“The demand for pallets has touched 90 million in India,” reveals Nitin Kalla, founder & MD, Exzod India. “The logistics and supply chain sector will continue to offer opportunities, with an upsurge in the share of organised retail and e-commerce. Owing to the nature of goods and the need to move the goods quickly from manufacturing locations to the points of consumption, the pallet business is experiencing heavy growth in demand from existing and new customers”. Exzod India, a player in pallets manufacturing, sale, renting and AMC, aims at managing a pool of assets pallets, which it intends to maintain for its clients across India. Exzod provides wooden pallets and packaging boxes used for storing and moving finished products and raw materials in industries such as FMCG, retail, automobile, etc. “AMC is a strategic business option for companies for reducing capital expenditure, repair costs and improving handling processes,” adds Kalla. The company’s expertise in the supply chain space allows it to provide customised solutions as per requirement. It provides technology-embedded AMC services – the only organised player present in the industry to do so. “The idea is to revamp the traditional nail-and-hammer approach of the AMCs with an automatic approach embedded with advanced robotics,” observes Kalla. Founded in 2018, Exzod provides returnable and customised packaging solutions used in storing and moving products across the supply chain in various industries. Exzod has partnered with over 75 customers across sectors, including the likes of RK Foodland, UB, Mahindra, Trent and Patanjali, to name a few. The company has a pan-India presence, with three manufacturing plants. Kalla has 20 odd years of business experience and is one of the few members of Exzod’s core team in charge of strategising the company’s operations, vendor base development, business development and marketing function. Key milestone Exzod has three other manufacturing units – located in Punjab, Maharashtra and Haryana -- equipped with state-of-the-art automatic pallet manufacturing machines. It plans to set up a manufacturing plant in Hyderabad too, with a vision to serve its clients in southern India. “We are really proud of this key milestone,” affirms Kalla. “And, we are geared up for our fourth company-owned pallet manufacturing facility, which would literally make us serve the clients spread across India. With this new plant, we would be able to meet the increased demand from the South and our value chain for supplying pallets is complete”. “This would make us a dependable company for buying pallets for both large brands and warehousing players in the country,” adds Nimi Tiwari, general manager. “We are the only organised pallet manufacturing company in India, which has automated pallet manufacturing”. The new plant is meant to advance Exzod’s business expansion goals, mainly owing to strong demand for pallets due to growth, improvement in supply chain management, automation in both materials handling at production and user end and even at storage level.