Kirloskar Ferrous Industries is a manufacturing company that turns iron ore and scrap metal into the precision metal parts that keep vehicles and machinery moving - engine blocks for tractors, seamless tubes for boilers, and bearings for everything that spins. It was born in 1991 as a pig-iron maker for the Kirloskar Group’s own engine business, and has since stitched together a chain that starts at its own iron-ore mine and ends with a machined casting or a high-pressure boiler tube, absorbing a distressed tube maker and a Punjab foundry along the way. The recurring approach is to own the raw material, make the intermediate metal, and then shape it into a component the customer cannot easily switch away from - a “mines to machined casting” and “mines to seamless tubes” logic that turns a commodity input into a sticky, specified product. # Business segments Four engines, each a step further from the mine - a commoditised iron-making base that feeds a captive foundry, a specialty steel business that dominates one niche, and a precision-tube platform stitched on through acquisition, with a small North Indian foundry adding geographic reach. ## 1. Pig iron: the furnace that feeds everything else **The company makes foundry-grade pig iron in mini blast furnaces, selling most of it to outside foundries but also using it as the captive raw material for its own casting plants - a built-in hedge when prices swing.** - **Three furnaces, two locations** - pig iron is smelted at Koppal and Hiriyur in Karnataka, close to the Hospet-Sandur-Bellary iron-ore belt, with a combined capacity of roughly 7,00,000 tonnes a year. In FY26, one furnace was idled for about three and a half months when market prices were too low, while the other two ran well enough that they could have produced close to 7 lakh tonnes in better conditions. - **Its own iron ore, finally** - after years of waiting for forest clearances, the company began drawing ore from its captive Kirloskar Bharat Mines in December 2024, with a permitted annual output of 1,24,000 tonnes of low-phosphorus ore, cutting its dependence on outside purchases. It was also declared the preferred bidder for a second mine, Jambunatha, in mid-2025. - **Energy is made from waste** - a 52 MW waste-heat recovery plant runs on blast-furnace and coke-oven gas, so the Koppal site is self-sufficient in power; a 20 MW unit added in 2020 runs on coke-oven waste gas alone. The company is layering on 35 MW of solar and 25 MW of wind to push green power to about a third of its mix. - **Coke costs squeezed from every angle** - a captive coke-oven plant with 3.8 lakh tonnes of annual capacity meets all its coke needs, and pulverised-coal injection plus oxygen enrichment cut the amount of coke each tonne of iron consumes. A new oxygen plant finished in late 2024 at a cost of around ₹37 crore pushes that saving further. - **A commodity with a distribution network** - about a quarter of pig iron moves by rail over the company’s own siding to long-distance customers, and the rest goes through a dealer network that spans distributors, consignment agents, and branch offices across India. End-users are spread across auto, pumps, steel, pipes, and general engineering, with auto alone taking 34% of sales. ## 2. Castings: the sticky core built on pig iron **KFIL pours molten iron into custom moulds to make cylinder blocks, heads, and transmission housings for tractor, truck, and construction-equipment makers - a business where it is often the sole supplier, making it hard for a customer to walk away.** - **One in every five castings sold in India** - the company holds a 19-20% domestic market share and claims number-one leadership, built on a near-total 97% share of tractor castings in the country. It serves 29 OEM and Tier-1 customers across tractors, commercial vehicles, diesel engines, and construction equipment. - **Three foundries, three weight classes** - the Koppal plant handles pieces up to 300 kg, the Solapur “No Bake” line tackles large castings from 500 kg to 1,200 kg, and the recently acquired Oliver foundry in Punjab adds another 28,000 tonnes a year of simpler transmission parts, giving KFIL a foothold in North India. Combined casting production grew 16% year-on-year in FY26, with Oliver contributing 17,500 tonnes. - **Prototypes printed in sand** - KFIL is the only foundry in India with a 3D sand-printing machine that makes prototype cores using the same moulding practices as regular production, slashing the time it takes to move a new engine block from drawing to test part. It used this to develop a 350 kg cylinder block, the biggest ever made in its foundry. - **Machining to capture more value** - the company has been installing CNC machining centres and special-purpose machines so it can ship a fully machined block or head rather than a raw casting, installing over 25 high-performance CNC machines in FY25 alone. This pulls revenue that would otherwise go to a separate machine shop into KFIL’s own factories. - **Customer stickiness through co-development** - KFIL jointly designs BS VI engine components with OEMs and runs a Critical Chain Project Management system to speed new parts to market; it has won awards for supply-chain management from Volvo Eicher and for innovation from JCB. ## 3. Seamless tubes: the acquisition that doubled the company’s reach **KFIL makes precision steel tubes - from 6 mm to 273 mm in diameter - for boilers, bearings, hydraulic cylinders, and car axles, a business it acquired when it bought and turned around the distressed ISMT Limited in 2022.** - **A global-scale tube mill stitched on** - the merger of ISMT, effective August 2024, brought two Maharashtra plants at Baramati and Ahmednagar with hot-mill rolling capacity of about 3,70,000 tonnes a year, making KFIL one of the world’s most diversified seamless-tube producers. The Baramati plant alone was debottlenecked from 10,000 to 12,500 tonnes a month. - **More than just hollow pipe** - the tube catalogue runs from precision-machined bearing rings and constant-velocity-joint parts to multi-rifle bore tubes, superheater tubes, and premium couplings for oil-country tubular goods, with over 10,000 tonnes of premium connections sold to Indian oil majors in FY25. The customer base splits across boilers, trade distributors, bearings, general engineering, and automotive. - **Inspection as a selling point** - the plants run ultrasonic, eddy-current, magnetic-particle, and hydrostatic testing up to 10,000 psi, with a 22-probe ultrasonic machine for multi-angle defect detection, which is what qualifies the tubes for pressure-containing applications in power plants and oil wells. - **A turnaround, not a greenfield** - ISMT was financially distressed when KFIL took a 51.25% stake for ₹476 crore; KFIL cut debt by selling assets and restructuring, and the business became profitable at both operating and net levels under its watch. The inherited foreign subsidiaries - in Sweden, Luxembourg, and the US - have since been wound down or liquidated, cleaning up the perimeter. ## 4. Steel: the niche where it owns two-fifths of the market **At its Jejuri plant, KFIL melts scrap in an electric-arc furnace to make alloy and bearing steels, capturing over 40% of India’s bearing-steel market by supplying the grade that goes into high-speed and noiseless bearings.** - **Bearing steel is the anchor** - bearings account for 69% of the steel division’s sales, with demand growing about 8% a year on the back of railways, infrastructure, and a shift to EV-compatible noiseless bearings. The plant runs an automated ultrasonic testing line, installed at a cost of over ₹15 crore, specifically to inspect bearing steel. - **Capacity waiting for demand** - installed liquid-metal capacity is about 3,00,000 tonnes a year, but utilisation sat at 68% in early 2026, leaving headroom for the specialty-steel grades where integrated players have pricing power. # Group structure and partners **KFIL sits inside the 136-year-old Kirloskar Group and has reshaped its corporate perimeter through two mergers - absorbing ISMT in 2024 and folding in Oliver Engineering plus a solar subsidiary in 2026 - while winding down nearly all inherited foreign entities.** - The company is listed on the BSE and permitted to trade on the NSE, with the promoter group holding about 59% as of FY21; the chairman is Atul Kirloskar and the managing director is R. V. Gumaste. - The ISMT merger, effective August 2024, was executed at a share-exchange ratio of 17 KFIL shares for every 100 ISMT shares, adding 2.49 crore new equity shares and bringing nine subsidiaries onto KFIL’s books - most of which have since been liquidated, wound down, or fully impaired. - The Oliver Engineering and Adicca Energy Solutions merger, operative in June 2026, required no share issuance since both were wholly owned; it consolidates the Punjab foundry and brings solar-project execution capabilities in-house. - Kirloskar Bharat Mines is not a separate subsidiary but a mining operation run directly under KFIL, supplying iron ore from its Karnataka lease since December 2024. - A legacy family-settlement deed from 2009 has drawn regulatory attention from SEBI over a non-compete clause, but KFIL maintains it was never a party to the deed, its board never adopted it, and it is challenging the SEBI directive through legal proceedings.