Defence and Aerospace sector, Jindal Aluminium’s next focus to expand: Pragun Jindal Khaitan

Jindal Aluminium, India’s largest aluminium extrusion company which controls domestic market share over 30% is expanding its focus on the defence and aerospace sector, as it forecasts these sectors to be more potential given the policy changes permitting private players, as per a senior company official.

Bengaluru-based multi-million dollar company with 50 years of legacy is also the second-largest maker of aluminium flat-rolled products, taking 10-12% of the market share; and is the only manufacturer in the country equipped with 11 extrusion presses ranging from 6” extrusion press container to 12” extrusion press container. 

Jindal Aluminium products are consumed in more than 40 countries globally, contributing 15-20% of its topline sales annually, stated by Pragun Jindal Khaitan, Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, Jindal Aluminium and the grandson of Sitaram Jindal, Group Founder and Chairman.

Pragun Jindal said: “While we straddle the entire spectrum of the aluminium downstream industry, we see a lot of scopes to widen our focus on the defence sector with the government allowing larger private participation in this. Another focus area is the aerospace segment, where also we see more business coming in from.”

“Currently our revenue from these two segments is negligible. We want to play big in these two areas.”

Presently Jindal Aluminium’s business comes from electrical, façade, solar, electronics and aviation industries, however, he did not comment for a set revenue target from the new expanding areas.

Pragun Jindal added: “Another focus area will be the packaging segment and also the metro/high-speed rails. We also want to grow by catering to the packaging industry as well as high-speed/metro rail systems.”

“Beverage cans are a big market but we will not get into manufacturing the cans, but only supply the raw material”, he said.

Debarring any type of merger or acquisition, he said: “We plan to increase output gradually in a modular manner every year so that both manpower and technology go hand in hand to meet rising demand.”

The boosting up of capacity with the help of technology is what Jindal Aluminium is looking forward to and not in snapping up an existing plant because mergers have their own cultural and integration issues.

“Though the pandemic-driven lockdowns had hit production in the initial months of the first quarter, the operations are close to 80% of the pre-pandemic days now”, he said.

He expects this fiscal to be marginally better than last year when it had closed with a topline of INR 3,000 crore; even so, he refused to share bottom-line numbers since the company is privately held.

He also discarded taking it public saying: “The company don’t need additional capital given the fact that it has been profitable from the very first year of operations.

He said: “There is no plan to defer the annual CAPEX which typically is under INR 80 crore because of the pandemic. A few of the projects have been delayed by a few months due to the pandemic but there is no curtailing of CAPEX.”

Pragun Jindal, who has been recently promoted as the Vice-Chairman also ruled out the fact of increasing export focus, saying the domestic market is too large with per capita aluminium intake of 2.2 kg annually as against the global average of 42 kg.