Thaindian News

Kolkata, Sep 1 (IANS) Tata Chemicals is planning to build its second water purifier-making plant this fiscal and aims to boost its purifier sales to 80,000 units a month by March next year.
The company, which manufactures water purifiers under the brand name “Swach’, now has a one-million unit capacity water purifier-making plant at West Bengal’s Haldia in East Midnapore district.

“Shortly, we will be raising our water purifier-making capacity. We will have a second unit. We are yet to finalise its location, but it will be close to a rice growing belt as its main raw material is rice husk,” company managing director R. Mukundan told a media meet here.

While the company’s existing plant at Haldia has a one million unit per annum capacity, the second unit would be able to manufacture half a million units a year.

“Later, maybe we will have plants in three-four zones,” Mukundan said.

At present the company sells 600,000 units per annum. “But the way we are growing, we propose to raise the sales figure to 80,000 units per month by next March. Thus, the annualised sales then will be about one million units a year.”

With its product not needing running water or electricity, the company aims to tap the rural and semi-urban markets. “We want a 60:40 split in the ratio between our urban and rural markets.”

Asked about the company’s plans to venture abroad, the official said: “Our first target is to tap the Indian market in a big way. Now, we are only in five cities.”

“But we are getting lot of enquiries from Africa and America. We have to move to these markets soon. It may be this fiscal or the next. But we are yet to formulate our plans,” he said.