KCP Group, one of the oldest industrial families in Chennai, is planning to expand its cement capacity by setting up a new greenfield project.
The proposed third plant would come up in Andhra Pradesh. The cement business of the group is over 60 years old. It has manufacturing plants in Macherla and Muktyala in Andhra Pradesh with captive supply of high-grade limestone. These two plants have a combined annual capacity of 4.3 million tonnes of premium-grade cement.
Commissioned in 1958, Macherla is one of the country's oldest cement plants and perhaps India's first dry process kiln with technology from KHD Humboldt, Germany. It started with an initial annual capacity of 200 tonnes. Since then, the production capacity has expanded to 0.8 MT with technology from Fives-Lille, France, and later FLSmidth, Denmark (Fuller Inc, US). This plant also incorporates a state-of-art centralised process control system using hardware and software from FLSmidth Automation, Denmark, for optimisation and enhanced production.
The Muktyala facility, commissioned in 2011, is a modern, highly automated, cost-efficient and eco-friendly plant with an annual capacity 1.86 MT, expandable to 3.5 MT. In 2019, the plant capacity was expanded to 3.52 MT per annum by the addition of a second line of operation by replicating the pyroprocessing of the first line and adding grinding technology from Loesche, Germany.
The new plant — once fully functional — would double the cement capacity of the group. To a query, she said the group had sufficient land to house the new project.
The 80-year-old diversified business group with a turnover over $250 million has interests in cement, heavy engineering, sugar, power and hospitality. It has nine manufacturing plants over various geographies in India and Vietnam.
