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With installed capacity of around 3m tpa, India is already a significant producer of soda ash for its own domestic needs. But its main market players have ambitions to go increasingly global, Sunder Singh, IM Correspondent, discovers.
Emerging economies have been the primary growth drivers for soda ash over the past decade. With rapidly increasing GDP and urbanisation, these economies have experienced an increased per capita consumption of products that are manufactured using soda ash, including flat and container glass, detergents, baked goods, clean water and sodium-based chemicals.
India's soda ash industry, which has experienced almost flat growth in last two years, is gearing up for more positivity on the back of a revival in the country's economy.
India produces synthetic soda ash from limestone and salt, having no natural deposits of trona from which to extract natural material.
With an installed capacity of just over 3m tpa, India has emerged as an important supply base for the global soda ash industry, accounting for around 6% of capacity worldwide. The country produced 2.375m tpa soda ash in its financial year 2013-14. During the same period, India imported 551,000 tonnes soda ash and exported about 86,000 tonnes.
The Indian soda ash industry constitutes production of two types - light soda ash, mainly used in detergent industry, and dense soda ash, which is principally used to make glass, with shares of 60% and 40% of the market, respectively.
Almost all the major industry players - around 95% or 2.6m tonnes of India's installed capacity - are based in the northwest Indian state of Gujarat, due to the proximity and ready availability of the main raw materials used to make synthetic soda ash, namely limestone and salt. The production is spread across five existing plants and at least one new greenfield plant is also planned for the state in the near future.
The remaining 5%, or 120,000 tonnes, is produced from a single plant in southern India.
The 2013-14 financial year in India was a story of two halves for its soda ash industry; pipeline inventories remained high through the first half of the year (April-September 2013) as a result of robust growth in the previous financial year.
As market demand remained subdued towards the end of 2013,...