Berger Paint's 8th plant at Rewadi, Rajasthan in 2007

Kolkata, May 17 (UNI) Berger Paints, India's largest manufacturer of decorative paint with an annual sales turnover of Rs 1,100 crores till March this year, is setting up a fully automotive car painting plant at Rewadi in Rajasthan by April 2007 at a cost of Rs 35 crores.

When completed it would be the Beger Paint's 8th manufacturing unit after the ones in Delhi, Jammu&Kashmir, West Bengal, Goa, Pondichery, Maharashtra and Gujarat, informed Berger Paints India Managing Director Subir Bose.

Speaking to newsmen here today in connection with the pan India launch of its latest range of product called "Galaxy", aimed at meeting the imagination of children, Mr Bose said when operational the Rewadi plant would be the first of its kind in the country where the entire gamut of automobile paintings would be taken care of in a state of the art manner.

To start with, the Rewadi plant would produce only about 600 kilo litres of solvent based automobile paint per annuam before increasing the capacity to 1,000 Kilo Litres gradually by next year, he said.

But when his attention was drawn towards the reason for some delay in commissioning the plant which was scheduled to be operational from October this year, Mr Bose cited "innumerable unforseen hurdles in the forms of government regulations" as the prime reason for the "slight delay".

"We had no idea that we would have to seek permission even from the National Highway Authorities before commissioninig the plant, since it was located within 150 metres of the New Delhi- Jaipur National Highway," Mr Bose pointed out and cited it as one of the reasons for the delay.

Asked about the performance of Berger Paints' wholly owned subsidiary in Southern Russian town of Krasnadar near Black sea, Mr Bose said the 400 kilolitles per month capacity plant was doing excedingly well in terms of business on a foreign soil.

The plant, set up last year as the maiden foreign venture of Berger Paints with a total investment of three million US dollars, was presently producing only decorative paint for Russian buyers, Mr Bose said but made it clear that that they had no plan to go for exporting their products to any other country either in Europe or elsewhere because of the "non-viability" of the proposal.

About their operation in India with a total production volume of 140,000 tonnes of acrelic and solvent based paint, Mr Bose said at present they were enjoying about 18 per cent of domestic paint market share to become the third largest paint manufacturer in the country after Asian Paints and Nerolac India.

Referring to the unprecedented hike in the price of crude oil,a natural ingredient for the solvent based paint, Mr Bose said being unable to bear the increasing financial burden they were forced to increase the cost of all categories of solvent products by about four per cent from this month itself.

But despite that we are expecting about 17 to 18 per cent overall growth in business during the current fiscal itself, he pointed out replying to another query.

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