APL Apollo’s JV with Singapore company plans manufacturing unit in Raipur

Iron & Steel | Imports from China, 2019: 4 percent. (Image: Moneycontrol)

The 66:34 joint venture company of APL Apollo Tubes and Singapore’s One To One Holdings will set up a 100,000 tonne plant at Raipur in Chhattisgarh to make specialized in-line galvanized steel products for scaffoldings, green houses, construction and infrastructure, a senior company official with the Indian company told Moneycontrol. He said the capacity was likely to be commissioned by September 2018.

One To One Holdings is the holding company of Japan’s Daiwa Steel Tube Industries Company which is the patent holder of the in-galvanized technology and will thus be supplying the know-how to the Indian company. APL Apollo and the Singapore company had announced the joint venture on September 27.

The Raipur plant will be located a little less than a kilometre away from APL’s existing unit in Chhattisgarh's capital. The project has an outlay of Rs 100 crore with 60 percent of it coming in debt and the rest from equity.

The machines at the plant will be imported from US-based Super Technologies which also counts One To One Holdings as its holding company, the official said.

APL Apollo, a Ghaziabad-based maker of galvanised tubes, hollow sections and round pipes, is approaching the end of its Rs 300 crore, two-year expansion programme that will take its manufacturing capacity to 2 million tonne per annum by March. This will mark the completion of phase-I of the expansion plan.

“Once phase-I is over, there will be no room left for expansion at our existing plants. We have another 0.5 million-tonne expansion planned and that will involve some greenfield capacity in India and may be an acquisition abroad,” another official of the company had told Moneycontrol in February.

The 100,000 tonne capacity under the joint venture company is not part of APL’s expansion programme.