Rs 12 crore in the last year," an executive of the company said.

"This year we are expecting to breakthrough and we are hopeful that we will turn towards profit. However, we are expecting a small sum of approximately Rs 1 crore this year but which will go up next years onwards," he added.

Aluminium foil is a growing sector and the demand has started coming in from lower middle class people.

"This is the only sector which is expected to grow dramatically in future as people have started becoming more health conscious today in comparison with that of a few years ago. Therefore, the demand of aluminum foils is expected to multiply in future," the executive said.

"We will expand our capacity by reviving the closed units first provided we are turning into profits. Once profits start coming in in the existing facilities, we will go into installing plant and machinery for further expansion in future," he added.