In his speech to shareholders in the annual report for FY 21-22, Vivek Chawla, whole-time director and chief executive officer at EMPL says, “It would be simplistic to assume that this improvement was the result of a swing in commodity realisations of the products manufactured by your company or inventory profits during an inflationary environment. The improvement was the result of the coming together of dozens of small improvements across operations. The gains that were generated by these improvements translated into an attractive increment over the prevailing industry average, deepening our outperformance.”

Aditya V Agarwal, executive chairman of EMPL, added, “The new Emami Paper is not singularly focused on revenue as much as it is focused on profitability. The result has been a subtle shift from maximise output to maximise margins, which has translated into a return on capital employed focus, strengthening value addition, realisations and margins.”

Chawla said that looking ahead the company is weighing the options for either backward or forward integration. “All our cash flows are likely to be allocated in this business with the objective that we graduate Emami Paper 2.5x into a Rs 5,000-cr revenue company by 2025. This means that whatever growth we generated in the past year of our existence could be more than replicated in only the next three years.”