Value Industries Ltd is a consumer durables manufacturer that has been frozen in time. It was once a maker of washing machines and refrigerators inside the Videocon Group, but since September 2018 it has been run not by its board but by a court-appointed Resolution Professional under India’s corporate insolvency process, with its factory effectively idle and its shares suspended from trading. The company’s entire existence now revolves around a single consolidated insolvency proceeding that bundles it with twelve other Videocon entities, and every operational decision - from paying a bill to retaining its last nine employees - is taken only to keep the legal shell alive while creditors and courts determine its fate.
Business segments
A single business that has ground to a near-complete halt - consumer appliances manufacturing, now operating as a legal entity in preservation mode rather than a going commercial concern.
1. Consumer appliances: a factory in cold storage
The company still owns a plant that can make refrigerators and washing machines, but it has not meaningfully produced or sold anything since the insolvency process began.
- One factory, two product lines - the manufacturing facility is situated at 14 KM Stone; Village Chittegaon Taluka Paithan, District Aurangabad, Maharashtra and was built to produce washing machines and refrigerators, which remain the company’s only reportable business segment.
- Production has virtually stopped - revenue from operations collapsed from about Rs. 111 million in the year before the insolvency to just Rs. 0.24 million by FY23, because the company cannot access fresh credit to buy materials or run the plant at scale.
- Inventory is frozen, not flowing - as of March 2023, the company still held Rs. 145 million of raw materials and Rs. 95 million of materials in transit, but work-in-progress was just Rs. 3 million and finished goods barely Rs. 0.4 million, showing that the production line is essentially stopped mid-cycle.
- A skeleton crew keeps the lights on - total staff strength was around 277 for FY23 and has further come down to just 9 as of March 2024, and all payments require the Resolution Professional’s sign-off, so the company is being preserved, not operated.
- No investment in the future - the company has imported no technology and spent nothing on research and development since the insolvency began, so the plant’s capabilities are frozen at whatever they were in 2018.
Group structure and partners
Value Industries is one of thirteen Videocon companies yoked together in a single insolvency proceeding, and its liabilities are tangled with theirs through cross-guarantees and a pooled loan structure.
- Thirteen companies, one legal process - the NCLT ordered the consolidated insolvency of Value Industries and twelve other Videocon entities in August 2019, meaning no single company can be resolved in isolation.
- The brand sits in a sister company - the “Videocon” brand is owned by CE India Limited, another entity in the consolidated insolvency, and that brand is pledged as security to the lenders, so Value Industries cannot use it independently even if it resumed production.
- A resolution plan was approved, then overturned - creditors backed a plan by Twin Star Technologies with a 95% majority and the NCLT approved it in June 2021, but the appellate tribunal set it aside in January 2022, and the matter now sits in the Supreme Court with nothing changing on the ground.
- The Resolution Professional runs the show - with the board’s powers suspended, Mr. Abhijit Guhathakurta manages the company using shared group resources and, with creditor approval, has drawn on funds from Videocon Industries Limited to cover the fixed costs of the other insolvent entities.