As was rumored in the industry for the past several days, and as announced in the financial press on 29 November 2021, Warburg Pincus-owned Parksons Packaging has acquired a 100% stake in Manohar Packaging. Both companies are headquartered in Mumbai, with Parksons Packaging owning six plants in five locations and Manohar Packaging having two plants including a new greenfield site in Punjab that started production before the onset of the pandemic. While Parksons Packaging is active in almost every FMCG monocarton segment, Manohar is a specialist in premium alcobev packaging.
The financial press says the deal is in the range of Rs 200 to 250 crore (approximately US$ 27 to 33 million). An interview on Zoom with managing director Siddharth Kejriwal and chairman Ramesh Kejriwal of Parksons Packaging confirms that the expected combined revenue of the merged company is expected to be Rs. 1,500 in the financial year ending 31 March 2022.
Parksons Packaging has six carton manufacturing plants in five locations – Daman and Chakan in Western India, two plants in Pantnagar in the North, Sri City in South India, and Guwahati in the Northeast, while Manohar Packaging has carton plants in Mapusa in North Goa and the new plant 17 kilometers west of Ambala in Punjab.
Aditya Patwardhan who has grown the family-owned Manohar Packaging and is its CEO will continue to be part of the management team in the enlarged Parksons Packaging. Patwardhan says, “We’ve always been good and it’s time to become great. We look forward to this association and offering our clients the strongest platform for paper-based packaging that any Indian company can provide and is thus far unparalleled in the industry.”
Siddarth Kejriwal explains that while Parksons Packaging was acquired by Warburg-Pincus in April 2021, the global equity and investment firm is content with letting the Kejriwal family continue to drive the growth of the Indian monocarton business. Speaking about inorganic growth and the acquisition of Manohar Packaging, he said, “Parksons has a tradition of doing things differently and for us finding the right partner means looking for real synergy. We look for customer fit, location fit, culture fit, and most of all trust.”
He spoke further about the synergy between the two organizations, “Scalability is another factor that we look for when evaluating inorganic growth, and the new plant in Punjab can easily be scaled to four times its current capacity. The plant is located in a region with many of the biggest food and pharma players as well as alcobev. The real benefit is to the premium alcobev brand owners that Manohar brings closer to us, who will now be able to leverage our network of eight plants in every part of the country.”
Parksons Packaging is hopeful of bettering the Indian monocarton industry’s expected double digital growth in the 2022-23 financial year. Chairman Ramesh Kejriwal says that 20% growth is achievable for the combined company which would take the turnover to Rs 1,800 crores. With another K&B Rapida 7-color coater press ordered and expected to be installed before 31 March 2022, capacity addition and redundancy for the Punjab plant is already underway. He states, “We are aiming to reach Rs 2,000 crore in FY 2022-23 itself, which is achievable. And there is certainly no harm in being ambitious in our goals.”
