Exide Industries is acquiring a 26% stake in Australian battery marketing and sales company CIEL Motive Power Pty.
Will buy 26% in the battery marketer for up to A$ 4 m
KOLKATA: Exide Industries is acquiring a 26% stake in Australian battery marketing and sales company CIEL Motive Power Pty.
“We will invest not less than A$ 1 million in the first year, which can eventually go up to A$ 4 million,” T V Ramanathan, managing director and chief executive officer, Exide Industries said at the annual general meeting here on Friday.
The home-grown storage battery major will export forklift electric traction batteries to the JV.
“The Australian traction battery market is huge and we already have a presence in the country as we have been exporting to this company, which is the third largest in this segment. Some of our big OE clients there have been Linde, Toyota and others,” Ramanathan said.
The Exide board also decided to acquire the remaining 49% stake in its associate company Caldyne Automatics, which will be positioned to manufacture and act as a knowledge processing outsourcing centre for power electronics.
R J Kapadia, non-executive chairman, Exide Industries said, “With the 100% subsidiary, the company is in a position to induct in the management of Caldyne, experts in electronics and instrumentation. Going forward, it is our intention to develop high quality battery chargers. Further, our auto SBU will now get a manufacturing platform for solar energy related products.”
According to Gautam Chatterjee, director-industrial, Exide Industries, the company exports about 1 lakh cells to the Australian market and is likely to double it in a year’s time. Most of these traction batteries are used in electric forklift trucks for handling in warehouses.
Exide has an 80% share in the nascent traction batteries market in India.
The board has also decided to increase investments from Rs 140 crore to Rs 185 crore in the current year.
“This has been in spite of the 30% increase in lead prices from April to July this year. Given the high costs on account of continuous lead price hike, we may be forced to take another round of price increases on our products in the current quarter,” Ramanathan said.
On London Metal Exchange, the price of lead rose from $1,936 per tonne in the beginning of the quarter to $2,647 per tonne on June 30, 2007.
Exide has set a target of 7 million and 10 million units for four-wheeler and two-wheeler batteries, respectively. The company currently has a market share of around 80% in the original equipment category and 70% in replacement batteries in the Rs 4,000 crore organised automotive battery market of the country.
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