Money churner

Calcutta, Dec. 4: The Rs 1,500-crore Manaksia group will focus on non-ferrous metals to generate revenue. It will gradually reduce its dependence on bottle caps and crown production and mosquito coil business for revenue growth.

The company, which is a major supplier of caps and crowns to Coca-Cola and beer manufacturers in the country, was hard hit when the cola firm was embroiled in a pesticide controversy recently and cola sales took a beating.

Almost 65 per cent of Manaksia’s revenue from the caps and crown business comes from Coca-Cola.

“Plastic bottles and tetra packs are fast replacing glass bottles in the soft drinks packaging business,” said a senior official of Manaksia, formerly Hindustan Seals Ltd.

In the beer market, too, cans have replaced glass bottles to a large extent. “But we don’t want to get into making cans,” the official said. Though the company here makes containers for tea and shoe polish makers, the volume and the value of the business are not significant and the company is not very keen to increase it either.

“The company has no immediate plans to scale down its metal caps and crown business, but our focus will be more on producing non-ferrous metal ingots and other value-added products,” he added.

The group is steering its subsidiary businesses also towards the manufacture of non-ferrous metals such as aluminium, copper, lead, and value-added products of these metals.

Outside India, Manaksia has its only manufacturing unit for metal caps and crowns at Isolo in Lagos, Nigeria, run by wholly owned subsidiary MINL Nigeria Ltd. “The thrust here, too, is on scaling up non-ferrous metal production, though our metal caps and crowns business is doing extremely well at present,” said Koch Purkayastha, managing director of MINL Nigeria.

“Nigeria is the most populated country in Africa and the market still has a huge potential for the caps and crowns business,” he added.

MINL Nigeria is scaling up its non-ferrous metals manufacturing capacity at its second plant in Sagan Ota, where the group is relocating the galvanised sheet manufacturing plant of its subsidiary Crescent Industries in Nepal. The Nepal plant has stopped production since the beginning of this calendar year.

“Following the relocation of the Nepal plant to Nigeria, our glavanised sheet manufacturing capacity at the Ota plant will increase to 54,000 tonnes per year,” said Purkayastha.

The Manaksia group also has a subsidiary, Dynatech Industries, in Ghana, which it plans to fold up soon and relocate to Nigeria.