Kolkata, July 17 (IANS) The country’s largest lead acid battery maker, Exide Industries, will invest around Rs.100 crore in 2009-10 on augmenting its capacity by 15 percent, a top company official said here Friday.
“The investment will go into our plants in Haldia and Hosur and 50 percent of the money will be spent on increasing our industrial battery output,” Exide managing director T.V. Ramanathan told reporters on the sidelines the company’s annual general meeting.

Besides these two places, Exide also has production units at Shyamnagar near Kolkata, Chinchwad near Pune, Taloja near Mumbai and Bawal in Haryana.

Exide’s manufactured 19.46 million storage battery units in 2008-09, against its capacity of 22.66 million units, according to its latest annual report.

The company plans to start manufacturing colloidal gel batteries at the company’s Haldia unit by January, Ramanathan said.

“Colloidal gel batteries find application in telecommunication towers and we will be importing the technology from a Japanese company,” he added.

Exide also plans to introduce lithium ion batteries for automobiles this fiscal.

“We would be initially importing the batteries from a Chinese company following an agreement signed in the fourth quarter of last year (2008-09) and we plan to manufacture them at a later stage,” Ramanathan said.

Lithium batteries are considered to be environment-friendly batteries and take less time to charge than conventional lead-acid batteries.