Stellar Value Chain Solutions, the consumer supply chain start-up, has drawn up ambitious plans for the East as it looks at ratcheting its warehousing capacity to 50 million square feet over the next five years against 12 million square feet now.
Around 5-7 million square feet of the new capacity will come up in cities in the East such as Calcutta, Siliguri, and Guwahati, catering to the supply chain requirements of a variety of industries .
The Warburg Pincus-backed entity has a warehousing facility of 0.5 million square feet at Dankuni, which was launched four months ago. It is now setting up a similar capacity at Panchla, which will come up over the next three months.
“It (the Eastern India market) is an important growth area for us and I have been giving equal importance to this geography apart from the other three zones. Over the past few years, we have understood the market very well. It presents us a great opportunity to capture, build presence and capability and fulfil our mission to be a value chain transformation company,’’ Anshuman Singh, chairman & managing director, Stellar Value Chain Solutions, told The Telegraph.
He said the planned expansion would require an investment of around Rs 25,000 crore, some of which will be from its development partners.
The company runs a fleet of 2,500 trucks and this is expected to jump to 50,000 vehicles in all formats such as express, temperature controlled transportation and LTL (less than truckload that transports small quantities of freight) over the next five years.
“We will also be deploying a large fleet in the East to take care of the supply chain requirements in the market’’, he said.
Singh founded Stellar Value Chain Solutions in July 2016 and in just a month raised $125 million (Rs 830 crore) from Warburg Pincus.
The company has also used the inorganic route to grow — Stellar has acquired Kelvin Cold Chain in 2016, Innovative Logistics, a Calcutta-based company in 2018 and Patel Roadways the following year.
He said the facility in Calcutta will largely cater to fashion, lifestyle, retail, automotive and consumer durable segments, while the focus in the North East will be on pharmaceuticals in addition to FMCG, consumer durables and fashion.
According to Singh, growth has now returned back to the pre-Covid levels for supply chain firms.
“Last year, those catering to e-commerce did well and a lot of other sectors were hit. However, now in the warehousing front, the growth has come back to pre-Covid levels. At Stellar Value we are adding capacities both in the e-commerce and non-e-commerce space. We are also bullish on e-groceries’’, he said.