For an Indian company looking for a global play, a bet on soda ash looks smart.
With glass as well as plastic in mind you might want to look into another raw material, soda ash.
The raw material is converted into soda ash, used in detergents and pharmaceuticals and in the manufacturing of glass.
Dalmia also is taking advantage of India's new global outlook by buying soda-ash companies abroad, expanding a soda-ash business that's already India's third-biggest.
"All those tall buildings in Manhattan with glass exteriors and windows use soda ash, " says Nikhil Sen, GHCL's senior finance and strategy manager.
Oh, and FMC owns a soda ash mine in Wyoming, digging the commodity (a.k.a. sodium carbonate) out of the ground at a fraction of the cost of manufactured soda ash.
But there's also a natural way to get your hands on it--dig it out of the ground in Wyoming. (The natural origin may or may not endear this chemical to the greenies.) The primary use of soda ash is to make glass.
Even if the strong dollar hurts Penrice's profits, the mining boom does have some benefits: the company sells some of its soda ash to miners, such as Uranium One, which will mine the metal in South Australia and export it, probably to Japan and elsewhere.
It also has agreed to buy Romania's only other soda-ash producer, Uzinele Sodice Govora.
The government recently imposed fresh anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports of sodium bicarbonate, for example, at the request of Penrice Soda Holdings, Australia's sole producer of soda-ash crystals, which appear in everything from animal feed to antacids.
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