June 10, 2011 (LBO) - Sri Lankan tile manufacturer Royal Ceramics is to build a third plant at a cost of three billion rupees that will add 12,000 square metres a day to its capacity to meet growing demand.
"Work on the plant will begin in June this year, and we have already contracted overseas companies to supply the machinery," Royal Ceramics managing director Nimal Perera told shareholders in the firm's annual report.
"Once completed in about 18 months time, the plant will add 12,000 square meters per day to our capacity. With this, we hope to have adequate stocks to supply the market."
The new plant will be partly funded through debt and internally generated cash, according to the annual report for the financial year ending March 2011.
Chairman A M Weerasinghe said demand for tiles was rising as the Sri Lankan economy has rebounded sharply with the end of its 30-year ethnic war in May 2009.
"While construction activity has helped overall economic growth, we have also benefited from peoples’ changing lifestyles and higher disposable incomes."
The new tile factory will be built at Kiriwaththuduwa, Homagama south of Colombo, where the company owns a 33-acre land through subsidiary Rocell Ceramics Limited, which had been earmarked for a new floor tile plant to meet expansion requirements.
Royal Ceramics Lanka now has a semi-automated production facility in Eheliyagoda with a capacity of 4,000 square metre a day and a fully-automated plant in Horana with a daily capacity of 7,500 square metres.
The firm's sanitaryware subsidiary Rocell Bathware, which began production in April 2009, turned profitable during the year, and is the only domestic manufacturer of sanitaryware competing against upmarket imported brands from Europe and East Asia.
Rocell Bathware made a net profit of 31 million rupees in 2011 compared with a loss of 50 million rupees a year earlier. Sanitaryware sales rose to 596 million rupees in the 2011 financial year from 287 million a year earlier.
The plant has an initial production capacity of about 250,000 pieces of sanitaryware a year.
Royal Ceramics claims to account for more than half the tile and bathware sales in the country, according to the annual report.
Royal Ceramics Lanka's 2011 financial year net profit rose 51 percent to 1.5 billion rupees on higher sales, profit from share sales and contributions from a new sanitaryware unit that turned profitable.
Annual sales of the group, which manufactures both porcelain and ceramic tiles, rose 29 percent to 6.4 billion rupees from the year before.
source - www.lbo.lk
1 comment:
Visit Sri Lanka Tile Show Rooms
Post a Comment