Established in 1946, HIL is a flagship company of the CK Birla Group. It is the world’s largest manufacturer and seller of fibre cement roofing and offers comprehensive building solutions. For the past 70 years, the company has achieved market leadership by developing and marketing advanced, high-quality, innovative, sustainable products for the building materials industry. It has six major brands: Charminar, Birla Aerocon, Charminar Fortune, Hysil, Birla HIL and recently acquired German wooden flooring brand Parador. Dhirup Roy Choudhary, Managing Director, shares more....

It was to achieve the aggressive growth plan made for the polymer solutions business. Major capacity expansion along with new product introduction happened during the year in this business and the operation process took some time to stabilise. Proper coordination and meticulous planning combined with focused efforts on expansion of distribution network and branding led to our growth.

The biggest event in FY2018-19 that contributed to the company’s topline growth was the acquisition of vertically integrated premium wooden flooring brand, Parador. The company has two manufacturing plants—one each in Germany and Austria—and its products are sold in 86 countries across the globe. Parador is the No. 1 brand in Germany and has won many accolades year on year for its technology, innovation, design and quality..

Nothing specific was avoided. All possible actions were taken to ensure significant growth both in the topline and bottomline.

We have worked on the cultural and financial integration of Parador in the past year and the integration process was very smooth and successfully completed. We have been continuously working on improving operating efficiencies and Lean-Six Sigma initiatives have been undertaken both at HIL and Parador, which we believe will result in substantial cost reduction going forward. Plans are in place to continue to grow the polymer solutions business aggressively. The new non-asbestos, cement-based corrugated roofing sheet under the brand Charminar Fortune has shown good traction and work has already been initiated to put up additional capacity in the coming year. Capacity expansion is also proposed in the building solutions business as the existing blocks and panels plants are at 95 per cent capacity utilisation.