Recent reports indicate that cement prices have been reduced once again in May 2015. But Sanjay Gupta, CEO, Star Ferro & Cement says there has been no price cut in north-east and eastern region. In these parts, prices were stable even in the fourth quarter.
Below is the verbatim transcript of Sanjay Gupta's interview with Ekta Batra & Mangalam Maloo on CNBC-TV18.
Ekta: Can you tell us whether there have been any price cuts which have been undertaken. We do understand that there could have been another round in this month itself?
A: We have not seen price reduction in north east or eastern region. The prices have been stable and even in Q4 of FY15 the prices were stable and we have not seen any price cut as yet in north east and in eastern side.
Mangalam: The last time you spoke to us, you were indicating that you are looking to improve your capacity utilisation. What is the target capacity utilisation for FY16 and also how much clinker from your plant you will be using for your own factories and how much will you supply to the others?
A: FY15 we have closed capacity utilisation of around 65 percent. We will be primarily utilising the clinker for our grinding only. We will have around 0.5 million tonne of clinker capacity in excess of whatever, we will be using it for our own plant. Therefore, we were looking for certain grinding opportunity in West Bengal primarily in the eastern side of the country and we are also looking for setting up our own cement plant in Siliguri. So that 0.5 million tonne extra clicker will get utilised in these two units. We also have 0.4 million tonne of hired grinding capacity in West Bengal, so partly we are using that clicker in these plant and going forward we are looking for further agreements in this direction and we will be utilising extra capacity there.
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