TCL Industries is a joint venture (JV) company in which Tirumalai Chemicals Ltd has got stake of 37 per cent, Ultramarine & Pigments with 16 per cent, Rianson Pvt Ltd holding 16 per cent and the rest is divided among three companies - Singapore High Polymer, Bromet and Yan San Terengganu.The current capacity of the plant is around 30,000 tonnes per annum. The doubling of the capacity will require funds to the tune of $20 million to be invested by the promoters.

According to Thirumalai Chemicals' managing director S Sridhar, the company would bring in a strategic investor to pick up part of its stake so as to pump in the funds required for capacity expansion and increase the downstream products of maleic anhydride. The company is looking out for a partner which is in a position to install facilities like distillation, storage, oxidation etc in the already existing infrastructure.

According to Mr Sridhar, Thirumala Chemicals may, at a later date, also consider diluting its entire stake in the Malaysian JV so as to bring in the funds into the Indian group companies.

TCL Industries Malaysia SDN BHD suffered a setback due to the South East Asian crisis and the global slowdown. Mr Sridhar said: "Malaysian company was struggling with international markets because it is a single product company and it had made losses till last year and part of this year. But after June, it has picked up and now it is working up with full blast. By the coming year, we are expecting to earn a huge profit by establishing a good niche market all around the world."

Tirumalai Chemicals Ltd is the largest manufacturer of phthalic anhydride and maleic anhydride in the country.

According to Mr Sridhar, the industry is under the threat of dumping of products from South East Asian countries like China, Korea and Indonesia. Dumping has been seen in products like PVC shoes, leather clothes, paints, automobile parts etc. Automatically the commodity chemicals like phthalic anhydride and maleic anhydride have been affected.

To counter this serious problem, Thirumalai Chemicals is concentrating on specialised chemicals like maleic acid, fumaric acid, succinic anhydride etc. Mr Sridhar said: "We have diversified into specialty chemicals. We are trying to concentrate on these products which are all value added so that it improves the bottomline. While phthalic anhydride and maleic anhydride improves the company's turnover, profitability is mainly coming from the specialty products. We are also looking forward to ship moulding, bulk moulding compound with Japanese collaboration."

Tirumalai Chemicals is also coming up with IT-enabled service areas like website development, advertisement and database management within the next three months.

The associate company, Ultramarine is concentrating on the IT project and expecting the completion within next three months. The services will include medical billing, insurance, medical transcription etc. and even in call centres.