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India's vehicle sales hit a record 2.83 crore units in FY26. Every dashboard, mirror housing & washing-machine panel behind numbers like that begins life as a small beige granule called ABS, short for acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, a plastic tough enough to survive a slammed car door & glossy enough to look good doing it. India uses roughly 4 lakh tonnes of ABS a year but can make only about 1.75 lakh tonnes at home; the rest arrives by ship. Well, this year the ships got complicated. The conflict in West Asia squeezed the supply of styrene, the imported feedstock behind ABS, & in February Europe imposed definitive anti-dumping duties, the tariffs a country adds when imports are priced below fair value, on ABS from Korea & Taiwan.
Hold that backdrop against an ABS maker I've been studying this quarter. In the June quarter it just reported, revenue grew 53.3% YoY & profit after tax grew 42.9% YoY, from a company that has carried zero debt since 2018. That said, it's not without its problems: the plant has run at 95 to 96% of capacity for five years straight, so almost none of this growth came from selling more tonnes; prices & traded material did the lifting, & what a supply squeeze gives, a supply squeeze can take back, which is the first thing I went looking at.
The company I’m referring to is . . .