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Informist, Friday, Jul. 10, 2026

 

By Avishek Rakshit

 

KOLKATA – In its move to make the company future-ready and harness the potentital of new-age batteries and technology, Exide Industries Ltd. will keep investing in its upcoming lithium-ion plant near Bengaluru and also scale up investments to increase capacities of lead acid battery plants. Also, the company has identified 20 key artificial intelligence technologies to implement to improve operational efficiency and will be investing in these technologies for the next 12-18 months. 

 

"First is to support through equity infusion in our subsidiary Exide Energy and make them successful to become a top manufacturer of lithium ion cells and packs," Avik Roy, manging director and chief executive officer at Exide, said in response to a shareholders' query at the company's 79th annual general meeting. "Though much of the capital expenditure have been done in the last one year, going forward, in the next 2-3 years, we will also need to ramp up the production, therefore, the requirement of working capital and other things will come."

 

So far, Exide has spent over INR 48 billion in the first phase of the 12 gigawatt hour capacity lithium-ion battery plant. Exide is soon set to commission the first phase of this plant with an installed capacity of 6 gigawatt hour and will double it in due course. 

 

Roy said the second focus area for the company to invest in will be on further strengthening its core lead acid batteries business by means of brownfield expansion, debottlenecking, and increasing automation at the factories to improve efficiency at optimal costs. 

 

"We are trying to improve productivity through more automation, increase throughput as well as de-bottlenecking our various factories," Roy said. 

 

Earlier, in his address to the shareholders, the company's Chairman Sridhar Gorthi said that Exide remained focussed on strengthening the cash-generating core lead-acid business at a time when it is heavily investing to come up with the lithium-ion battery plant.

 

Thirdly, Roy said Exide will heavily invest in automating its existing plants and digitisation of its factory operations. Additionally, it will also make significant investments in artificial intelligence to improve operations and productivity. 

 

"We have heavily invested last year and going forward as well in automation and digitalisation of our factory operations and also to improve our business processes," he said. 

 

Exide has identified 20 use cases and applications to deploy artificial intelligence. It includes business processes across sales, service, and operations.

 

Roy explained that the current volatility in global macro-economic environment as a fallout of the West Asia war has made Exide look for more resilient risk mitigation measures. While the company will continue to emphasise on cost control measures, it will also be on the lookout to improve productivity. 

 

"There is a limit to which you can take price corrections because we also do not want our customers to be impacted with high prices. So we will adjust it as per the business need and we will see how to handle it in future," Roy said. Usually, companies pass on commodity inflation and higher input costs to consumers by increasing prices. 

 

Exide is watchful of the West Asian war and remains cautiously optimistic.

 

"We are trying to make this company more resilient through risk mitigation measures. Going forward, we think that the crisis will be least impactful with whatever geopolitics scenario is evolving over the weeks. We will have to wait and watch. That is why we are cautiously optimistic," Roy said.

 

At 1329 IST, shares of Exide Industries traded 0.4% lower at INR 423.45 on the National Stock Exchange. End

 

IST, or Indian Standard Time, is five-and-a-half hours ahead of GMT

 

Edited by Akul Nishant Akhoury

 

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