KOLKATA: Kesoram Industries, the flagship company of the over Rs 13,000 crore B K Birla Group, will sell its chemical business housed under Hindusthan Heavy Chemicals. This pision, along with spun pipes and rayon, contributes around 5.5% to the turnover of Kesoram.

Speaking to TOI, the nonagenarian Basant Kumar Birla said he plans to sell two units of his group, the chemical business of Kesoram and the closed Kesoram Textiles Mills, an associate company of Kesoram Industries.

Empower Your Corporate Journey with Strategic Skill CoursesOffering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Leadership in AIVisitIIM LucknowIIML Chief Executive Officer ProgrammeVisitUniversity of Western AustraliaUWA Global MBAVisit”We will sell a few businesses. These are very small compared to other segments,” he said. Birla said talks are on with potential buyers of Hindusthan Heavy Chemicals. “If we get a good price, it will be sold,” he said.

Hindusthan Heavy Chemicals used to be a subsidiary of Kesoram and merged with the latter four years back. It has a 21-acre unit on the outskirts of Kolkata and has around 300 employees. It deals with caustic soda lye, hydrogen gas and sulphuric acid.

Sources said the performance of Kesoram’s chemical pision was improving following a rise in demand for two of its main products, chlorine and hydrochloric acid. “The demand for hydrogen is also improving following the recovery of the vanaspati industry. But it will be sold because the focus is on tyre and cement,” they added.

Birla confirmed that Kesoram is now concentrating heavily on tyre and cement, which together account for 95% of the firm’s topline that crossed the Rs 5000 crore mark in 2009-10. The second largest company of the B K Birla Group, Century Textiles, where grandson Kumar Mangalam Birla is also a director, has a turnover of Rs 4500 crore.

Kesoram’s tyre pision (formerly Birla Tyres) clocked a 46.3% topline growth in 2009-10 at Rs 2,849 crore. “Earlier, the contribution of cement was more, but now tyre accounts for the biggest chunk in Kesoram’s topline,” an official said.

It is in the process of setting up a passenger/LCV radial tyre facility having a capacity of 80 tonne per day at a cost of Rs 450 crore. This is expected to commence production by December.

It has also entered into motorcycle tyre manufacturing in 2009. The cement pision of Kesoram has a combined capacity of 7.25 million tonne through two units at Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.