Apollo Tyres to invest Rs 108 cr for capacity expansion

MUMBAI: Apollo Tyres on Thursday said it will pump in over Rs 100 crore in the next fiscal to hike production capacity of its passenger car radial (PCR) tyres to 4.5 lakh units a year from 3 lakh now to serve both the domestic and overseas markets.
    
"We have earmarked Rs 108-crore investment for the next fiscal to increase our production capacity to 4.5 lakh tyres per annum. This will suffice the expansion plan given that this will be an expansion of existing capacity as opposed to creating greenfield site," company's Joint Managing Director Neeraj Kanwar said.
    
Kanwar said the PCR expansion would take place in the firm's Limda facility near Vadodara along with some small capacity increases in all its units in India and South Africa across the sector.
    
Apollo has four manufacturing units in India and two each in South Africa and Zimbabwe.
    
The company has set a target of generating USD 2 billion revenue by 2010 from over USD 1 billion now.
    
"We will embark on capacity expansion in the next fiscal and it will be completed by the end of the fiscal," Kanwar said, adding the company would use internal accruals to fund the proposed expansion.
    
Asked whether Apollo Tyres would go for inorganic growth, Kanwar said if any such opportunity comes up within India, the company would "surely consider it very seriously".
    
"We do not look at acquisitions from the view of their size, but rather from the viewpoint of a strategic fit to our overall corporate plans and vision," he added.