JSW Cement's growth plans
The Indian cement company has been expanding rapidly in recent years from its start-up in 2009 and this summer it also announced that it will be setting up its first overseas grinding unit in Fujairah, UAE. Both these projects are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2019, by which time the Portland slag cement producer aims to have a cement capacity of 20Mta. JSW Cement has plants at Vijayanagar in Karnataka, Nandyal in Andhra Pradesh, Salboni in West Bengal and Dolvi in Maharashtra. The commissioning of the 2.4Mta Salboni grinding plant earlier this year took the company's cement capacity up to 10.3Mta and the company has already indicated that it plans to further expand the facility to 3.6Mta. At Dolvi, the company has completed the first stage of a two-stage investment plan. The first phase has seen the unit's capacity increase from 1Mta to 2.2Mta in February 2018, taking overall company capacity to 12.5Mta. The second stage of the INR15bn (US$206.6m) programme will lead to a further increase to 4.5Mta next year. The Vijanagar works will also benefit from a 2.4Mta expansion. JSW Cement had preferred to grow largely through building greenfield projects but it did acquire a stake of 54.4 per cent in Shiva Cement in 2017. "It does not make sense for a company like ours to go for any inorganic growth," claims Jindal. "We are strong in execution, so the greenfield capacity is our strength and that’s what we are trying to leverage." However, JSW Cement does not completely rule out acquiring other cement producers as it was initially the highest bidder for Binani Cement’s 11.25Mta of capacity in January 2018, until Dalmia and UltraTech Cement targeted the Binani assets.
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