Ambuja Cement will complete its integrated greenfield cement plant at Mundwa in Rajasthan with investment of ₹2,350 crore by September quarter.
The new plant will enhance the clinker capacity of the company by three mtpa and help improve cement sales by 5 mtpa.
Ambuja Cement is also evaluating brownfield expansions at Bhatapara in Chhattisgarh and Maratha (Chandrapur) Maharashtra plants besides looking at significant de-bottlenecking opportunities across all plants to reach 50 mtpa capacity in the medium term. Addressing shareholders virtually at the company’s 38th AGM, Martin Kriegner, Non-Executive Director, Ambuja Cement, said the company has a robust roadmap to become the best in the industry with strategic priorities structured under key levers of growth, competitiveness, innovation and digitalisation and sustainability.
He said that in 2020, Ambuja leveraged synergies with ACC to drive scale and performance. Various cost management and efficiency initiatives have helped deliver a strong performance. “We fully leveraged synergies between LafargeHolcim India’s two operating companies — Ambuja Cement and ACC to drive scale and performance,” he said.
During the year, the company launched a LafargeHolcim India organisation structure led by the country CEO and CFO to drive performance in key areas of supply chain, procurement, digital, finance and other support functions. This structure has enabled to fully extract synergies under the Master Supply Agreement with ACC, leading to over 5 per cent contribution to the profit before tax last year, he added.
Enhancing asset optimisation in line with LafargeHolcim’s Plants of Tomorrow programme, it implemented plant digital tools of Technical Information Systems and Performance and Collaboration Tool which record and report data from all assets on a real-time basis, helping improve operational efficiency.
Asset optimisation
“We also piloted the use of Artificial Intelligence in predicting cement strength, fineness and predictive maintenance of critical equipment such as Vertical Roller Mills,” he added.
On the logistics front, the company has initiated an Artificial Intelligence-powered supply chain management platform ‘Blue Yonder’ to enable better predictability and efficiency across supply chain.