- **Oricon Enterprises is a five-decade-old Indian company that has just completed the most consequential chapter in its history: selling every factory it ever owned. Incorporated in 1968, it spent most of its life as a diversified manufacturer of metal and plastic packaging - the caps on your bottle of beer, the tube your ointment comes in, the preform that becomes a PET water bottle - before a deliberate, multi-year divestment programme that began in 2020 turned it into something entirely different. By mid-2026, the last of its plants had been handed to buyers, and the company had become a cash-rich holding entity whose sole continuing activity is trading goods and managing the proceeds of those sales while its board searches for a new business to build. The recurring pattern is unmistakable: every few years, a non-core or underperforming unit was carved out and sold - logistics, petrochemicals, plastic closures, metal crowns, collapsible tubes - each transaction freeing capital and narrowing the company’s focus until nothing was left but a treasury and a question about what comes next.** # Business segments Three engines, all but one now silent - a packaging manufacturer that was the group’s industrial heart, a petrochemicals unit that was always feedstock-starved, and a trading desk that is now the only thing still running - sold in sequence to leave behind a pool of cash awaiting redeployment. ## 1. Packaging - metal and plastic closures: the factory floor that built the company **For decades, this was Oricon’s reason for being: making the caps, seals and tubes that keep beverages, food and medicine contained, until every machine was sold to a bigger player.** - **Four plants, two coasts** - metal closures and tubes were produced at Murbad in Maharashtra’s Thane district, while plastic closures and preforms came from Kundaim in Goa and an IDCO plot in Khordha, Odisha, where the preform line had been expanded to a capacity of 22,000 metric tonnes. - **A structural headwind it could not outrun** - demand for crown caps was shrinking as soft-drink makers switched from glass to PET bottles, and the company itself noted that a further shift by customers to tetra packs, sachets and flexible packaging could erode its scale. ## 2. Petrochemicals: a pentane plant that never had enough raw material **A small, non-core unit making industrial solvents from a feedstock it struggled to secure, sold for its land and machinery once the board decided to exit.** - **A single plant with a persistent problem** - the unit at Khopoli, Maharashtra, had the capacity to process 9,000 metric tonnes of raw pentane into different grades of the solvent, but it consistently faced difficulty obtaining enough feedstock to run at full tilt. - **Tagged for exit early** - the board resolved to leave the business by FY23 and began looking for a buyer, eventually striking a deal with Narendra Plastochem Private Limited in September 2023 for the land, plant and machinery at an initial consideration of ₹19 crore, later amended to ₹20.10 crore. - **Handed over in two stages** - the land was transferred in August 2025 and the plant and machinery followed in October 2025, at which point the division, which had contributed ₹73.55 crore of turnover in FY23, was classified as a discontinued operation. ## 3. Trading and treasury: the only engine still running **With every factory sold, the company now buys and sells traded goods and parks the divestment proceeds in financial assets while it hunts for a new operating business.** - **A slim continuing operation** - the company’s ongoing revenue comes from the purchase and sale of traded goods, which brought in ₹1,230.95 lakhs in FY25, supplemented by scrap sales, service income, export incentives, rent, interest on bank deposits and loans, dividends from subsidiaries, and gains on financial assets. - **A temporary home for surplus cash** - management has stated that the funds raised from the series of divestments have been deployed in treasury and other investment avenues pending the identification of new business opportunities. - **Inventories now include shares** - the company’s stock-in-trade includes shares valued at the lower of cost or market value, reflecting the shift from holding physical goods to holding financial instruments. # Group structure and partners **A holding company that has systematically emptied itself of operating subsidiaries, associates and joint ventures, leaving a listed shell with a wholly-owned logistics subsidiary and a promoter group that has just been restructured.** - **The last material subsidiary** - United Shippers Limited, a Mumbai-based company incorporated in 1952, became a wholly-owned subsidiary after Oricon bought out minority shareholders in 2022, though its own operating divisions and step-down subsidiaries (marine logistics, a Singapore bulk-shipping entity, a clearing agency, and a logistics unit) have all been sold. - **Exiting the remaining stakes** - in May 2026 the board approved the sale of its entire 80% holding in Oriental Containers Limited and its exit from the 50% jointly controlled entity Claridge Energy LLP, while its 25% stake in the Tecnocap Oriental joint venture had already been sold back to the Italian partner in March 2026 for ₹5.50 crore. - **A promoter family redrawn** - a Memorandum of Family Settlement executed in September 2025 split the Somani family into three groups and vested sole management control in one branch, after which 5 promoter-group entities holding 0.53% collectively asked to be reclassified as public shareholders.