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The India Cements Limited
India Cements makes and sells cement, the grey powder that gets mixed with water, sand, and gravel to make concrete for buildings, roads, and bridges.
India Cements is one of the older names in Indian cement, a company that turns limestone and coal into the bags of grey powder that hold up apartment towers, roads, and dams. Its main job is simple: dig rock out of the ground, crush and burn it into clinker, grind that into cement, and truck it to builders, contractors, and concrete plants. It sells mostly in South India, where it has long been a familiar brand, and it operates a string of plants across states like Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Rajasthan.
Cement is a brutal business in one specific way: it is cheap and heavy, so shipping it far eats your profit. That is why cement makers cluster around limestone deposits and fight over nearby customers. The winners tend to be the ones with the lowest cost per ton and the strongest hold on their home region. India Cements has had a harder time on that front than giants like UltraTech Cement or Ambuja Cements, which have deeper pockets and newer, more efficient plants. For years the company carried heavy debt, and its plants were older and less efficient than the best in the industry. The business also rides a simple see-saw. Cement demand comes from construction, so a booming economy with lots of building means good times. But cement is a commodity, meaning one bag is basically the same as another, so companies compete mostly on price and location. When too much new cement capacity gets built, prices fall and everyone's margins shrink. Fuel costs, especially coal, swing profits too, since coal is a big input for the kilns.
The most important recent chapter is ownership. In 2024, India's competition regulator approved UltraTech Cement, part of the Aditya Birla Group empire, buying a controlling stake in India Cements. The move folded a struggling South Indian player into the country's largest cement maker, which is the kind of consolidation the industry has been heading toward for years. It is a bet that scale and efficiency beat sentiment in a business where a few rupees per bag decide who wins.
Saved answer · last researched 9 Nov 2026
BIG PICTURE
South India makes about 32% of India's cement, and India Cements is one of the names there
- 32% South India's share of national cement capacity
- 68% The rest of India
Cement is heavy and cheap, so it rarely travels far. That makes where a plant sits matter as much as the brand on the bag. South India holds roughly 32% of the country's cement capacity, and India Cements is named among the players built around that region. Its home turf is also its main market. Source: Fabian Warislohner, LinkedIn, data from 2026
Timeline
A Banker Finds Limestone
In the mid-1940s, a banker named S.N.N. Sankaralinga Iyer spotted limestone and gypsum deposits near a village called Talaiyuthu in southern India. He teamed up with T.S. Narayanaswami, and in early 1946 they set up The India Cements Limited, borrowing technical know-how from a Danish equipment maker, FLSmidth. The idea was simple: the raw ingredients for cement were sitting in the ground, so why not turn them into cement right there? Investors loved it — the company's first public share sale was oversubscribed — and by August 1949 the Sankarnagar plant was turning out a lakh tonnes of cement a year.
A Young Srinivasan Takes Over
Two decades later, in 1968, T.S. Narayanaswami died, and his 23-year-old son N. Srinivasan came home from studies abroad to become joint managing director. Almost immediately, he clashed with the managing director, K.S. Narayanan — the son of the other co-founder. Two founding families, one company, and a growing rift.
Srinivasan Is Ousted
That rift cost Srinivasan his job. In 1979 he was pushed out of the company, and financial institutions — big lenders with a say in how the firm was run — played a key role in his removal. It took him nearly a decade of negotiating before a truce between the promoter families brought him back as managing director in 1989. He had lost the company his father helped build, and now he had it back.
The Chilamkur Deal
Back in charge, Srinivasan went shopping. In 1990 India Cements bought the Chilamkur plant from Coromandel Fertilisers — a big plant with a million tonnes of annual capacity — for Rs 105 crore. It was the company's third plant, and more importantly the start of a long run of takeovers that spread it far beyond its home turf.
The Raasi Takeover Race
The buying spree kept going. In 1997 the company picked up the Yerraguntla unit of Cement Corporation of India, then set its sights on Raasi Cement. It was a race, and the rival bidder was Gujarat Ambuja Cements. India Cements won only after Ambuja backed out at the last stage — a victory that would soon reshape the company's size.
Seven Million Tonnes and a New Brand
With Raasi in hand, India Cements built a brand-new plant at Dalavoi in Tamil Nadu and began folding Raasi into itself. It now had seven million tonnes of annual capacity, and it launched a premium product called Coromandel King, a superior 53-grade cement. The company that started with one plant near a limestone deposit was now a serious force in the south.
A Big Loss and a Debt Revamp
But all that expansion came with a bill. By 2002 the company posted a net loss far wider than the year before — roughly five times as bad — and had to file a corporate debt-revamp plan with its lenders, with IDBI leading the restructuring. Growth bought on borrowed money had turned into a problem to dig out of.
Buying the Chennai Super Kings
The company soon found a very different way to spend money. In 2008 it successfully bid for the Chennai franchise of the new IPL cricket tournament — the Chennai Super Kings. That same year it revived its shipping business with two dry bulk carriers and started a million-tonne grinding plant in Chennai. Cement was no longer the only thing on its mind.
Slipping to Third Place
The distractions showed. Once the largest cement maker in South India and fifth in the country, by 2013 the company had fallen to third in its home market, behind Madras Cement and Chettinad Cement. Analysts pointed at a lack of management focus and money spent on the wrong things, and the stock had trailed its peers for a decade.
UltraTech Takes Over
That long slide ended with a sale. In 2024 UltraTech Cement, part of the Aditya Birla Group, bought the promoter family's stake and lifted its holding to a majority, making India Cements its subsidiary. N. Srinivasan stepped down as vice chairman and managing director, along with his family members and the independent directors, closing the book on decades of promoter-family control. For UltraTech, it was a way to strengthen its position in the fiercely competitive southern market.
Under the UltraTech Brand
The payoff came under new ownership. By the end of March 2026, all of India Cements' volumes had been migrated to the UltraTech brand, and the numbers finally turned: a profit after a long stretch of losses, with EBITDA per tonne improving. UltraTech backed it with big money — thousands of crores for efficiency and extra capacity — targeting over a thousand rupees of EBITDA per tonne by 2028. The little cement maker from Talaiyuthu had become part of India's biggest cement story.