Luxor to commission its eighth mfg unit in Oct

Hyderabad: Luxor Writing Instruments (LWIL) expects to commission its new unit in Uttarakhand by October. Once commissioned, it would be the company’s eighth manufacturing facility; it has four facilities in New Delhi and three in Mumbai.

“Currently our capacity is 1.5 million pens a day. But with the new facility, which would also manufacture pens and stationery, it will touch 4.5 million pens a day,” Ms Pooja Jain, Executive Director, Luxor Writing Instruments said.

The company in the last one year has invested around Rs 40 crore in the new facility, which was raised from internal accruals.

Ms Jain also said that the company is looking at promoting its retail venture by launching more stores in the next couple of years.

“With the inauguration of the Hyderabad store, the company currently has 13 Luxor Signature stores. By the end of the current financial year we expect 20-25 stores to come up,” she said.

LWIL is taking up a three-pronged approach to promote its retail venture. Apart from the Signature stores, which target the youth, Ms Jain said that the other two formats are High Life, which will offer pure luxury products, and Luxor Colors, which are targeted at kids.

“The Signature stores, apart from offering writing instruments, will also have music and travel accessories, and premium stationery. At the High Life store, the first of which will come up in Delhi by November-December, we will offer men’s accessories, jewellery and all top-end products targeted towards gifting. The kids store would all the material for learning and basically things related with fun activity,” Ms Jain said.

The company plans to launch Luxor Colors next fiscal. According to Ms Jain the idea of the company is to have close to 100 stores by fiscal 2012-end, out of most of them would be Signature or Colors. She added that company is looking at investing close to Rs 70 crore for setting up the retail stores.

It is also looking at tie-ups with other retail majors to promote the shop-in-shop concept. LWIL this year expects its revenues to touch Rs 250 crore, against Rs 215 crore last year. It expects the export revenues to touch Rs 100 crore in the next tow year from the current Rs 60 crore.

At the inauguration of the company’s store in the city, Ms Jain unveiled the Waterman Exception solid gold pen worth Rs 10 lakh.