The 12-year tenure of Rupinder Singh Sodhi, who stepped down as the managing director of the Gujarat Co-operative Milk Marketing Federation (Amul) on Monday, saw the dairy cooperative’s sales turnover jump over five times.
He started milk procurement in states other than Gujarat and also set up processing capacities outside the home state. The launch of assorted value-added products also helped increase the turnover.
Amul, which reported a turnover of over `61,000 crore in 2021-22, now has a wide milk procurement base across Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Odisha, apart from Gujarat.
“We would have lost market share if we had not decided to step out of Gujarat for milk procurement and processing,” Sodhi told FE.
In the last fiscal, 18 district cooperative unions which operate under GCMMF on an average procured 26.3 million litre milk daily from more than 3.6 million farmers. When Sodhi took charge as the MD in June 2010, the not-for-profit cooperative’s milk procurement was only around a million litre per day.
Currently, around 60-65% of milk procurement by Amul is carried out in Gujarat and it is ranked as the eight-largest dairy organisation globally.
Amul has been incurring a capital expenditure of `800 crore-`1,000 crore annually for processing capacity expansion annually in the last five years. The company currently has 87 large-scale dairy processing plants located across states.
Amul has 9,200 distributors and 720,000 retailers for its products including liquid milk at present. In 2010-11, the number of retailers was just around 6,000. Its products are currently available in over 4,900 towns, of which 3,600 fall in the under 10,000-plus population category.
According to the National Dairy Development Board, GCMMF has around 40% share in the milk procurement carried out by all the 28 state-level dairy federations in the country.
Amul witnessed the sharpest growth in the value-added products like ghee, paneer, chocolates, cheese, dairy whitener etc, in the last two years.
Officials said since boosting immunity was of prime importance during the pandemic, Amul had launched a series of value-added products such as flavoured milk categories — Haldi, Tulsi, Ginger, Ashwagandha etc.
On possible competition from the global dairy majors, Sodhi said that “they can’t compete with Amul’s efficiency in the supply chain of providing affordable milk and dairy products to the large mass people”.
On the road ahead for Amul, Sodhi said in the next five-seven years, Amul will be the biggest food company in the world. By 2047, Amul aims at achieving an annual sales turnover of `18 trillion to emerge as the biggest dairy company globally.
Following his resignation from Amul, Sodhi would continue to hold the post of president at the Indian Dairy Association. Sodhi had joined Amul as a senior sales officer in 1982. During 2000-2004, he served as its general manager (marketing) before taking over as its MD in 2010. He was on extension for the last two years.