NACL Industries is a crop protection company that has spent three decades evolving from a single-molecule manufacturer into an integrated partner for both farmers and multinational chemical giants - and in FY26, it became a subsidiary of Coromandel International, part of the 125-year-old Murugappa Group. Founded in 1993 to make the insecticide Monocrotophos, the company now develops, manufactures and sells everything from the raw active ingredient to the branded bottle on a dealer’s shelf, serving roughly 5 million farmers across 39 countries. The recurring approach is to build deep, long-term manufacturing relationships - some spanning over 20 years - with large MNCs, and then use that technical credibility and scale to fuel a branded retail business at home and a growing export footprint abroad. # Business segments A single integrated engine - crop protection chemicals - run through three complementary channels that share the same factories, R&D and registrations: contract manufacturing for global MNCs, branded retail to Indian farmers, and exports to 39 countries. ## 1. Contract manufacturing: the technical backbone and the MNC trust engine **Making active ingredients and intermediates for the world’s largest agrochemical companies, on multi-decade contracts, provides the scale, technical rigour and steady demand that the rest of the business is built on.** - **MNC relationships older than most startups** - the company describes its contract manufacturing ties with large multinationals as spanning over two decades, built on technical precision and consistent delivery, with some products made exclusively for a single customer. - **Scale that negotiates for itself** - the B2B business serves over 163 institutional customers with a portfolio of more than 10 products, and the company believes its volume lets it secure favourable terms from over 30 raw-material vendors across China, the US and elsewhere. - **A buffer against the weather** - because institutional orders are less tied to a single monsoon season than farmer purchases, the B2B book diversifies the customer base and smooths out the seasonal swings inherent in Indian agriculture. - **R&D that pays its own bills** - the company’s GLP-accredited lab not only supports internal process development but also sells studies like impurity profiling and method validation to external clients, turning a cost centre into a revenue stream. ## 2. Domestic branded retail: the farmer-facing engine **A portfolio of over 66 branded insecticides, fungicides, herbicides and plant-growth regulators sold through more than 6,500 dealers, backed by village-level demonstrations and digital tools that pull product through the channel.** - **Direct reach, not just wholesale push** - the company uses a direct-to-retail model with stock depots and a dedicated sales force, and it runs farmer outreach programmes including field demonstrations and village meetings to build brand pull at the ground level. - **A brand for every major crop and pest** - the portfolio covers rice, cotton, soybean, maize, wheat, sugarcane, onion, tea and vegetables, with flagship names like Profex Super (insecticide). - **Credit and inventory are part of the product** - because farming is seasonal and monsoon-dependent, the company routinely carries receivables of 130-140 days and holds around 90 days of inventory to ensure product is on the shelf when the pest pressure hits. - **Digital glue for a physical network** - a WhatsApp bot for dealers, Power BI dashboards and the Krishi Kalyan app give farmers and sales teams instant access to pest identification, dosage recommendations and procurement workflows. ## 3. International business: the registration-led export engine **Exports of technicals and branded formulations to 39 countries, built on 147 overseas registrations and a key-accounts model that supplies active ingredients to global MNCs.** - **Two distinct export lanes** - one is a Key Accounts business selling active ingredients directly to large MNCs worldwide; the other is a portfolio of generic and differentiated formulations sold through national importers in Asia, Africa and Latin America. - **The Americas anchor the book** - the Americas have historically been the largest export region, contributing 62% of export sales in some periods, with destinations also spanning Japan, Brazil, Europe, Southeast Asia and Africa. - **Growing despite a shrinking global market** - export revenues grew 14% in FY26 even as the global crop protection industry contracted roughly 7% to USD 77 billion and India’s agrochemical exports dipped 3%. # Manufacturing and R&D: the shared capability engine **Four plants and a GLP-accredited R&D centre form a single integrated production backbone that serves all three channels - contract manufacturing, domestic retail and exports - from the same assets.** - **Three chemistries, one campus** - the 76-acre Srikakulam plant in Andhra Pradesh makes technical-grade insecticides, fungicides and herbicides with an installed capacity of 13,000 tonnes per annum, and is cleared to expand to 70.1 tonnes per day. - **Formulations at scale** - the Ethakota unit houses two dedicated formulation plants that can handle 12,000 kilolitres of liquids, 5,600 tonnes of powders and 35,475 tonnes of granules, with a packaging facility that turns bulk into branded bottles and bags. - **Speciality chemicals via a subsidiary** - the Dahej plant in Gujarat, operated through NACL Spec-Chem Limited, adds 6,000 tonnes per annum of speciality chemicals capacity and began commercial production in December 2022. - **Zero liquid discharge as a licence to operate** - the Srikakulam ZLD plant, commissioned in 2010 at a cost of ₹30 crore, recycles all process water and meets nearly half the site’s water needs through reuse, while continuous online emissions monitoring is integrated directly with Pollution Control Board servers. - **R&D with OECD credentials** - the Hyderabad-area R&D centre holds GLP accreditation recognised by all OECD countries, meaning its test data is accepted by regulators in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan, the UK and Germany without re-testing. # Group structure and partners **NACL is now a 53.73% subsidiary of Coromandel International, part of the Murugappa Group, giving it a parent with a balance sheet and distribution heft in Indian agriculture - while its own subsidiary web runs speciality chemicals, multi-crop nutrients and a greenfield expansion.** - **A subsidiary cluster for new chemistries** - wholly owned NACL Spec-Chem runs the Dahej speciality chemicals plant, while NACL Multichem is building a 38,000-tonne-per-annum greenfield agrochemicals project at Srikakulam and NACL Agri-Solutions markets advanced micronutrient formulations like Zinc Oxide SC and Boron Ethanolamine. - **Co-marketing with Japanese partners** - since 2016, the company has had a partnership with leading Japanese chemical companies for the herbicide Sirius and the plant growth regulator Atonik, combining NACL’s Indian distribution with their proprietary molecules. - **Foreign subsidiaries wound down** - the Board approved the closure of the Australian and Nigerian subsidiaries in May 2026, after they had served their purpose of holding local product registrations.