In a statement, the company says that the results for the fiscal ended March 31, 1999 are not strictly comparable given that effective April 1, 1998, the company had spun off its flacconage division and its bulk drugs business into separate entities.

The performance comes even as the group's total healthcare sales scaled the Rs 1,000 crore mark for 1998-99. A company press release said: ``The first decade has seen a 50-fold expansion with a combination of organic growth, acquisitions and mergers taking 1998-99 sales beyond the thousand crore milestone to Rs 1,017 crore''.

Of this, Nicholas Piramal accountedfor sales of Rs 441.8 crore, Gujarat Glass (the flacconage unit) brought in roughly Rs 183.8 crore, Global Bulk Drugs accounted for sales of Rs 42.4 crore, while the joint ventures posted cumulative sales of Rs 348.7 crores for the year ended March 31, 1999.

Nicholas Piramal, the flagship company, saw other income rise to Rs 7 crore, while total expenditure increased to Rs 374.6 crores as against Rs 329.7 crores in the previous year. Interest and taxation stood at Rs 14.5 crores and Rs 5.5 crore respectively.

Commenting on its ability to meet the year 2000 challenge, the company said it had made extensive investments in enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, intranet networks, VSAT connectivity and new hardware all of which are Y2K compliant. NPIL expects to incur, approximately, Rs one crore on hardware and some small stand alone software programmes so as to be Y2K compliant, it added.

Nirma profit up

MUMBAI: Nirma Ltd has posted a 12 per cent higher net profit of Rs 170 crore for thefinancial year ended March 31 1999 as compared to Rs 152 crore of the previous year. The company's turnover jumped up by 22 per cent to Rs 1473 crore from Rs 1206 crore of the previous year. According to a company release here today, the directors of the company have declared a dividend of 30 per cent for the year 1998-99.

The company is implementing its second phase of linear alkyl benzene (LAB) project to manufacture 65,000 tonne per annuam (TPA). The committed cost as at March 31 has been Rs 175 crore. The company has already placed project cost of Rs 280 crore. The project is expected to be on stream by June 2000, the release added.