Heranba Industries Ltd.: Streamlining Operations
30 January 2009 What is the biggest challenge for your business in this macroeconomic environment?
At present we are facing a “no demand” situation in the market where customers are delaying their purchasing decisions in the hope and quest for more competitive prices. Also in view of ripples of monetary devastation in various economies, people do not want to pay higher conversion rates in local currency, especially against the US dollar and euro. Hence, they are adopting a wait and watch policy. The biggest challenge for our company is to keep our head above water and try to wade through these difficult times taking minimum risk.
How are you changing your operations to better serve your clients in these tough times?
In this time of recession where demand is greatly reduced, we are making short-term plans and revising our production plan from time to time depending on the market and product needs.
We are adopting the just-in-time technique in buying raw materials and making finished goods only for confirmed orders to avoid inventory pile up.
At the same time, we are making sure of prompt availability and delivery of our products to our customers so that they, in turn, should not miss any chance to deliver the product to end users on time.
What is your most innovative product, service or research initiative?
At this point of time when the market situation is very grim, demands for our products have been extremely low, and prices nose-dived, our main focus is to economize operations.
One positive point is the sharp fall in crude oil prices has lowered the input material costs in some of the petroleum-based products we use. To capitalize on this further, we are aggressively pursuing the improvement of the consumption norms of various raw materials by streamlining the existing processes, backed by our R&D efforts, to improve the process engineering.
Recovery and recycling of solvents and other related streams is another area where we are making efforts to reduce production costs.
We are contemplating the possibility of backward integration in some products and processes to be more competitive in the international market.
How optimistic are you about the economic health of the agrochemical industry for 2009?
Seeing the current market scenario of uncertainty, it’s very difficult to predict how 2009 will behave. But we are expecting the global financial scenario to improve, creating a favorable season for manufacturers and growers. Agriculture is a necessary activity for all human communities to survive. Hence, consumption and usage of agrochemicals will pick up in the forthcoming months for Heranba Industries Limited.
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