Star Cement expects price rise in Q3; sees 6-7% growth in annual demand

Talking about demand, he said, “In the entire eastern belt, demand had actually dropped in the last two, three months by around 10 percent. Q2 has been really affected by a lot of floods and rains in Eastern India. So, we also expect Q3 and Q4 to do much better than Q2.”

“However, expecting 10-20 percent of an annual demand would be a tall order. We expect demand to grow at around 6- 7 percent on an annualised basis,” Gupta mentioned.

On pricing, he said, “Overall, in the month of July, August, the prices dropped from 78 percent in totality. They have stabilised in this month (September) and we do hope that the upcoming festive season from October onwards and the onset of Q and Q4 as the rain subsides, we will definitely see an uptick in prices because prices have actually come to threshold levels.”

“It will be very difficult to operate plants economically if the prices do not move on from here because we are really seeing a lot of cost pressures coming from the transport costs etc., so the prices need to go up in Q3,” said Gupta.

On acquisitions, Gupta said that the company is not looking at it currently. He said, “We were interested in Emami quite a bit but we lost out. So, anything down south, we are not interested but our focus will remain largely on East.”