Alluri Indra Kumar, 55, the chairman and managing director of Avanti Feeds, is a man of few words. In the early 1990s, when he was executive director of the Hyderabad-based Avanti Feeds, he spotted an opportunity in the shrimp feeds market. The company, founded by Kumar’s father Venkateswara Rao in 1993, was at the time mainly involved in manufacturing proteins for medicinal and food products.

He foresaw the boom in aquaculture and believed that, as a ripple effect, the market for shrimp feed would expand. He started meeting fish and shrimp farmers to understand their requirements. “Farmers want quality feed. Over the years, we have supplied farmers quality products and thus our market share has kept increasing,” he says. In 1993, the company had a market share of 7 percent, which has gone up to 45 percent today.

Kumar had to consistently maintain the quality of the product year after year because farmers would not stay with a sub-standard product; shrimp feed is the single largest expense for the farmer and if the quality of the feed is not right, farmers quickly move to other manufacturers. Kumar understood this and created a customer-focussed company. The result now reflects in the stock price of the company as well. Over the last 10 years, the share price of Avanti Feeds has grown from ₹10 to ₹2,860—an annual growth of 76 percent, against the Sensex’s 6.5 percent in the period. In the last one year, the stock has shot up 400 percent, giving the company a market cap of around ₹12,800 crore as on November 3.

Simply put, Avanti Feeds is one of the fastest growing mid-cap companies in the Indian market and investors feel there is still a lot of steam left.

Source: Forbes India  // Original Article