Ambar Protein Industries is a Gujarat-based edible-oil company that refines crude cottonseed oil and trades a basket of other refined oils, all from a single plant on the Sarkhej-Bavla Highway in Ahmedabad. Incorporated in 1992 as Ankur Protein Industries, it has spent three decades turning cotton country’s most abundant by-product into cooking oil, recently adding branded and cold-pressed oils to a business that was once purely a commodity play. The recurring approach is simple: stay physically close to the raw material, manage volatile input prices through hedging and forward buying, and sell both loose and packaged oil to a mix of trade buyers and a key related-party distributor.
Business segments
A single engine with two ways to market - refining its own cottonseed oil in-house, and buying, packing and reselling other refined oils - now extending into branded and cold-pressed products.
1. Edible-oil refining and trading: a cotton-belt processor with a broadening kitchen shelf
The company makes its own refined cottonseed oil and resells five other oils it buys ready-made, with a recent push into branded mustard oil and cold-pressed oils that moves it beyond commodity margins.
- Refines what the cotton fields yield - crude cottonseed oil arrives in tanker loads from nearby crushing mills, and the company puts it through a three-stage process of alkali refining, bleaching and deodorization to strip out gums, colour and odour, producing a clear refined oil ready for cooking. Gujarat is one of India’s top cotton-processing states, so the raw material is on the doorstep.
- Trades oils it does not crush - alongside its own refined cottonseed oil, the company buys, packs and resells groundnut, sunflower, maize, mustard and soybean oils, which together with cottonseed oil make up 100% of turnover. In FY24, it refined roughly 29,757 metric tonnes of cottonseed oil and traded another 3,776 metric tonnes of the other oils.
- A step-change in capacity, then a second refinery - a new 200-tonnes-per-day refinery went live in April 2019, replacing older capacity, and in August 2023 the board approved a second 200 TPD sunflower refinery at the same Changodar site. By early 2025, machinery for four cold-pressed oils - groundnut, extra-virgin coconut, sesame and mustard - had been installed, adding a premium, less-processed tier to the product line.
- Sells loose and packaged, with one buyer dominating - revenue is recognised when control of the goods passes to the customer, and sales are made on normal trade credit terms. A related-party agreement with Ankur Oil Industries, a group partnership firm, runs from April 2024 to March 2027, and in FY24 that single relationship accounted for more than 10% of revenue and nearly all trade receivables.
- Hedging is the shield against wild input prices - crude cottonseed oil and internationally sourced raw materials expose the company to commodity-price and foreign-exchange swings, so management runs a mix of spot buying, forward contracts and currency hedging to keep input costs predictable.
Group structure and partners
A standalone, promoter-held company with no subsidiaries, whose most important commercial relationship is with a promoter-linked partnership firm that buys its oil.
- The company has no holding, subsidiary or associate companies, and its only equity investment is 20,000 shares in a co-operative bank.
- Promoters held 71.35% of the equity as of March 2025, down from roughly 75% in FY20-FY21, after some promoter-group entities sought reclassification to the public category in 2021.
- Ankur Oil Industries, a group partnership firm, is the dominant customer, buying refined edible oils in loose and packaged form under a three-year agreement that runs to March 2027.
- The company is listed solely on BSE, with connectivity to both NSDL and CDSL depositories, and had 40 permanent employees on its payroll as of 31st March, 2024.