Up in downturn: While the economic slowdown is taking root, manufacturing shows a different story

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Sample gift boxes and wicker baskets are stacked in a corner of the conference room of Candor Foods’ offices in an industrial cluster of Navi Mumbai. The weeks leading up to Diwali in October will be the company’s busiest, as demand for its products - dried fruits and nuts - soars. 

In a 30,000-sq ft facility on the same premises, Candor Foods will process around 8,000 kg of almonds, cashews, pistachios, walnuts, dates, etc, to meet that demand, up from a current average of 4,500 kg now. “We expect business this Diwali to be around the same as last year,” says chief executive Yash Gawdi. Bags of raw nuts, fresh off a truck, await their turn to be taken in. A young man puts a lid on a plastic jar of trail mix, seals it with a machine and repeats the process with speed and precision.

Candor also makes cereal bars and flavoured peanuts. Gawdi’s forecast for Diwali may come as a surprise to many in the backdrop of the steady drumbeat of reports about a slowing economy and job losses. Plummeting vehicle sales, a rise in unsold apartments and a troubled shadow banking sector have caused the likes of Bajaj’s Rahul Bajaj, L&T’s AM Naik and HDFC’s Deepak Parekh to speak out about the gravity of the economic crisis over the past few weeks. The Indian economy grew at 6.8% in 2018-19 — its lowest in five years. 

Their concerns were backed by more troubling data recently when industrial output in 11 of the 23 manufacturing segments contracted in April-June 2019, compared with the same period last year. But there were also sectors that bucked the trend, such as food production, apparel and steel, which grew at a faster clip than in 2018. 
Source: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com

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