Everest Industries plans to set up a 1,00,000-tonne fibre cement product plant in Orissa with an investment of Rs 50 crore. "The company is in the process of identifying 20 acres in Orissa for the new plant that will produce roofing solution products. The expansion will be funded through internal accruals," said Manish Sanghi, Managing Director, Everest Industries.

Currently, Everest has six production lines of fibre cement for roofing and three lines for boards at its Roorkee plant. The company offers a complete range of building solutions which includes ceilings, walls, flooring, cladding, doors, roofing and pre-engineered steel buildings. Besides Roorkee, it has manufacturing facilities at Kymore, Nashik, Coimbatore and Kolkata. The building solution industry was badly hit in FY-11 due to the poor monsoon in 2009. The industry had registered a growth of just one per cent in the financial year 2010-11, said Sanghi. The industry may register a growth of 8-10 per cent this fiscal as the disposable income of farmers and rural areas has improved substantially on the back of a bumper harvest and higher realisations of commodities, he added. On the soaring cement prices, Sanghi said there are no concrete reasons for prices to remain so high particularly when there is an excess production capacity in the country. Cement prices may stabilise or soften from here on. It is surprising that the cement prices are the highest in the world despite the country ranked as the world’s second largest cement manufacturer, he said.