Century Ply to foray into home furniture, shipping

Diversified Century Plyboards (I) Ltd that just demerged its cement and ferro alloy divisions is working on two major diversifications—foraying into branded readymade home furniture and re-entering shipping business.

“We plan to venture into readymade furniture business within a year. The brand would be our own which is now being developed. Shipping is another business which we have started about two months back in a small way and have some big plans for it,” managing director Sajjan Bhajanka told DNA.

For the readymade furniture business, Century Ply plans to create a chain of exclusive stores across the country under the franchise model where the franchisee would set up the stores at their own investments.

Century would own the brand and would either manufacture the furniture or source them from others depending on the business model to be adopted for different regions.

The Indian readymade furniture market, according to Bhajanka, is worth Rs5,000 crore with organised players like Godrej and Zuari but dominate mostly by unorganised players, giving enough room for other serious players.

“We would manufacture the furniture on our own partly and would source the rest from both within and outside the country,” Bhajanka said.

The brand for the furniture range under the umbrella brand Century has already been developed and applied for registration, which would be unveiled only when the product hits the market one year from now.

“We would be opening up a pilot exclusive showroom in Kolkata, and gauging the response we would be rolling out the range of stores across the country,” Bhajanka said.

Bhajanka and his team is currently busy doing their homework to zero in on the look of the stores and also to decide on the countries from where the furniture would be sourced.

Century had been on an overdrive establishing its brand through national campaigns, TV commercials and getting associated with Bollywood movies.

Bhajanka now feels being restricted only to plywood severely underutilises the potential of the brand; and a foray in the furniture business, sharing a lot of synergy with plywoods, would help unlock the potential of the brand.

“We can do a lot more with the Centuryply brand; venturing into furniture is just a beginning,” Bhajanka said.

Century has forayed into shipping business about two months back with three small single vessels via its subsidiary Aegis Business Ltd and Bhajanka said it has already handled about 1.5 lakh tonnes of cargo between ports of Haldia, Vizag and Dhamra and Paradeep. “We are currently concentrating on coastal cargo and have already got cargo handling business from SAIL and now talking to Tata Steel,” he said.

Century currently operates three vessels taken on lease of sizes varying between 10,000 tonnes and 50,000 tonnes. It has plans to buy three vessels of larger capacity for catering to ports in south and west.

Bhajanka didn’t disclose the probable investments that would go into creating the shipping logistics. “The opportunity is huge and sky’s the limit for us to invest and create assets in this sector: anything between Rs500 crore to Rs1,000 crore,” he said adding investments plans for 2011-12 are yet to be firmed up.