The Chennai-based Murugappa Group’s Coromandel International has four manufacturing facilities at Kakinada and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, and Ennore and Ranipet in Tamil Nadu, is into production of complex fertilizers with a cumulative annual capacity of 3.2 million tonnes. They were the second-largest player in phosphatic fertilizers in the country, having a 16-18 per cent market share.
But the company also imports 0.23 million tonnes of urea and they are now looking forward for the acquisition or the setting up of a urea plant. The acquisition could be even overseas. This would complement their fertilizer business, being their aim to get a capacity of a million tonnes urea per year. India is the world largest urea importer, but it is still not under the nutrient based subsidy scheme, although a proposal to this effect was mooted in the recent Union budget.
Fertilizer and pesticide maker Coromandel Fertilisers Ltd, a part of the Murugappa Group, was renamed last year as Coromandel International. India’s annual fertilizer consumption experimented this decade a growth of 4.5 percent, but it seems not to be enough: yields are typically 20-50 percent of those on equivalent USA cropland.
N-P-K World 