The Hindu : Business : RAK Ceramics to set up vitrified tile unit

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 19, 2007
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RAK Ceramics to set up vitrified tile unit

Special Correspondent

Forms venture with a Singapore firm
Partners Indu Projects of Hyderabad

HYDERABAD: RAK Ceramics, a global ceramic manufacturer, will be setting up a vitrified tile manufacturing plant with an installed capacity of 20,000 sq. m. of tiles a day at Rajkot in Gujarat with an investment of $50 million before the end of this year.

The company also proposes to invest $45 million in the next three years on the 20,000-sq. m. a day plant near Kakinada in Andhra Pradesh to ramp up its capacity to one lakh sq. m. a day.

Naturally, the present production capacity of 2,000 pieces of sanitary ware will also be scaled up.

Addressing a press conference, after inaugurating the second showroom here on Tuesday, CEO and global head of the company, Khater Massad, said the company would enhance the capacity of its Rajkot plant also to one lakh sq. m. a day in three years. This meant that the production of the company in India would go up to two lakh sq. m. a day.

Mr. Massad said the company was exporting 30 per cent of its Indian production to countries like Australia, Taiwan, Israel and a few European nations.

The Indian ceramic market was estimated to be 200 million sq. m. a year and it would go up to 500 million sq. m. in five years from now.

The company had production units in the UAE, Bangladesh, China, Sudan, Iran and India. He observed that the Chinese ceramic tiles market was 1.2 billion sq. m.

The company formed a joint venture with a Singapore company which would build 40 ‘Millennium’ hotels with an investment of $200-300 million.

The company had partnered Indu Projects of Hyderabad to form ‘Rak-Indu’ which would invest $2 billion in projects of townships, hospitals, hotels, golf courses and villas.

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