Somany Ceramics posted a near 78 percent plunge in the net profit for the quarter ended September 30. Abhishek Somany, MD of the company, spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the earnings and business plans.

“It has probably been one of our worst quarters in so many years. We have been hit by 3-4 issues, the truckers’ strike for 10 days, which was more aggressive in Haryana and in Gujarat which is where our productions are and the second was the Kerala outage about 12 percent of volume goes into Kerala and then backed with that there was another 7-8 days outage in our northern plant which is our mother plant due to a trunk line being on routine maintenance by GAIL. So all of these factors lowered the production, lowered the capacity utilisation and also lowered the volume but the worst is over and I think things should look up from here,” Somany said on Friday.

“In H1 we have grown by about 3 percent over last year’s H1 and I think going forward, this quarter we should be at least at the mid-teens and next quarter is yet to be seen but I think we should be able to manage a high single-digit even now,” he added.

Talking about the business outlook, Somany said, “Things are looking up. If you look at October itself, we are handsomely doing well. We have taken a price increase at the mid of October. It came into play around October 20-21. It is about 2-2.5 percent net price increase."

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First Published:Nov 2, 2018 12:38 PM IST