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Ambuja Cement, a Holcim Group company, has discontinued providing monthly production and sales updates citing provision in new accounting norms. Its group company ACC has also not provided the update for November.
However, an ACC spokesperson said the company has skipped the November numbers, but assured that it would be back with its update next month.
“We have not suspended giving monthly production numbers. It so happened that some of our officials were busy travelling, and we had to skip the November update,” he said.
UltraTech Cement, an Aditya Birla Group company, had also stopped disclosing its production and sales figures in June.
The three companies - ACC, Ambuja Cement and UltraTech Cement – together command about 45 per cent market share.
The amendment to Schedule VI of the Companies Act, which stipulates the format for financial statements and balance sheets, allows companies to do away with the need to disclose quantitative information.
This includes installed capacity, production and sales statistics of manufacturing companies.
competitive disadvantage
Though this information is considered vital for investors to make informed forecasts about a company, it was concealed to align Indian reporting norms with global standards.
Indian companies have represented that disclosure of vital information on production and sales put them at a competitive disadvantage, where their details are known to foreign competitors, but they cannot get the details from the other side.
Following this, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs notified the revised reporting norms in March last year.
The decision not to disclose monthly production and sale details comes at a time when top 11 cement companies are contesting a Competition Commission of India penalty of Rs 6,300 crore for price cartelisation.
The sales figure given by cement companies not only provide an indication of the company’s performance, but are a signal on the progress of the entire economy, as cement is a key input for real estate and industrial development, said Arjun Dhaktode, an independent Mumbai-based economist.
Cement companies are currently hit by the double whammy of slowing demand and high capacity build-up.
The industry expects installed capacity to exceed demand by 126 million tonnes this fiscal, with total capacity reaching 393 mt ayear.
>suresh.iyengar@thehindu.co.in
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