q4fy25 :
we do not expect any impact of the tariffs and if the tariffs do come into play, we will be in a position to pass them on to the customers in the U.S., as all our competition as well will face the same tariffs or higher tariffs. One of the potential threats to our profitability, as mentioned in the report, is the upcoming commissioning of a large copper smelter in Kutch, and that is expected to happen sometime later this year. Is expected to put some downward pressure on the sulfuric acid market and while it may mainly affect Northern Gujarat and things like this, so we do expect a trickle-down effect all over the country and the latest situation after the terrorist attacks in Pahalgam remains to be seen.
Sulfur-based sulfuric acid is in general more expensive than smelter-based because the smelters don’t need to burn sulfur. They get it as a byproduct of their copper smelter or zinc smelter operations.
But when sulfur prices are high, all the sulfur-based sulfuric acid plants are at a disadvantage compared to the smelter-based sulfuric acid plants.
European demand coming down and particularly impacted by the increasing costs, not only for energy, but for everything else as well. And we are looking at and we have been active in developing new markets. So we are making some headway in Latin American countries, where we have seen decent growth. And we are also selling some products into China, which we were not doing earlier
we have enough headroom and we have enough space available within our existing plants. And in terms of reactor capacity, etc, we are available sufficient to double our current sales of Specialty Chemicals.
It can even touch INR 400 crores( the peak revenue from this plant could be around INR 430 crores)
but our idea is not to expand in the bulk business anymore , just 20-30% headroom growth. Boron is 70% commodity business contributing 100 crores.
Boron is a mature segment. As I said, we don’t expect too much growth in the Base Chemicals. But in the specialties, there’s opportunities in both domestic and export markets, which we are evaluating.
Europe, U.S**., China** , Japan and a little bit of Latin America where we are selling.
Like China is not competent in the sulfuric chemistry? Is it like that?
Bimal Goculdas: There are some products where we are more competitive than the Chinese.
This is a product where we are in the top 3 in the world. And they would go in multiple applications. Each one of them goes into different applications. The last one, sodium vinyl sulfonate particularly goes into coatings and emulsions. But the others have multiple end users.
Boron also goes on to find applications in things like glass, ceramics, glass fiber, agriculture, all that. We’ve got products which go into micronutrient fertilizers, fire retardants things like that. So it is not targeting any one particular industry.
