India: The Indian government has revived a plan to sell six Cement Corporation of India (CCI) factories, which have been closed for close to a decade. The six plants are located in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Haryana and Delhi, with two in Chhattisgarh.
The Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR), which looks into ailing public sector units, has reconstituted an asset sale committee to arrive at a valuation for the six plants.
Cement Corp. officials refused to talk about the valuation but an industry analyst estimated that the six defunct plants could be worth over US$300m. Collectively, the production capacity of the six plants is 2.65Mt/yr.
"On average, the cost of buying readymade cement production capacity will be US$110-120/t," said V Srinivasan, a cement sector analyst at Angel Broking. At this price, the plants may fetch US$288-317m.
Possible companies that are looking to increase their cement capacity include UltraTech Cement, Lafarge, Holcim and Birla Corp. CCI also has three operational cement plants, with a combined capacity of 1.4Mt/yr.