Century Textiles & Industries, which operates three business verticals including paper & pulp, real estate, and paper tissues, with these, the company earns more than 70% of its revenue from the paper and pulp is refocusing on the real estate business and has set aside Rs 1,000 crore for Capex, this fiscal for ongoing and upcoming projects, including the super-premium Worli project, where the CAPEX is nine times that of the other two. Birla Estates was founded in 2016 as Century Textiles real estate business vertical, and it has a large land bank that helps to stabilise the price effect, making it more appealing given the high cost of land in the cities it serves, especially Mumbai and its environs.
“We’ve set aside Rs 1,000 crore in Capex for Birla Estate this fiscal, and our main focus will be on real estate going forward, and we want to be among the top 5 players over the next three to five years, adding that the pulp and paper vertical, which generates over 70% of toplines, has a CAPEX of only Rs 0 crore, and that’s only for routine technology upgrades and other working capital expenses, The pulp and paper company contributed over 70% of the Rs 2,567-crore revenue in FY21, textiles 25%, and realty the remaining 5% or about Rs 125 core through rental income from the many Mumbai properties”, said JC Ladha, Managing director of Century Textiles.
Century Textiles, which was founded in 1897 as a textile company, was purchased by the Birla in 1951, has gone through three major reorganizations since 1994. It entered six verticals after the license raj ended in 1991 with the liberalization launch. After an acquisition in what is now in Uttarakhand, it entered the paper and pulp market in 1984 and closed the Bombay Mills in 2008. In addition, the company’s cement business was combined with the group’s flagship Ultratech, and Century Rayons was leased to Grasim.
The paper & pulp vertical, which has a capacity of 4.9 lakh tonnes per year, will receive Rs 100 crore in annual Capex for the next five years, while the tissue mill doubled capacity last year, and is now the largest with a capacity of 72,000 metric tonnes per year. Birla Estates is currently working on four schemes, including one in Kalyan, two joint growth projects in Bengaluru, and one in Gurugram. It made a booking of Rs 1,000 crore in FY21, but due to Rera rules, which allow a developer to account for sales only after giving possession, this cannot be shown in the FY21 balance sheet. The Gurugram project accounts for Rs 600 crore of the Rs 1,000 crore revenue, while the Kalyan project accounts for the remaining Rs 1,000 crore.
“Although our main focus will be joint construction, in which the partner will bring the land and we will handle the rest. We own approximately 50 acres in Mumbai, Kalyan, Pune, and Thane, as well as a small plot in Delhi. The projects in Gurugram and Bengaluru are being established jointly. The Birla Vanya project in Kalyan is currently under construction on a 22-acre plot with a revenue potential of Rs 1,150 crore, of which we have already sold units worth Rs 400 crore. On the 13 acres we are constructing in the first step, the salable area is 1.3 million square feet. The Gurugram project (Birla Navya) is much larger, with total revenue of over Rs 4,500 crore when all three phases are completed”, added JC Ladha.
