Shree Rama Newsprint Ltd is a company in the middle of a complete reinvention. Born in 1994 as a paper manufacturer, it permanently shut down that legacy business after it became unviable and is now focused entirely on selling packaged drinking water under the ‘CLEAR’ brand. The recurring approach is a pivot engineered by its holding company, Riddhi Siddhi Gluco Biols, which funded the water business and is now the anchor as the company dismantles its paper past piece by piece.
Business segments
A single consumer-goods engine in its early stages - a regional packaged-water brand built on a contract-manufacturing model, while the company simultaneously dismantles its defunct paper division.
1. Packaged drinking water: the company's new, sole operating engine
The company makes and sells bottled water under the ‘CLEAR’ brand, using a mix of its own plant and outsourced production to serve local institutions and retail.
- Own plant plus outsourcing - the company runs a bottling plant in Gujarat with a capacity of 32,000 bottles per hour, but it also outsources production of its 200ml and 500ml bottles to third parties, so it can offer a full range without owning all the machinery.
- A brand built on institutional sales - ‘CLEAR’ water is sold to customers like Air India and Marriott, which fits a wider industry shift where bottled-water companies are increasingly partnering with airlines, cinemas, and hotels to drive volume.
- Tied into a related-party distribution network - a material transaction with Energy Beverages Private Limited, where the chairman’s son-in-law is a director, handles the purchase, sale, and supply of goods for the ‘CLEAR’ brand, effectively making a related entity its route to market.
- Riding a market with a long runway - India’s per capita bottled-water consumption is about five litres a year, far below the global average of 24 litres, and the organized sector is growing at roughly 25% annually, so even a small regional player has room to expand.
Group structure and partners
The company is a tightly held subsidiary of Riddhi Siddhi Gluco Biols, with no subsidiaries of its own, and its key commercial relationships are with entities controlled by the promoter family.
- Controlled by a starch-and-biols group - Riddhi Siddhi Gluco Biols Limited (RSGBL) has held a majority stake since FY16 and owned 74.76% of the equity as of March 2021, making Shree Rama Newsprint a small piece of a larger industrial group.
- Funded by preference shares from the parent - the company has issued Rs. 350 crore of non-convertible preference shares to RSGBL, the proceeds of which were used to repay inter-corporate deposits from the same holding company, so the water business was effectively capitalised by the parent.
- Promoter-family directors span the related entities - the chairman, Mr. Ganpatraj Chowdhary, is a non-executive promoter; his son, Mr. Siddharth Chowdhary, is the whole-time director and also a promoter-director of Bluecraft Agro, a starch supplier to the paper industry; and the chairman’s son-in-law is a director of Energy Beverages, the ‘CLEAR’ brand’s trading partner.
- No subsidiaries or joint ventures - the company operates as a single legal entity with no downstream holdings, so all its operations and asset sales sit directly on its own balance sheet.