- **lead** - Andhra Sugars is an industrial conglomerate built on a simple, recurring logic: take a raw material or a by-product, process it further, and capture more value at each step. It began in 1947 with a workshop and generator, and its sugar unit became operational in the early 1950s in rural Andhra Pradesh, and over seven decades, it has used the cash flows and by-products of one business to build the next, moving from sugar into fertilisers, industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and power generation. That pattern - backward integration, captive power, and a relentless push into higher-value chemistry - explains almost everything the company does today. # Business segments Five engines at different stages - a hydrocarbon cash cow, two consumer platforms at national scale, and a green-energy bet under construction - each built with the cash flows of the one before. ## 1. Chloro-Alkali & Chemicals: the industrial backbone that powers everything else **Caustic Soda is an electricity product, and the company has built a captive power fleet and an integrated chemical complex to make it cheaper than almost anyone else can.** - **Power is the real raw material** - electricity is the single largest input cost for making Caustic Soda, so the company runs its own 33 MW thermal plant, 16.6 MW of wind mills, and solar installations to secure economical, reliable power instead of buying it from the grid. - **Membrane technology keeps it efficient** - the 600-tonnes-per-day Caustic Soda plant uses imported membrane-cell technology, which is far more energy-efficient than the older mercury-cell process it replaced, and the membranes are replaced periodically to keep power consumption uniform. - **Chlorine finds a home in-house** - the electrochemical process produces Chlorine and Hydrogen alongside Caustic Soda, and the company consumes them downstream to make Sulphuric Acid (800 TPD total capacity), Sodium Hypochlorite, Poly Aluminum Chloride, and Hydrochloric Acid, turning a co-product disposal problem into a product line. - **Even the waste heat makes power** - a 5.30 MW extraction-cum-condensing turbine at Saggonda runs on steam recovered from the Sulphuric Acid plant’s waste-heat boiler, feeding steam back to the Caustic Soda plant and generating electricity with what is left over. - **Deep customer relationships smooth out cycles** - long-standing ties with bulk buyers and traders mean the company can plan production and marketing in advance, which matters when imports and domestic capacity expansions are pressuring the market. ## 2. Aspirin & Salicylic Acid: a regulated pharma platform with a global licence to sell **The company makes Aspirin and its chemical cousins in a US FDA-approved facility, and that regulatory stamp is what opens the door to customers in America, Europe, and Australia.** - **Regulatory approvals are the product’s passport** - the Aspirin plant holds current Good Manufacturing Practice (cGMP) certifications from the US FDA, the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines (EDQM), and Australia’s TGA, plus WHO GMP and Written Confirmation, which lets customers register their own end-products in regulated markets. - **A clean bill of health from the FDA** - in September 2024, the US FDA inspected the Tanuku facility and issued a “no action indicated” (NAI) classification, the best possible outcome, confirming the plant is in an acceptable state of compliance. - **One big customer is coming back** - the company expects to restart supplies to HALEON (the consumer-health group that owns the old Novartis/GSK Aspirin brands) by the end of 2025, with expected usage of around 900 tonnes per year of Aspirin Starch Granules and Crystals. - **The product range goes beyond Aspirin** - the same facility makes multiple grades of Salicylic Acid and Sodium Salicylate, and a new 2,640-tonnes-per-year Salicylic Acid plant was commissioned in March 2024 using an in-house process that delivers higher purity to USP and EP specifications. - **Domestic sales fill the export gap** - while the company works to rebuild its regulated export business and target generic toll manufacturers in the US, indigenous demand is helping to absorb capacity that would otherwise sit idle. ## 3. Sugar: the original engine, now winding down **The sugar business that gave the company its name is shrinking as cane disappears, but the knowledge it built - in fermentation, distillation, and farm mechanisation - has already been repurposed elsewhere.** - **Three mills, none crushing** - the Tanuku plant was permanently closed following Board approval on 29 May 2025, and the Taduvai and Bhimadole units had no crushing operations in the 2025-26 and 2026-27 seasons, all because viable quantities of sugarcane are no longer available in the region. - **Government pricing breaks the link to sugar prices** - the Cane Pricing Policy set by central and state governments forces mills to pay farmers more than the Fair Remunerative Price regardless of what sugar sells for, while low yields per hectare push farmers toward other crops. - **R&D outlives the mills** - the company developed its own sugarcane harvester prototype, imported Australian chopper-drum technology to fine-tune its fleet, and built a “True Seed Pan” and a Lamella Juice Clarifier that cut juice retention time from 37 minutes to 7 minutes; that engineering capability now supports other parts of the group. - **Ethanol is the bridge** - the government’s ethanol fuel-blending programme and permission to make ethanol directly from sugarcane juice create a pathway for the company’s fermentation and distillation know-how to stay relevant even as raw sugar production fades. ## 4. Power: the captive utility that makes the chemicals business viable **The company generates its own electricity because it has to - Chlor-Alkali is so power-hungry that buying from the grid would destroy the economics.** - **A three-fuel generation fleet** - the company runs a 33 MW coal-based thermal plant at Saggonda, 16.6 MW of wind turbines across Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, and solar plants at Kovvur, giving it a mix of captive and renewable sources. - **Surplus is wheeled or sold** - the power assets are sized to cover the chemical complex’s needs, but when generation exceeds demand, the company can sell the excess or use open-access arrangements to keep its overall power bill low. - **Old assets are pruned** - the 2.025 MW wind mills at Ramagiri were permanently closed in October 2025 after more than 30 years of operation, because they had become unviable. - **A gas-power stake that went cold** - the company is a shareholder in Andhra Pradesh Gas Power Corporation Limited (APGPCL) and used to draw power from it, but natural gas allocations stopped in October 2022, halting its operations. # Group structure and partners **The company controls a cluster of subsidiaries and an associate that extend its chemical logic into soaps, oxo-alcohols, and niche industrial chemicals - each one a further step down the value chain.** - **JOCIL Ltd. (55% stake)** - makes Fatty Acids, Glycerine, and Toilet Soaps from non-edible oils at Dokiparru, Guntur, and also runs a Stearic Acid plant that produces an intermediary for soap manufacture. - **The Andhra Farm Chemicals Corporation Ltd. (77% stake)** - established in 1968 at Kovvur, it was once India’s largest manufacturer of Hydrazine Hydrate, using technology from RRL Hyderabad that the company later improved. - **Hindustan Allied Chemicals Ltd. (77% stake)** - a third unlisted subsidiary, rounding out the group’s chemical holdings. - **The Andhra Petrochemicals Ltd. (34% stake, associate)** - the only plant in India making Oxo-Alcohols (2-Ethyl Hexanol, n-Butanol, i-Butanol), which are ingredients for the plastics industry; it uses technology from Davy McKee of London and is located at Visakhapatnam. A long-running legal dispute with Visakhapatnam Port Trust over its land lease was ruled in the company’s favour by the High Court in February 2022, though the port trust has appealed.