- **K.P.R. Mill is a textile maker that does everything from spinning raw cotton to stitching finished underwear - a “fibre to fashion” chain built to squeeze out every cost and hour between the field and the store. It started in 1984 when three brothers from a farming family in Tamil Nadu made a small, determined start with a maiden business at Coimbatore, and it has since grown into one of India’s largest vertically integrated apparel manufacturers, employing over 30,000 people, roughly 90% of them women. The recurring pattern is simple: the company adds a new link to its chain - spinning, knitting, processing, printing, stitching, a retail brand, even sugar and green power - and uses the cash and captive supply from the last link to fund the next, so that each piece makes the whole harder to copy.** # Business segments Five engines at different stages - a textile-and-apparel cash cow, a young innerwear brand, a sugar-and-ethanol agro-industrial sidecar, a captive green-power backbone, and a tiny car dealership - each built with the cash flows of the one before. ## 1. Textile and apparel: the integrated chain that makes the clothes **One of India’s largest knitted-garment producers, running six spinning mills, three knitting units, two processing plants, a printing facility and four stitching factories - all within 50 km of Asia’s biggest knitwear hub, so fabric can become a finished shirt with almost no transport cost.** - **Spins its own yarn, then uses it** - the mills can make 1,00,000 tonnes of cotton yarn and 10,500 tonnes of Vortex Viscose yarn a year, and about 29% of that yarn is fed straight into the company’s own knitting and garment lines, which means it captures the margin a standalone spinner would hand to a middleman. - **Cold processing that saves water and salt** - the fabric-processing units use Advanced Cold Processing Technology that cuts water consumption by 30% and eliminates salt entirely, while an Italian-designed effluent plant recycles up to 95% of the water, so the company stopped using bore water for production. - **Sells to the neighbourhood and the world** - over 1,500 regular domestic clients in the Tirupur knitwear cluster buy its yarn and fabric, while its 204-million-garment-a-year stitching capacity ships finished clothes to Primark, Marks & Spencer, Walmart and GAP across more than 60 countries, with Europe taking roughly 63% of exports. - **Basic garments that stay in demand** - the garment business deliberately operates in the “basic segment” - everyday essentials rather than fashion-forward pieces - which makes it less vulnerable when European buyers slow down orders. - **Cotton team on the ground** - the main raw material is Shankar-6 cotton from Gujarat, and the company stations its own people in growing areas to track availability and price swings, while 48% of sustainable cotton is procured as per buyer's requirement under certifications like BCI and Organic. ## 2. FASO: the company’s own innerwear brand **A 100% organic-cotton innerwear and athleisure label, launched in 2019, that lets the company sell directly to Indian consumers instead of only stitching for foreign retailers.** - **From factory floor to retail shelf** - FASO (short for “Fashion Adapted Sustainable and Organic”) takes the same organic cotton the company already spins and turns it into briefs, trunks, vests and gym tees across three premium ranges, sold through its own website, Amazon, Ajio and large-format stores. - **Started in the South, reaching outward** - the brand was first rolled out in South India through a distribution network and has since expanded into seven other commercially important states, with a Pan-India plan in motion. ## 3. Sugar and ethanol: the agro-industrial sidecar **Two wholly owned subsidiaries in Karnataka crush 20,000 tonnes of sugarcane a day, turning it into sugar and ethanol - the ethanol sold entirely to government oil-marketing companies under India’s blending programme.** - **Quota-driven ethanol, steady offtake** - the government allocates an ethanol quota each year based on the company’s estimate, and in the latest crushing season the two mills together produced about 87,600 kilolitres of ethanol, all of it bought by oil-marketing companies, so the customer is effectively guaranteed. - **Built in stages with textile cash** - the original 5,000 TCD sugar plant and 30 MW co-gen unit were set up in 2012; an ethanol distillery followed in 2019, and a large second mill at Chowdapur doubled sugar capacity to 20,000 TCD while lifting ethanol capacity to 470 KLPD, all funded as the textile business generated surplus. - **Co-generation makes the sugar viable** - the sugar mills house 90 MW of co-generation power capacity that runs on bagasse, and the power is partly used captively and partly sold, turning what would be a cyclical commodity business into a diversified agro-industrial system where by-products matter as much as sugar. ## 4. Green power: the captive energy backbone **191.92 MW of wind, rooftop solar and co-generation capacity that supplies 40-60% of the textile division’s electricity, insulating the company from grid-price swings.** - **Solar on every roof** - 37 MW of rooftop solar has been installed across all units, up from an unspecified earlier level, so generation is spread across the factory footprint rather than concentrated in one location. - **Moving off coal** - the company has installed a multi-fuel boiler with an electrostatic precipitator and is phasing out coal in favour of gas and biomass, while energy-saving measures include 5-star rated equipment and automated cut-off systems for boilers and compressors. # Group structure and partners **A holding company with six wholly owned subsidiaries - two material sugar mills, a garment unit, a dormant knitwear entity, an Audi dealership, and an Ethiopian factory being wound down - plus a promoter group that holds just over 70%.** - The material subsidiaries, K.P.R. Sugar Mill Limited and KPR Sugar and Apparels Limited, run the sugar, ethanol and co-generation plants in Karnataka. - Quantum Knits Private Limited is a garment subsidiary consolidated for management efficiency, while Galaxy Knits Limited has not yet started operations. - Jahnvi Motor Private Limited operates an Audi dealership in Coimbatore and sold 101 cars in FY26 - a tiny non-textile sideline. - KPR Exports Plc, the Ethiopian apparel unit, is being formally closed after civil disturbance. - A Singapore subsidiary, KPR Mill Pte Ltd, was struck off in March 2025 after years of nil turnover and no operations.