India’s TOP 500 Companies 2021

INDIA’S TOP 500 COMPANIES 2021 136 Experts’ View How would you summarize JKCement’s journey since its inception? What are some of the key milestone achieved by the company in recent years? With humble beginnings in the year 1975, at our flagship grey cement unit at Nimbahera, Rajasthan, today JKCement Ltd. is one of India’s leading manufacturers of Grey Cement and the third largest White Cement manufacturer in the World. Some of the key milestones achieved by JKCement are: • Our Market Capitalization increased by 3 times in the last scal to reach USD 3 billion. • We reported our highest ever EBITDA in Q3 & Q4 FY21. • We have retained and strengthened our position of being one of the Global leaders in White Cement and the largest producer of Wall Putty worldwide. • We further strengthened the foundations of the Company’s presence, by successfully commissioning two grey cement grinding units in Aligarh, UP and Balasinor, Gujarat last year. • We also augmented our production capacity by 3 LTPA at our unit in Katni, making it the largest manufacturing plant of Wall Putty in India. • We have announced the setting up of a green- eld integrated Grey Cement plant with a split grinding unit, having the capacity of 4 MnTPA in Panna, Madhya Pradesh with a total investment of ` 2970 Crs • JKCement has launched a new and vibrant corporate brand identity. How was your business impacted due to the pandemic? What steps did you take to tide over this crisis? Like all other industries, our business was also impacted during Covid. We powered through these tough conditions on the back of the strong foundation of business fundamentals that we’ve built over the years. With the easing of the lockdown eventually, construction activities started picking up pace and we witnessed faster recovery in rural areas as compared to urban areas. Hence, adopting a proactive approach, we started focussing our efforts mainly on rural marketing. We rolled out an aggressive rural drive to cover white spaces and untapped markets, which gave us impetus in gaining the incremental volumes. Apart from this, our differentiated marketing and brand communication, technical services & improved serviceability helped us in gaining a competitive edge. We have certainly become stronger in our strategic markets by expanding our network of grey and white cement businesses and achieving a higher share of wallet from the existing network base. We organised business continuity training programmes for the families of our channel partners who succumbed to covid, to support the next generation that is new to the trade and to enable them to grow their business with JKCement. We achieved all this while also taking care of our employees as their safety and wellbeing is our number one priority. Our channel friendly policies, employee support and transparent business practices have helped us cope with the pandemic and also emerge as one of the fastest growing cement companies. What are some of the sustainability initiatives by your company? At JKCement, we have always worked towards reducing our carbon footprint and are working towards shifting to green technology. We have been focusing on increasing the use of alternate fuels & raw materials as also setting up more solar, wind and waste heat recovery sources of energy generation. In this regard, we have also augmented Waste Heat Recovery power generators in Rajasthan with a combined capacity of WHRS as 40.05 MW. Our three-point sustainability goals are: 1. We will reduce specific direct net CO 2 emission from 593 to 465 kg CO 2 /t of cement by 2030. 2. To improve water positivity from 3.2 to 5 times by 2030. 3. Increase 25% CSR beneficiaries by 2025 from 2020 level which we have overachieved by 75% this year in FY2020-21. To further augment the same, we have built a solid governance ecosystem to ensure that our efforts are carried out in a consistent, accountable and transparent manner. JKCEMENT Dr. Raghavpat Singhania Managing Director Dun & Bradstreet