Indian Card Clothing Company is a 70-year-old specialist that makes the consumable wire “clothing” covering the giant rollers inside textile spinning mills - the part that combs raw cotton into a fine web, a step the company calls “the heart of the spinning process”. Born in 1955 in Pune and now controlled by Multi Act Industrial Enterprises Ltd., Mauritius, the company survived a near-fatal plant migration to Himachal Pradesh and a decade of net-worth erosion to emerge as a focused engineering firm with a side business in commercial real estate. Its recurring approach is to compete not by owning the carding machine itself - it has no tie-up with any major machinery maker - but by being the independent, value-for-money reclothing choice that keeps thousands of mills running after the original supplier’s warranty ends.
Business segments
Two engines at different stages - a niche manufacturing consumable that rides India’s installed base of spinning machines, and a property portfolio that has been steadily monetised - each operating with little overlap beyond a shared balance sheet.
1. Card Clothing: the consumable that keeps India’s spinning mills running
ICC makes the precision wire teeth that carding machines consume and replace every few years, and it is India’s only domestic manufacturer of non-woven card clothing for technical textiles.
- A replacement-part business, not a machine sale - every new carding machine arrives already clothed by its OEM, but once those wires wear out, mills must buy replacements; ICC competes in that re-clothing aftermarket, where demand depends entirely on how many machines are running, how fast, and how much fibre they process.
- The installed base is the addressable market - India has the world’s second-largest spinning capacity after China, producing about 73% of its spun yarn as cotton yarn from roughly a quarter of global cotton output, and every one of those mills is a potential reclothing customer.
- No machine-maker tie-up is the structural handicap - the three big carding-machine manufacturers (Rieter, Truetzschler, LMW) together control more than 97% of the market, and each pushes its own captive card-clothing brand for the first few reclothing cycles through annual maintenance contracts, so ICC must work harder to get its wires onto those machines.
- Non-woven wires are the growth wedge - ICC is the major non-woven wire manufacturer in India and the only one serving the country’s technical-textile demand, covering segments from medical textiles to geotextiles, and sales here grew 32% in FY23 and 18% in FY24.
- Raw material comes from a narrow, disrupted supply chain - the wire is made from imported high-carbon and alloy steel sourced from a limited number of suppliers, and the company depends on high quality expensive raw material that is primarily imported, affecting the company's profit margin.
2. Real Estate: a portfolio of commercial property, steadily sold down
ICC owns and leases out commercial buildings in Mumbai and Pune, but the real story is a series of large, one-time asset sales that have turned property into a second source of cash.
- Rental income from owned offices - the company has held investment properties including chambers in Powai, Mumbai, and a commercial unit in Baner, Pune, leased to third parties and related parties.
- Big-ticket disposals, not just rent collection - in January 2022, ICC sold two sub-plots at its old Pimpri, Pune site for Rs. 122 crores and Rs. 103 crores respectively; in May 2024, it sold both Powai buildings for Rs. 91 crores; and in 2025-26, it sold a Coimbatore workshop for Rs. 11.01 crores and a Baner unit for Rs. 13.20 crores.
- A legacy of the plant migration - the Pimpri land sales trace back to the company’s exit from its original Pune manufacturing site, which was discontinued from May 2018, turning a former factory location into a monetisable asset.
Group structure and partners
ICC is a promoter-controlled listed company with a single operating subsidiary in the UK that makes non-woven wires, a recently closed trading subsidiary, and a sales branch in Turkey.
- The ultimate parent is Multi Act Industrial Enterprises Ltd., Mauritius, and the promoter group holds 67.33% of the equity; shares trade on both NSE and BSE.
- Garnett Wire Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary in England and Wales incorporated in 1991, is a leading European manufacturer of non-woven wires for technical textiles; ICC bought out its joint-venture partner’s 40% stake in August 2022 for £2,32,873, making it a fully owned unit.
- ICC International Agencies Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary that traded and serviced textile capital machinery under agency agreements, was approved for closure in January 2025 after losing its key principal agencies since 2015 and slipping into negative net worth.
- The Turkey branch operates a fully equipped sales and service centre serving that market, though it was disrupted by the severe earthquakes of February 2023.