Gloster Cables Limited was incorporated in the year 1995, with Fort Gloster Industries limited (FGI) as one of the equity participants. The technical knowhow and the marketing expertise was all from Fort Gloster and the cable was branded as Gloster cables. The company is centrally located near Secunderabad (Hyderabad) on NH 7 Andhra Pradesh. It focuses more on extra high voltage and the other value added products. The production facility has been designed to match the customer’s expectations. They are trying to revive the Kolkata unit and planning to merge it with Hyderabad unit to make it as one entity. In a brief chat with team Wire & Cable Mr. Ashish P Modi MD Gloster Cables shared his thoughts on the future strategy of the company along with other subjects like Giving the overview of the industry he said “The growth of the industry is faster than the GDP growth which has not really kicked off the way it was supposed to be. In the anticipation of the boom, lot of ideal capacity has built up over the last 5-6 years which coincided with the global down turn. The last 2-3 years have been little difficult but like everybody said that this industry is cyclical in nature where 4-5 years of growth is followed by 2 or more years of hardship and then back again.”
Talking about the challenges he specified “This is a very fragmented market so it has its own challenges there are all shades of players so the entire industry is not able to speak with one voice. Cable sourcing by the unorganized players without excise duty and sales tax is also a major problem. Another threat to this industry is the volatility of pricing. An enquiry is floated which is culminated into an order. The order has come to the time of execution i.e. proper manufacturing and there after the inspection has to happen. If there is a delay in the project inspection your inventories built up and it is all on firm pricing. The procurement price keeps on changing from minute to minute whether you buy aluminum, copper or anything which becomes a toll on the manufacturer. This means that you have to work on the today’s pricing and then hope for the best. The value addition in the industry is also very limited. So to overcome this challenge the demand has to overtake the capacity for sometime in future.”
Counting on the strengths of Gloster he cited “we have the skilled manpower for our business wherein all my senior people have at least 30-35years of experience in the cable industry. We are one of the most premium priced products in the country because what we bring to the table is quality. The biggest advantage we have is the large distribution network in all the leading metro cities wherein we cater pan India. We are not very large cable company in terms of volumes but yes in terms of reputation our brand is far bigger than the size of our company. Till date it was our strategic intent to work in the niche market but recently we have ventured into domestic cables also.”
Commenting on the strategy for future he said “all the effort are right now into the reviving the Calcutta unit because in that one process we will be more than double our capacity with the entire product basket from 1.1 to 132kv which can be extended to 220kv line. When Fort Gloster starts it will be merged with the Gloster Hyderabad unit and then both the units will be managed as one company. Now in anticipation of the boom we have created a lot of capacity and working at about 60% of our extra capacity at Gloster Hyderabad. There will be an added advantage of distribution network too. If we will more than double our size our procurement will also be more than double and then there will be a lot of synergy and benefit in terms of pricing. All the ingredients of growth are available with us like capacity, goodwill, brand etc.” he concluded.