Kaveri Seeds to focus on non-cotton crops

Hyderabad: Seed company Kaveri Seeds will focus more on non-cotton crops, said a senior official of the company.

"We don't see the acreage going up for cotton crop and that is the reason why the company wants to focus more on non-cotton crops like rice, maize and vegetables," said Mithun Chand, Executive Director, Kaveri Seeds. However, the company will focus on increasing its market share in the cotton market, he added.

"Cotton business has contributed to 52 per cent of the revenue for the last fiscal and might retain the same percentage for the current fiscal too, but going forward, the revenue contribution from cotton might fall to 40 per cent or even less in the next 3-5 years," Chand added.

"Cotton still has a market potential of Rs 4,000 crore and will be growing at an annual rate of 15-20 per cent in the next 3-5 years," he said and added, "rice, maize and vegetables also can add 85 per cent growth to our revenues and our company's share is just above 5 per cent."

Earlier, the company inaugurated a laboratory named "Centre for Applied Genomics and Seed Technology" that will house the latest infrastructure and will focus on developing quality hybrids for all crops.

The Rs 20 crore biotechnology lab was inaugurated by Singireddy Niranjan Reddy, Minister for Agriculture, Co-operation and Marketing, and T Harish Rao, Finance Minister, Telangana.

Speaking on the occasion, GV Bhaskar Rao, MD & CEO, Kaveri Seeds said, "We are delighted to inaugurate our new state of the art laboratory which significantly strengthens our research and development capabilities.

We are amongst the top companies with scientific expertise to use Biote­chnological tools along with advanced Plant Breeding methods.

Its' always been our endeavor to innovate and we believe that the use of "Smart Breeding" will pave the way for our futuristic product innovations for high yielding, pest and disease resistant, climate – smart seeds, which will play a significant role in improving the farmer's crop yields / agricultural productivity.