Annapurna Swadisht Limited (ASL), a Kolkata-based food and beverages company, has reported a near 100% surge in its revenue from operations at Rs 131.13 crore for the half year ending September 30, 2023, as compared with Rs 65.61 crore registered in the same period last year. The company’s profit after tax increased by 128 per cent to Rs 6.56 crore during the period under review compared with close to Rs 2.87 crore reported in the same period last fiscal.
The company’s operating profit (EBITDA) surged nearly 163 per cent to Rs 13 crore during H1FY24 (April – September 2023) as against Rs 4.95 crore registered during H1FY23. The company’s margins improved because of better economies of scale,entry into high-margin products and normalising raw material prices. ASL reported an EBITDA margin of 9.92% in H1FY24, an improvement of 238 basis points from 7.55% over the previous comparative period.
Commenting on the performance, Shreeram Bagla, Managing Director, Annapurna Swadisht, said, “The increase in top line during the first half of this fiscal was primarily due to the addition of new capacities penetration into newer geographies along with better penetration in some of the existing markets.”
Sequentially, revenue from operations grew by nearly 39% from Rs 94.93 crore registered during H2FY23 (second half of the financial year ended March 31, 2023).
“We remain bullish about the Bharat story, which lies in India’s rural and semi-urban markets. We have been witnessing good traction in demand from these markets. With the increasing per capita income, we expect demand to grow even further in the days to come. We have expanded our manufacturing capacity bysetting up a new plant at Dhulagarh in West Bengal, which has already commenced operations. We look to strengthen our presence in the existing markets by ramping up our distribution footprint and rolling out more SKUs,” Bagla said.
ASL has five owned manufacturing units spread across West Bengal at Asansol, Siliguri, Gurap, Dhulagarh, and six contractual/leasing arrangements at Kakinara (West Bengal), Hazaribagh (Jharkhand), Ranigunj (WB), Ganjam (Odisha), Siliguri (WB) and Mathura (UP).
Annapurna Swadisht primarily caters to the Tier III and Tier IV markets in Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Assam, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh. Its portfolio has close to 72 SKUs (stock-keeping units) across ten broad categories, including fryums, namkeens, snacks, candies and cakes. It has nearly 550 distributors and over 115 super distributors, and the products are available across over 6 lakh retail touchpoints. The company had recently appointed Mr GP Sah, former CEO of the FMCG division of CG group, as an Additional Director and Joint Managing Director of the company to steer the company on to its next phase of growth, where it is looking to ramp up its product portfolio, particularly in the noodles segment.
The company, listed on the NSE-SME platform in September 2022, had raised close to Rs 65.43 crore through a preferential issue of equity shares and warrants by the end of September 2023.
