Cotton Viscose Staple Fibre

Viscose Staple Fibre
Grasim is India's pioneer in Viscose Staple Fibre (VSF), a man-made, biodegradable fibre with characteristics akin to cotton. As an extremely versatile and easily blendable fibre, VSF is widely used in apparels, home textiles, dress material, knitted wear and non-woven applications.

Grasim's VSF plants are located at Nagda in Madhya Pradesh, Kharach and Vilayat in Gujarat and Harihar in Karnataka, with an aggregate capacity of 498,000 tpa.

Nagda
Nagda is its largest unit producing a wide range of VSF to suit customer requirements in terms of length, denier and colour and also second and third generation fibres like Modal, Excel and Solvent Spun fibres, respectively. Nagda is also the largest producer of spun-dyed specialty fibre in the world.

Harihar
The Harihar unit houses facility for manufacture of both VSF and rayon grade pulp, the basic raw material for VSF. The company's Rayon Grade plant was the first in India to use totally indigenous wood resources with in-house technology for producing rayon pulp with an innovative oxygen bleaching process to reduce the use of chlorine.

Kharach
The VSF plant at Kharach, set up in 1996, employs the most modern technology giving it a competitive edge in the export market.

Vilayat
The recently commissioned greenfield project at Vilayat produces both grey VSF and specialty fibre. This is the company's first plant producing specialty grade fibre.

Joint Ventures (JV)
Grasim has the following joint ventures overseas:

AV Cell Inc. and AV Nackawic Inc. in Canada
AV Cell and AV Nackawic supply dissolving grade pulp to the Groups VSF units in India, Thailand and Indonesia.

Domsj Fabriker AB in Sweden
Grasim acquired one-third stake in Domsj Fabriker AB, a leading Swedish speciality pulp and bio-refinery company in June 2011. With this acquisition, Grasim is assured of high-quality dissolving grade pulp.

AV Terrace Bay Inc. in Canada
In line with the strategy to secure key inputs, Grasim acquired assets of Terrace Bay in July 2012 in JV with Thai Rayon, a Group company. This will help in meeting the increasing pulp requirement for VSF business after the mill is converted into a dissolving grade mill.

Birla Lao Pulp & Plantation Limited in Laos
To further strengthen the backward integration in pulp, Birla Lao has been formed as a JV with other associate companies for raising captive plantations at Laos. This will provide a low cost source for wood to meet future requirements of a green field pulp plant in due course of time.

Birla Jingwei Fibres Company Limited in China
Through Birla Jingwei, Grasim has its footprint in China, the largest VSF market globally. Plant capacity was doubled in 2012 and currently the capacity is 72,000 TPA.

This spread and scale of operations make the Group's VSF operations very cost competitive. Moreover, vertical integration into manufacturing of rayon grade pulp and horizontal integration into production of principal raw material required for VSF production, namely, caustic soda, intermediate inputs namely CS2, sulphuric acid along with captive power and steam generation facilities, further enhance its competitive edge.

Research and development
Grasim has established a very strong research and development (R&D) base covering different stages of the value chain.