The Hundred, Part Two: Things Factories, Farms and Builders Buy

Forty thousand fly-ash bricks sat under blue tarpaulin in a yard at Shikrapur in July 2017, and the man who made them, I'll call him Nitin, asked me whether my company needed a compound wall. It did not. He knew that. He was asking everyone who drove past, because the builder who had ordered those bricks had stopped site work when the rain came and then, quietly, stopped answering his phone. The bricks were perfectly good. They would still be perfectly good in October. Nitin's electricity bill, his loan instalment and his eleven workers would not wait until October.

That is the building-materials trade in one yard. The demand is real and it repeats: India puts up houses, godowns, schools and boundary walls every single year, and none of that can be imported, because a truck of bricks loses its margin within about 80 kilometres of the kiln. But the demand comes in waves. It drops every monsoon. It dropped after demonetisation in November 2016, and it stopped dead in April 2020. A builder's credit terms of 120 days are normal in this trade, and a factory that lives on one or two builders lives on their luck.

The units I have seen survive did three things. They sold to many small buyers (the man building a two-storey house in a village, the local contractor doing a gram panchayat road) as well as the big ones. They kept enough cash to carry three slow months. And they never let cement or fly-ash stock pile up beyond a fortnight, because cement goes hard in a damp shed and fly ash prices move with whatever the nearest thermal plant decides.

Entries 51 to 63

Pollution colours follow the CPCB list as most state boards apply it in 2025. Check yours; some states classify cement products more strictly.

51. Fly-ash bricks. ₹15–35 lakh, white. Key machine: hydraulic brick press with pan mixer. Main risk: depending on one thermal plant for ash, then losing your allocation. Crowded near Nagpur and Chandrapur.

52. Paver blocks. ₹12–30 lakh, green. Key machine: vibro-press with rubber moulds. Main risk: municipal orders paid nine months late, so balance them with housing societies and petrol pumps.

53. Solid and hollow concrete blocks. ₹15–40 lakh, green. Key machine: egg-laying or stationary block machine. Main risk: weak curing; blocks that crack on site end your name with every mason in the taluka.

54. AAC blocks. ₹3–5 crore, orange in most states. Key machine: autoclave. Main risk: the capital. Large brands have pushed prices down since 2021, and a half-used autoclave eats interest every day.

55. RCC hume pipes. ₹40–90 lakh, green. Key machine: spinning pipe machine. Main risk: tender-dependent sales and BIS certification you must hold before bidding.

56. Precast compound walls and fencing posts. ₹25–60 lakh, green. Key machine: moulds and a small crane. Main risk: transport breakage and an installation crew you must also manage.

57. Cover blocks for reinforcement bars. ₹3–8 lakh, green. Key machine: table vibrator and plastic moulds. Main risk: almost none except tiny ticket sizes; this one still has room.

58. Chequered and terrazzo tiles. ₹10–25 lakh, green. Key machine: hydraulic tile press. Main risk: vitrified tiles from Morbi undercutting you on anything decorative. Sell for godown floors and footpaths.

59. Dry-mix mortar and ready plaster. ₹60–150 lakh, green. Key machine: ribbon blender with sand dryer. Main risk: convincing masons to change habits learned from their fathers.

60. Chain-link fencing and barbed wire. ₹8–20 lakh, green. Key machine: automatic chain-link machine. Main risk: wire-rod prices that can move 15 per cent in a quarter.

61. Pressed steel door frames. ₹15–35 lakh, green. Key machine: press brake. Main risk: builders who ask for custom sizes and then cancel.

62. FRP and concrete manhole covers. ₹20–45 lakh, orange for FRP. Key machine: compression moulding press. Main risk: resin smell complaints from neighbours, so site this one carefully.

63. Rolling shutters. ₹10–25 lakh, green. Key machine: roll-forming machine. Main risk: fitting work done by others that fails and gets blamed on you.

Nitin sold his forty thousand bricks in the end. A school trust in Shirur took them in November at ₹1.20 below his price, and paid cash.

Entries 64 to 73

Hitesh (not his real name) makes drip irrigation laterals in a shed off the Gondal Road in Rajkot, and in February 2023 he showed me his order book for the year. Between April and July it was full. Between September and January there were four pages with almost nothing written on them. "The farmer buys when the borewell report is good and the kharif loan comes through," he said. "After that he buys nothing from me. He buys tractor diesel."

Farm inputs are about as non-discretionary as anything in this book. A farmer who skips fertiliser or lets his drip lines crack loses the crop, and in a drought year he spends more on irrigation, not less. What he does not do is spend evenly. Kharif sowing pulls money in June and July; rabi pulls it in October and November. In between, the dealers in the mandi towns (the market towns where farmers buy and sell) sit on last season's stock and ask you for credit until harvest. Harvest can mean February.

So the question for anyone choosing from this family is not whether demand repeats. It does. The question is how you pay eleven workers in the months when it has not yet repeated.

The units I trust do some version of the following:

• Book the season early. Hitesh takes dealer orders in January with a 20 per cent advance, and uses that advance to buy granules before polymer prices rise in spring.
• Carry a second customer who does not farm. His extruder runs garden hose and conduit for electricians from August to December. It barely pays, but it keeps the operators and covers the power bill.
• Count the off months honestly. If your sales arrive in five months, your cash plan has to cover seven without them. I tell people to write the rent, salaries and EMI for those seven months on one line and look at the total before they buy a machine.

Several of these products also need registration under the Fertiliser Control Order or with the Central Insecticides Board. Those approvals take months, sometimes a year. I don't know how fast any particular state is processing them now; ask two existing manufacturers before you trust a consultant's date.

64. Drip irrigation laterals. ₹40–80 lakh, green. Key machine: extrusion line with inline emitter insertion. Main risk: sales tied to state subsidy schemes whose payments to dealers run a year late. Crowded in Rajkot and Jalgaon.

65. HDPE sprinkler pipes and fittings. ₹30–60 lakh, green. Key machine: HDPE pipe extruder and an injection moulder for fittings. Main risk: fittings that leak at the joint, which a farmer remembers for ten years.

66. Bio-fertiliser (Rhizobium, PSB, Azotobacter). ₹15–40 lakh, green in most states. Key machine: fermenter and carrier mixer. Main risk: short shelf life; a cartoned batch left in a hot godown through May is dead before anyone sows it.

67. Vermicompost and enriched organic manure. ₹5–15 lakh, white or green. Key machine: rotary screen and bagging scale. Main risk: moisture variation that makes every bag a different weight by the time it reaches the shop.

68. Seed and nursery trays. ₹10–25 lakh, green. Key machine: vacuum-forming machine. Main risk: nurseries buy for one sowing window; sell to vegetable seedling growers near cities, who plant all year. This one still has room.

69. Cattle feed pellets. ₹40–100 lakh, green. Key machine: pellet mill with hammer mill. Main risk: maize and de-oiled cake prices. The upside is that cows eat every day, so this is the steadiest earner in the family.

70. Micronutrient mixtures. ₹20–50 lakh, orange in several states. Key machine: ribbon blender. Main risk: agriculture department samples that fail on zinc or boron content, after which dealers drop you quickly.

71. Neem and botanical biopesticides. ₹15–35 lakh, orange or red depending on state. Key machine: emulsifier and filling line. Main risk: the registration itself, which can outlast your savings.

72. Mulch and greenhouse film. ₹1–2.5 crore, green. Key machine: blown film line. Main risk: thin margins against large polymer processors who buy granules cheaper than you can.

73. Farm hand tools (sickles, khurpis, hoes). ₹8–20 lakh, green. Key machine: power hammer and grinding wheel. Main risk: steel that is too soft. Farmers test an edge on the first day and tell the whole village by the second.

Hitesh's four empty pages were not empty when I visited again that October. They were full of garden hose, in green and yellow, at a margin he described as "enough for tea."

Entries 74 to 90

In August 2019 I sat for three hours and forty minutes in the visitors' room of an auto plant outside Hosur with Karthik (not his real name), who turns brass inserts in a shed in the SIPCOT estate there. His appointment was at eleven. The purchase engineer arrived at 2.40, turned the sample over twice under the tube light and said, "Bring PPAP next month." Then he left.

Karthik was delighted. PPAP is the production part approval file: dimensional reports on a set number of pieces, material test certificates, a control plan, proof that your gauges are calibrated. It runs to sixty or eighty pages for a part that sells for nine rupees. He had been chasing that sentence for fourteen months.

Most plants buy each part from three vendors. Vendor one might carry 60 per cent of the volume, vendor two 25 per cent, vendor three the rest. Being number three sounds like being picked last at cricket. It is worth more than any brand I know, for two reasons. When vendor one has a fire, a strike or a bad rejection, the volume moves within a week, and it moves to whoever already holds a vendor code. And approved vendors are usually paid on a fixed day, forty-five or sixty days, by bank transfer, without being asked. I have never had a famous retail brand of my own, but I have chased enough distributors for money to know which I would rather have.

The price of entry is patience and paperwork. Expect twelve to twenty-four months, two audits and a calibrated height gauge before your first purchase order. My plain rule for this family: do not buy a CNC machine until a buyer has handed you a drawing.

74. PVC electrical conduit and fittings. ₹25–50 lakh, green. Key machine: twin-screw extruder. Main risk: price wars in wholesale electrical markets, where buyers compare by the bundle and nobody checks wall thickness. Crowded.

75. Rubber gaskets and O-rings. ₹15–40 lakh, green, orange if you mix compound yourself. Key machine: compression moulding press with a two-roll mill. Main risk: compound recipes that drift batch to batch until a pump maker rejects a whole lot.

76. Moulded rubber auto parts (bushes, grommets). ₹30–70 lakh, orange. Key machine: transfer moulding press. Main risk: the approval wait described above, which you must fund from somewhere.

77. Injection-moulded industrial components. ₹30–80 lakh, green. Key machine: 150–250 tonne injection moulder. Main risk: moulds. Agree in writing who owns each one before it is cut.

78. Plastic crates and pallets. ₹60 lakh–1.5 crore, green. Key machine: 500-tonne-plus moulder. Main risk: a single crate mould can cost ₹25 lakh, so one wrong design is a year's profit.

79. Nylon cable ties and clips. ₹15–30 lakh, green. Key machine: moulder with a multi-cavity mould. Main risk: imports in the wholesale bazaar; sell direct to panel builders instead.

80. Reclaimed rubber and crumb. ₹40–90 lakh, orange or red. Key machine: cracker mill. Main risk: consent, and neighbours who object to the smoke.

81. CNC-turned components. ₹25–70 lakh, green. Key machine: CNC lathe with bar feeder. Main risk: idle spindles, because the machine came before the customer.

82. Special fasteners. ₹30–80 lakh, green, red if you plate in-house. Key machine: cold header and thread roller. Main risk: drifting into standard sizes, which the big mills sell cheaper than your steel costs.

83. Sheet-metal pressings and brackets. ₹20–60 lakh, green. Key machine: power press. Main risk: one cracked die stops a customer's line, and he remembers.

84. Gears and sprockets. ₹30–70 lakh, green. Key machine: hobbing machine. Main risk: outsourced heat treatment that comes back distorted. This one still has room.

85. Heat-treatment job shop. ₹40 lakh–1 crore, orange. Key machine: sealed quench furnace. Main risk: power bills, and the batch that comes out soft.

86. Zinc electroplating job work. ₹20–50 lakh, red. Key machine: plating line with effluent treatment. Main risk: many estates will not allow it at all; check before you look at sheds.

87. Wire harnesses. ₹15–40 lakh, green. Key machine: crimping presses and test boards. Main risk: labour-heavy work and operators who leave for ₹500 more.

88. Aluminium die-cast parts. ₹50 lakh–1.2 crore, orange. Key machine: cold-chamber die-casting machine. Main risk: porosity rejections found only after machining.

89. Conveyor rollers and idlers. ₹20–45 lakh, green. Key machine: tube cutting and welding fixtures. Main risk: cheap bearings that seize in a cement plant's first monsoon.

90. Compression and tension springs. ₹15–40 lakh, green. Key machine: CNC spring coiler. Main risk: fatigue failures traced back to wire bought from the cheaper dealer.

Karthik got his vendor code in January 2020. The first purchase order was for 4,000 inserts. His PPAP file weighed more than the parts.

Entries 91 to 100

The last ten come from two families I know mostly as a customer. I buy cotton waste by the bale to wipe down the corrugator's glue rollers, and in 2023 I paid ₹61 a kilo for it. My operators wear uniforms stitched by a woman in Akurdi who has had my order every March since 2011. Every new owner thinks of these things as small. They are small. They are also bought every month by every factory in this book.

91. Cotton yarn waste processing. ₹15–35 lakh, green. Key machine: waste opener and baling press. Main risk: buying mixed waste with polyester in it, which no wiping-cloth buyer will take back.

92. Industrial and school uniforms. ₹10–30 lakh, white. Key machine: single-needle lockstitch machines, ten to twenty of them. Main risk: the school order that arrives in May and is paid for in October.

93. Knitted safety gloves. ₹20–45 lakh, white. Key machine: automatic glove knitting machine. Main risk: Chinese imports at bazaar prices; sell to steel and auto plants that audit their PPE suppliers.

94. Narrow woven tapes and webbing. ₹15–40 lakh, white. Key machine: needle loom. Main risk: dyeing, which you should job out rather than learn on your own money.

95. Wiping cloths and industrial rags. ₹5–12 lakh, white. Key machine: cutting table and bundling press. Main risk: margins of two or three rupees a kilo, so volume is everything. Still has room outside the big clusters.

96. Wall putty. ₹25–60 lakh, green. Key machine: ribbon blender with a packing machine. Main risk: dealers who expect sixty days and a scheme every Diwali. Crowded.

97. Industrial adhesives (PVA, hot-melt). ₹20–50 lakh, orange. Key machine: jacketed reactor or hot-melt kettle. Main risk: one bad batch that delaminates a buyer's whole shipment. I know, because it was my shipment.

98. Degreasers and industrial cleaning chemicals. ₹8–20 lakh, orange. Key machine: stainless mixing tanks. Main risk: the buyer's maintenance manager changes and the new one brings his own supplier.

99. Cutting oils and coolants. ₹15–35 lakh, orange. Key machine: blending tank with a homogeniser. Main risk: base oil prices, which follow crude and do not ask you first.

100. Primers and industrial enamels. ₹40 lakh–1 crore, red. Key machine: bead mill and high-speed disperser. Main risk: solvent storage, fire NOC and a consent process that can run past a year.

Four I would hesitate over

I put all hundred in because each one passes the Repeat-Purchase Test. Passing the test is not the same as my recommending it to a stranger with savings.

I would hesitate over zinc electroplating (86) because the red category, the effluent plant and the estates that refuse it will eat your first year before you plate a single bolt. I would hesitate over reclaimed rubber (80) for the same reason, plus neighbours. I would hesitate over plastic crates (78), where one ₹25 lakh mould decides whether you have a business. And I would hesitate over enamel paints (100), which belong to people who already understand solvents, not to people learning them.

These four are the units I have watched sell good product and still close. Raj (not his real name) ran a small plating line in Bhosari for nineteen months. The board inspector came on a Tuesday in 2017. By the Friday the line was dry, with orders on the clipboard and four workers sitting on upturned drums outside the shed.

That leaves ninety-six. Nobody can run ninety-six, and most readers can run perhaps three.

Last year a woman from Nashik rang me after reading an early draft of these two chapters. She had ₹12 lakh, eleven years of keeping school accounts, and a list of nine businesses written in green ink.

"Which one should I do?" she said.

"Tell me who you can sell to by December," I said.

She was quiet for a long time. Then she asked if she could send me the list.