The world’s second-largest beverage maker PepsiCo Inc will invest Rs 1,200 crore to set up its largest beverage manufacturing plant in India at Sri City in Andhra Pradesh.
This is the first tranche of the Rs 33,000 crore investment programme by 2020 that PepsiCo announced recently during the India visit of the company’s chairperson & CEO Indra Nooyi.
“The Sri City plant will boost our production capacity and support the growing demand for PepsiCo India’s beverage products in Andhra Pradesh and peninsular India,” PepsiCo India Holdings Pvt Ltd’s chairman and chief executive officer D Shivakumar said in the statement.
The proposed plant will generate direct and indirect employment to 8,000 people, the statement said.
The plant, which will manufacture a range of beverages, including fruit juice based drinks, carbonated soft drinks and sports drinks, will be completed in three phases.
This will be the company’s second facility in Andhra Pradesh. The beverage and snack maker has another manufacturing facility with seven production lines in Medak district in the state which caters to the Andhra Pradesh market and parts of Karnataka.
“Andhra Pradesh is a large beverage market with robust demand through the year,” he said.
The first phase of the Sri City plant, with a capacity to handle 1.2 million litres per day, will be started with immediate effect and will be completed by the third or fourth quarter of fiscal 2014-15, Shivakumar said.
The first phase will involve an investment of Rs 450 crore; second phase will cost the company around Rs 400 crore. While second phase will begin in 2015, the third phase is expected to start in 2017.
The company, which has brands such as Mountain Dew, Pepsi, 7Up, Lay’s, Tropicana and Miranda, has 38 beverage bottling plants and three food plants in the country. Top eight brands of the company generate business of around Rs 1,000 crore each.
PepsiCo has also announced plans to substantially increase sourcing of mango pulp from Andhra Pradesh in six years.
(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)