Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals Limited (GUJALKALI) share price

₹616.00 on NSE as of 2026-10-07. +0.47% on the day. market cap ₹4,524 Cr. P/E 68.1. 52-week range ₹414.15 to ₹801.60. Chemicals.

gacl.com

What the company does

Chemicals Chemicals & petrochemicals Commodity chemicals GACL was promoted in 1973 by the Government of Gujarat (GoG) through its industrial investment arm, Gujarat Industrial Investment Corporation Ltd. (GIIC). As on June 30, 2026, GoG as the promoter, through its undertakings, held 47.28% equity in the company, the largest being through Gujarat State Investments Ltd (GSIL) with 20.87% holding. GACL is the third -largest producer in the domestic caustic chlorine industry with integrated operations. It produces a wide range of products , including caustic soda, chloromethane, hydrogen peroxide, phosphoric acid, aluminium chloride, liquid and gaseous chlorine, among others, which find application in a wide range of industries, including textile, pulp and paper, aluminium, detergents, soaps , rayon, plastics, pharmaceuticals, water treatment, and agricultural chemicals among others.

Filed by CARE Ratings, page 5.

Gujarat Alkalies Q1 FY27: Operating Profit Doubles to ₹222 Cr While the Trailing ROE Still Reads -0.04%

At a glance

Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals makes caustic soda and a long list of related industrial chemicals. Consolidated revenue for the three months to June 2026 was ₹1,245 crore. The same three months a year earlier brought in ₹1,105 crore. The immediately preceding quarter, to March 2026, brought in ₹1,125 crore. Operating profit came in at ₹222 crore, against ₹95 crore a year earlier. That took the operating margin to 18 per cent, from 9 per cent. Net profit was ₹55 crore, against a loss of ₹14 crore a year earlier. The March 2026 quarter had carried a loss of ₹15 crore. Consolidated earnings for the quarter worked out at ₹7.49 per share.

The power and utilities line carries a one-off charge of ₹16.65 crore. It covers differential energy charges payable to GUVL for October 2018 to December 2023. The charge follows a base-rate recommendation from CERC, the central electricity regulator, approved by the Government of Gujarat. The statutory auditor drew emphasis of matter to it in the limited review report. Emphasis of matter flags an item without disputing it, and the conclusion was not qualified.

Alongside the results, the board gave in-principle approval to another HCl synthesis unit at Dahej. Its cost is put at roughly ₹55 crore, and a Vision 2047 document was also approved.

The trailing picture runs on different arithmetic. The full year to March 2026 closed with a consolidated net loss of ₹2.41 crore on revenue of ₹4,358 crore. The year to March 2025 lost ₹65 crore, and the year before that ₹237 crore. Screener, a financial data site, records return on equity at minus 0.04 per cent. It puts return on capital employed, profit measured against all money in the business, at 1.40 per cent.

Introduction

Gujarat Alkalies was incorporated in 1973 and promoted by the Government of Gujarat. Operations began at Vadodara in 1976. Promoter-group shareholding stood at 47.28 per cent as of the year to March 2026. It is held across seven state entities. Four of them are Gujarat State Investments, GIIC, GMDC and GIDC. The others are the Gujarat Maritime Board, GNFC and the Governor of Gujarat. The Governor holds 21 shares, presumably for reasons of form.

The company runs one complex at Vadodara and two at Dahej, the second commissioned in 2022. Caustic soda capacity has gone from 37,425 tonnes a year at inception to 873,750 tonnes a year including GNAL. That is a compounding exercise conducted over five decades with none of the urgency of a pitch deck.

Recent activity has been steady and capital-hungry. In April 2025 the company engaged A T Kearney as strategic transformation partner for Project Ahvaan. It is structured around cost reduction in power and procurement, long-term diversification and digital transformation. In November 2025 GACL acquired 26 per cent of Clean Max Sphere Energy for ₹19.42 crore. It added a further ₹32.33 crore in June 2026 to hold that stake.

In February 2026 the board cleared roughly ₹1,030 crore of projects. The largest is a food-grade phosphoric acid plant at ₹560 crore. Boilers account for ₹389 crore and caustic potash expansion for ₹80 crore. The board also cleared a ₹250 crore line of credit from Gujarat State Financial Services. In May 2026 it approved a high-purity hydrogen peroxide plant costing ₹67 crore. Management targets revenue above ₹10,000 crore by the year to March 2031.

Director S J Haider resigned with effect from 31 December 2025. Pankaj Pujara was relieved as Advisor to the Managing Director on 31 March 2026.

Business model

The company puts salt and electricity in a box and separates them. Everything else is downstream of that sentence.

Membrane cell electrolysis splits brine, which is salt dissolved in water, into caustic soda, chlorine and hydrogen. Caustic soda was 47 per cent of the revenue mix in the year to March 2026. It is the product everyone wants. Chlorine is the co-product nobody ordered. CARE, a credit-rating agency, notes that chlorine realisations stayed negative in the year to March 2025. CARE puts them at roughly ₹5,000 to ₹6,000 per tonne below zero. It attributes that to oversupply and weak downstream demand. A negative realisation means paying somebody to take the product away.

The company makes more than 36 products. The board frames the ₹55 crore HCl synthesis unit approved in July as enhancing chlorine utilisation. The HCl that unit makes feeds the approved phosphoric acid plant.

Phosphoric acid is 15 per cent of the mix and chloromethanes 9 per cent. Caustic potash is another 9 per cent and hydrogen peroxide 5 per cent. Chlorotoluene is 3 per cent, with everything else at 12 per cent. Market share is 16 per cent in caustic soda and 23.5 per cent in chloromethanes. GACL is India's sole producer of hydrazine hydrate and holds a United States patent for the indigenous process. It runs one of the country's largest chlorotoluene plants, at 30,000 tonnes a year, commissioned in March 2025.

End markets include textiles, pulp and paper, alumina and soaps and detergents. Water treatment is another. Exports went to 52 countries in the year to March 2025. There is no brand here and no customer loyalty, since alumina refiners do not develop a preference for a particular sodium hydroxide.

What the company has instead is 207.87 MW of renewable capacity and a 90 MW gas captive plant, meaning a plant it owns to supply itself. It also has access to GNAL's 130 MW coal captive plant. CARE puts power at 30 to 34 per cent of operating income for two straight years.

Quarterly results, balance sheet, cash flow, ratios, shareholding and the filings themselves are on the full page for Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals Limited.

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