Century Pulp & Paper is already producing about 800 TPD paper and the new packaging board machine is expected to be ready in October this year. The fiber line will also commence one month before the start-up of board machine. On the sidelines of Asian Paper in the month of June, we spoke to Mr. A.K. Bisariya, Joint President – Works at Century Pulp & Paper and took a quick view of the projects in pipeline and the current operations.
Commenting about Board machine he said, “We are not planning to manufacture any grey back board; rather we intend to manufacture quality board as the machine is very expensive. Yes the market response and prices are crucial factor to sell such a big capacity. We are going for low end grade board for the trial run. But, we don’t want to go into the market with the low end products. First let’s start the machine then we go on to make quality board, which is the basic idea to compete in the market.”
On the Pulp requirement he commented “We are partly importing our pulp, but once our fiber line starts then we don’t have to rely on the imported pulp. We are also going for the plantation in a big way with the social farm forestry, where we help the farmers to grow trees in lieu of the agreement that we will buy half of their produce and other half they can sell to the other party.”
On the New project he affirmed, “We have identified the place near the port in Gujarat where we intend to install a fine paper machine and a 100 TPD tissue plant. The idea is to import the wood chips or pulp, as we don’t want to install pulp mill there. We are going only for the machine part right now. The budgetary quotations have been started but our focus is to first establish the existing plant.
” Regarding Tissue market he briefed, “We target both the markets domestic & international but tissue share would be more for the exports. Current ratio of tissue paper sale is 30% domestic and 70% exports. International market is the key focus for us. Right now, we are selling 80 tonnes of tissue paper per day.
