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Nandini Goswami
Calcutta, Dec 1: Exide Industries Ltd, the Rajan Raheja-controlled storage battery major, is looking at technical alliances with world leaders as well as exports across its entire industrial portfolio. It is close to finalising a technical alliance for two of its industrial battery ranges.
A top company official told The Financial Express that Exide has focussed increasingly on industrial batteries since 1995 as it sees a boom in the infrastructure sector.
Exide is close to finalising technical alliances with Germany's Hagen for submarine batteries and the UK's Oldham for miners' caplamp batteries, both in the industrial segment. Exide has nearly 85 per cent of the market for caplamp batteries, and is the only Indian manufacturer of batteries for the navy's submarines.
The industrial-battery segment has grown by about 118 per cent over the last one year, and is worth around Rs 325 crore, the Exide official said.
Exide now makes industrial batteries at Hosur in Karnataka and Haldia in WestBengal. It has also set up a unit to make valve-regulated lead acid (VRLA) batteries at Hosur, which expects sales of Rs 110 crore. Exide's total capacity for industrial batteries is about 350 million ampere.
The industrial-batteries segment includes products for power, railways, and telecom. Industrial batteries are also used for solar systems and uniterrupted power systems (UPS).
In India, motive batteries -- including traction -- account for only 20 per cent of the industrial batteries market against 40 per cent worldwide. Standby or stepney batteries account for the rest of the industrial batteries market. The low share of motive batteries in India is attributed to the greater manual methods of transport and a preference for diesel power.
Exide has also been working on tackling competition from small-scale manufacturers in the low-end segment of industrial batteries who leverage on tax exemptions and higher margins. Using competitive pricing and certain low-end products, Exide has been able to takeon the competition to a considerable extent, the official said.
Last November, Exide acquired the factories of Standard Batteries Ltd at Taloja, Kanjur Marg and Ahmednagar in Maharashtra and Guindy in Tamil Nadu from the BM Khaitan group. The takeover included all the fixed assets and brands, raw materials and work in progress, and employees. Since then, it has re-worked the heirarchy.
The takeover also increased Exide's dealer base to around 2,500 throughout the country. Its capacity has gone up to 4.3 million units a year.
For the year to March 31, 1998, Exide's operating profit grew 12 per cent to Rs 79.91 crore on a turnover of Rs 571 crore.
Exports via Singapore unit
Exide plans to route its industrial battery exports via Singapore-based group company Chloride Battery South-East Asia. According to an Exide official, this will help it leverage the marketing strengths of Chloride Battery.
Traction batteries will be the first to be exported via this route, as the motive power segment isfast-growing and robust.
With domestic growth in industrial batteries limited by the government's purchase policies, the next best alternative is to improve export earnings, the official added.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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