Looking to expand our business: Hindustan Sanitaryware

He further adds that for the container glass business they have about a 15% market share on a national basis and they are a leading player in the South for that business.

Excerpts from CNBC-TV18's exclusive interview with Alok Vaish:

Q: Give us a word on your equity capital because you have just recently allotted about 82.5 lakh shares at a face value of about Rs 2 each. How much of a dilution has that led to and now what is the promoter's holding in the company?

A: It was about a 14.99% equity that was issued to Henderson and it was actually structured as a FCD, Fully Convertible Debenture, which got converted into regular shares. So after this conversion, Henderson would own 14.99%, the promoters holding would come down from 65% to about 56%.

Q: You said that you still have some of that money raised with the company and you also have big expansion plans in Bibinagar in Hyderabad. Is that completed, is that already operational and contributing?

A: Most of that expansion plan has been completed. We have spent about close to Rs 20 crore in raising that capacity by 6,000 tonne. There is some other balancing equipment, which would probably happen during the rest of this year.

Some of the proceeds that we had raised were used to fund this capacity expansion, some were used to repay the existing debt. We still have some cash sitting on our books. Basically, this is a short-term treasury to fund any acquisition plans that we might be working upon.

Q: You spent about Rs 20 crore odd in increasing your capacity to about 32,000 tonne per annum. Would there be any addition to that since that has been completed and if so, how much more would you be raising to expand that capacity?

A: The capacity that we have raised should be adequate for the next 18-24 months, beyond which once we start running out of that capacity, we probably can do another brownfield expansion in a similar location in Bibinagar.

We can probably do another 4,000-5,000 tonne there, which again should see us through for the next 18-24 months. Beyond this I think we probably will have to look at some kind of greenfield capacity expansion, but that’s sometime down the road.

Contd on pg 2...