DuPont's plans for 'strategic' India market

Balvinder Singh Kalsi took over as President and Chief Executive Officer of DuPont India in 2005. In an interview to CNBC-TV18, he spoke about DuPont being bullish on India, its ambitious growth targets and agriculture strategy.

Here is a verbatim transcript of Balvinder Singh Kalsi's exclusive interview on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.

Q: How is India looking at this point in time because it is clearly a strategic market as far as DuPont is concerned? You had plans of revenues of about a billion dollars that was by 2012. Are those plans still on track?

A: India is a strategic market for DuPont and we are continuing to increase our presence in the country. We are still on our plans to double the revenues but it is going to take us three-four years from now.

Q: Has the slowdown impacted any of your expansion plans? Are there any plans as far as India is concerned?

A: No, not really. We are even more bullish on India as we are coming out of this recession. Yes, things had slowed down a little just primarily in 2009 but as we come out of recession we are much more bullish on India.

Q: You saw and compounded annual growth rate at DuPont India of over 20% over the last five years. I believe its going to be a little under 20% as far as 2009 is concerned.  What is really the growth projection for you at DuPont India going forward?

A: As you rightly said, 2009 was comparatively slow year for us but despite that we still at about 10% and going forward our intent would be to maintain a 20% Year on Year (YoY) growth and doubling our revenues in the next three-four years.

Q: You are expect that significant jump form 10% in 2009 back to the 20% levels by next year?

A: 2009 was only an aberration and our plans will be made for 20% growth.

Q: What is the business that you are more bullish about because there is lot of talk of agriculture business and that clearly has been a revenue driver, revenue kicker for you at DuPont India, what is going on as far as the agriculture business is concerned at this point of time?

A: Our strategy is two-fold in India. One is putting our science to work and putting it for areas which this country needs the most. And these would be areas like agriculture and food, it is the area of infrastructure, it is the area of renewable energy. The second part of our strategy is to kind of fully leverage the advantage that India has to provide for global DuPont.

Q: Let's address the domestic India needs and how DuPont is addressing those - let us start with the agriculture business because I believe there is a significant amount of research that is currently going on how you can have seeds that enhance the yields, and yields in India are very low. What literally is going on there because I believe the focus is really on maize and rice at this point in time?

A: Agriculture and food is a big focus area for us and we participate in the seed business through our comma called Pioneer. We are currently into corn, into hybrid rice, we are into mustard and very recently we acquired and are getting into the cotton seed market. So our focus clearly is to focus on bringing high yielding hybrids for this market and the new technologies on the biotechnology side, the effort is towards new technologies like drought tolerance, so how do we have plants continue to grow when there is water stress.

Continued on next page...