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| Edited By: Sumit Moitra |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 18, 2018, 04:32 AM IST
Britannia Industries is planning to set up a manufacturing unit in Gujarat, which would be the bakery major’s first plant on the western coast.
“We have just submitted the memorandum to the Secretariat for industrial assistance for a manufacturing plant in Gujarat,” a Britannia official told DNA.
The move to tap the western part of the country, where Britannia doesn’t have a manufacturing set-up, either of its own or its partners, shows the aggressiveness in its efforts to protect markets in the face of some tough competition from players such as Parle Products and the growing clout of ITC’s bakery division.
Presence of Britannia’s manufacturing bases is highly skewed towards the eastern and northern regions. It has two facilities in West Bengal, where it has its oldest plant at Taratola, while another facility, Manna Foods Pvt Ltd, was set up later by its partner. With the recent commissioning of a plant in Bihar and plans for one in Orissa, Britannia will have a significant manufacturing present in the East.
In Uttarakhand, Britannia has its own plants in Pantnagar and Rudrapur. In Delhi, it has a plant at Lawrence Road. Its subsidiaries have plants in Puducherry, Gwalior and Guwahati.
Britannia’s managing director Vinita Bali had earlier said that there are plans to have a plant in Karnataka. She had said Britannia needed to expand its capacities to keep pace with a 20% growth in its sales.
“We need to have more manufacturing facilities nearer to the markets as unit values of our product packages are coming down to keep pace with customer demand and these products can’t be transported over long distances at a cost,” the official said.
Britannia’s plant in Gujarat has been planned at Bharuch, considered to be a strategic location having a port and significant dairy production, he said.
While the proposed investment in the project is not known, Britannia usually invests between Rs50-60 crore in each of its plants. It recently invested Rs55 crore for its facility at Hajipur in Bihar, which has an annual capacity of 50,000 tonne of bakery products.
