Berger plans Andhra plant for auto paints

Berger Paints is setting up a manufacturing plant in Andhra Pradesh in joint venture with Nippon Bee Chemicals of Japan in order to tap the opportunity being thrown up by the fast-emerging automobile manufacturing clusters in southern India.

Berger already has facilities in partnership with Nippon Bee for products under British Paints range of industrial paints -- all of them are located in northern India like Jammu, Surajpur and Sikandrabad.

“The proposed plant at Gollapuram Industrial Area in association with Nippon will help us to target the southern auto manufacturing hub and expand our customer base,” Abhijit Roy, managing director and CEO of Berger Paints, told dna.

Nippon Bee Chemicals, a part of Nippon Paints, specialises in coatings of plastics parts in automobiles, an area which holds immense potential as India turns into a global sourcing hub for automobile industry, Roy said.

The Gollapuram facility will have an initial capacity of 40,000 tonne of paints and resins, which is close to Berger’s recently inaugurated Hindupur plant.

The plant with advanced robotic lines, will have initial capacity of 80,000 tonne a year scalable to 320,000 tonne.     

The commissioning of the Hindupur plant got delayed by several months mainly due to the ongoing Telengana agitation, but Roy expects production to start in a week.

Earlier last week launching the Hindupur unit, Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Kiran Kumar Reddy said the state was a hub of industrial investments in spite of political crisis.

“We have Izuzu, now Berger Paints and many other major global industries are taking root in AP,” he said.

Berger has reported a 7% growth in net profit for the third quarter at Rs82.3 crore.