India's JK Paper profit plunges as higher costs, imports squeeze margins
May 19 (Reuters) - Indian paper and packaging board maker JK Paper (JKPA.NS), opens new tab reported its seventh consecutive quarter of lower profits on Monday, as high prices of wood pressured its margins.
The company's consolidated net profit plummeted 72.4% from a year earlier to 762 million rupees ($8.9 million) for the quarter ended March 31.
Indian paper manufacturers are grappling with the dual pressures of escalating wood prices —a key raw material—and lower-priced imports over recent quarters.
The industry has appealed to the government to restrict low-quality imports and provide support amidst global tariff pressures, particularly from the United States.
"Profits have been significantly impacted due to surge in imports at low prices and high wood cost," Managing Director Harsh Pati Singhania said.
JK Paper's net revenue from operations declined by 1.7% to 16.90 billion rupees, while expenses increased by 10.4% to 16.09 billion rupees, primarily driven by raw material costs.
This resulted in its margins shrinking to 4.7% from 15.2%.
The New Delhi-based company declared a dividend of five rupees per share.
Smaller rival Andhra Paper (ANDA.NS), opens new tab posted a near-80% drop in quarterly profit earlier this month, while West Coast Paper Mills (WSTC.NS), opens new tab and Emami Paper Mills (EMAP.NS), opens new tab are yet to report results.
($1 = 85.4230 Indian rupees)
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The Guardian
39 minutes ago
- The Guardian
How Pakistan fell in love with sushi
When the 17-storey Avari Towers opened in Karachi in April 1985, it was the tallest hotel in the city. 'It felt otherworldly,' said one chef who worked there as a teenager. 'It was there that I saw a swimming pool for the first time,' he remembered, 'and swimsuits.' By December 1986, this $32m building had another novelty to offer – Fujiyama, a Japanese restaurant at its summit. There had been no advertisements for Fujiyama, and for its first six weeks, the only way to get in was with an invitation; these began to land in the homes and offices of the city's bankers, businessmen, doctors and other members of Karachi's elite. By the new year, the restaurant was so busy it had waiting lists. There were now two kinds of people in the city of 6 million: those who had tried sushi and those who had not. In the late 80s, a Japanese restaurant like Fujiyama was an expensive proposition: foreign chefs had to be hired, staff trained, and ingredients, from wasabi to rice, constantly imported. Sushi – raw fish – in a country where daal roti is a staple and vegetables are often cooked down until they lose their crunch: who would take such a risk? And yet, somehow, it paid off. Fujiyama was the first place to serve Japanese cuisine in Pakistan, and it was where many Pakistanis encountered sushi for the first time. Today, you can finish your day of fasting during Ramadan at a sushi buffet or host a wedding reception for a small (by Pakistani standards) gathering of 100 or more at a Japanese restaurant. When restaurants closed during the pandemic, waiters zipped across the city on motorbikes to deliver sushi. In May 2022, the cash-strapped government attempted to impose a ban on the import of 'luxury items' to Pakistan – including Norwegian salmon and nori from Dubai – but the finance minister later had to admit that 'even though we had the ban … you could still find salmon and sushi in restaurants'. While much of it may not be good – with gummy rice or chalky, bland wasabi – it's clear today that Pakistanis want sushi. It is on the menus of fine dining restaurants in hotels, and in the many pan-Asian restaurants that have mushroomed across Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. By the time I encountered 'chapli sushi' (a chapli kebab and cucumber maki roll) at a restaurant in Lahore, I wondered: how did we get here? To understand the risks associated with bringing an expensive novelty like sushi to Pakistan, you have to understand the men of the Avari family. They were entrepreneurs – hustlers, really – of a kind we rarely see in present-day Pakistan. Byram Avari – 'Baba' to employees of the Avari hotel chain and Fujiyama – lived by the same simple edicts as his father, Dinshaw. A Zoroastrian migrant from Bombay, Dinshaw moved to Karachi as an insurance agent in 1929. 'Rules are made for fools, and donkeys and mules, and children in schools,' Dinshaw liked to say. Who makes the rules? You and I. Who can amend the rules? You and I. In 1945, Dinshaw bought Karachi's Bristol Hotel, which had until then been under the private management of Englishmen. However, as soon as the sale went through, the hotel was requisitioned by the army. Dinshaw approached the revenue commissioner, Sir Sidney Ridley, a friend from the Rotary Club, to intervene. Dinshaw wanted his hotel back – he had used all his savings and borrowed money to pay the purchase price. 'How can a bloody Indian run an English hotel?' the provost marshal asked Sir Sidney. However, when Dinshaw said that he would reduce charges for lodging, the hotel was derequisitioned. Who can amend the rules? Dinshaw was clever: he reduced the rates but doubled the charge for one peg of whiskey, then paid a sergeant commission for each soldier sent to stay at the Bristol. Rooms were filled with up to six soldiers at a time. When Dinshaw saw that soldiers were stealing his imported crockery and ashtrays as souvenirs, he stamped them with 'Stolen from the Bristol Hotel' and put them up for sale. They were a hit. In 1947, right before India was partitioned, Dinshaw stood on Chinna Creek in Karachi and imagined a waterfront resort hotel on its marshy sands. At a reception for Lord Mountbatten in the days before partition, the then-chief minister of Sindh, Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah, introduced Dinshaw to the viceroy thus: 'Excellency, please meet the madman who wants to build a hotel where even the dogs won't go, and who will later commit suicide in the creek next to it.' But Dinshaw knew what he was doing. In the decades that followed Pakistan's independence, the Beach Luxury Hotel became the place of New Year's Eve balls, garden dinners and, by 1962, a nightclub named 007 in homage to the newly released Dr No. In certain quarters, a whiff of disapproval lingered over each of Dinshaw's new schemes. When he introduced buffet-style meals for guests, some papers wrote that he was making people eat like cattle. But, as Dinshaw, and later, his son Byram, would say: 'A leader leads the pack.' These edicts guided the Avari men as they took chances. They believed their ideas would catch on. This is why, when Byram found himself mesmerised by a chef's theatrics at Benihana, a Japanese restaurant in Hawaii, in 1986, he trusted his intuition. A similar restaurant at the top of the new Avari Hotel would be a great draw, he thought. As Byram's teenage son Xerxes watched every flipped shrimp and silver flash of a knife, he said, with delight: 'It's Japanese kat-a-kat!' (Kat-a-kat is a dish made of offal, and the name comes from the sound that two blades make on the griddle as the meat is diced up and cooked.) Even so, common sense dictated that raw fish would never be accepted in Pakistan – even Xerxes shrank away from the nigiri at Benihana. But Byram was determined. He travelled with his wife, Goshpi, to Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong, where they ordered Japanese food for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. Over time, Byram's notebook filled with names of dishes and notes on their presentation. 'I was very excited,' he said to me in 2022, 'and more than that, my father was very excited and very happy.' There was no doubt in the pair's minds that this would succeed, because they knew what they were promising their customers: something to brag about. 'Whenever we held French or Belgian food festivals at the Beach Luxury or the Avari Hotel, we would get quite a crowd,' Byram explained. And it didn't matter that customers may not have been familiar with the food. 'You see, they wanted to say: 'I went to the Avari for some French food.' It was a status symbol. A fancy thing to do.' Byram poached a Japanese chef, Keni Hara, from a hotel in Dubai, and an interior decorating firm in Bangkok was hired to design the space. There were three teppanyaki counters, and the restaurant was intimate and dimly lit, keeping the city's harsh sunlight out. A private dining room with curtains offered discretion. Waiters were hired and training commenced at the Avari Towers. 'The chef's wife, who we called Momo, taught us,' recalled Vincent Francis Rodrigues, one of the waiters at the time. 'We learned about ojigi – bowing – and how to hold chopsticks, so we could show the guests.' The chopsticks had a little fixture at the top so they were as easy to use as tongs. The servers had to try the food so they could guide guests. Chef Keni offered sashimi. Some of the waiters refused to eat the raw fish. Rodrigues had never tasted anything like it. His Goan family regularly made prawn curries or fried surmai; white and black pomfret; mackerel and sole. But this? It was at once salty and a little sweet, a soft yet yielding bite that made his eyes water. Chef Arshad Mehmood, now 47, started his career as a 16-year-old banquet waiter at the Avari. On his first day in the Pakistani banquet kitchens, he was given 40kg of onions to dice. When he was moved to the Fujiyama kitchens, he was carving rosettes with cucumbers and carrots. He saw a pink fish – salmon – for the first time. Why give that up? When Chef Keni insisted he eat tuna sashimi, Mehmood closed his eyes, said a prayer, and put it in his mouth. Mehmood showed me the sketches he made as he learned to plate meals. He matched the Japanese names of dishes to Urdu words to remember them: teriyaki was tarri, the gleam of the sauce like the film of oil skimming a curry. Despite the high prices, the restaurant was often booked out once it opened to the public in January 1987. Fujiyama's windows looked out on to the great expanse of the city, but Karachi's noise and heat and crowds were a world away. In this room, you would learn that a sliver of sheer pink ginger cleansed your palate so you could appreciate the difference between the Norwegian salmon and the sweet crab. Byram found that people sitting in the private dining room would request for the curtains to be opened so they could 'see and be seen'. 'If you can't go to Fujiyama, you can't talk sushi and wasabi and gyoza,' said Ayaz Khan, who worked as a food and beverages manager at Avari Towers a decade after Fujiyama opened, and is now the proprietor of Okra, one of Pakistan's best restaurants. A demand had been created. A leader leads the pack. In the 38 years since Fujiyama opened, sushi has gradually gained popularity and adapted to Pakistani culture. Back in 2001, when Chef June Gallo joined Sakura, one of the top Japanese restaurants in Karachi, he found that staff were throwing away salmon roe, bought for £140-160 a kilo, because it expired before any customers ever ordered it. They did not know what it was. The chef who had previously run the kitchen had diligently recreated the simple, fresh flavours he encountered during his training in Japan. But customers complained that the food was bland. When that chef resigned, Chef June began to experiment. He tempered everything with red chilli powder, sugar syrups, soy, Tabasco and togarashi. Octopus and lobster were taken off the menu. In just three months, Sakura went from 40 covers a night to 60, and then up to 180. Today, customers in Pakistan's major cities do not have to visit fine-dining restaurants in hotels to get sushi. While we don't have the grab-n-go maki of convenience stores or the bright plates of nigiri rolling by at sushi train restaurants, the chefs at upscale sushi restaurants – most of them Filipino – have taken recipes with them as they move from one establishment to another. This means that the garlic rice you pay 1,290 Pakistani rupees (roughly £3.70) for at Sakura can now be eaten for Rs620 (£1.80) at Cocochan, a pan-Asian restaurant in Karachi. The difference is the quality of ingredients (is the wasabi from Japan, or is it a powder from Dubai?). Some spots even try to lure customers with novel experiences: is your sushi brought to your table, or does it arrive – as at the Karachi-based restaurant Nori – on a 'sushi boat', bobbing along a makeshift river? At Chop Chop Wok, a chain of restaurants modelled on Wagamama (down to the menu's design), the salmon nigiri and sashimi are the priciest dishes on offer, and sushi will often be ordered as a side dish alongside the popular Korean fried chicken or crispy beef with broccoli. As sushi has become ubiquitous at mid-tier restaurants in Pakistan, high-end ones are seeking new ways to maintain its allure. The fine-dining restaurant Izakaya caters to the kind of customer Fujiyama may have attracted in 1987: moneyed, and seeking experiences that make for good cocktail-party stories. The restaurant, which opened in 2022, is all marble floors and designer furniture, with pieces from Art Basel and Japan. Each of the six rooms follows a theme. There's the Shah Room with a baroque chandelier hanging low over the table, while the secret Polo Lounge reveals itself behind a bookshelf. Each room has a dedicated server, private music system, butler and chef. Among customers here, eye-watering prices are welcomed. Anyone can pay Rs4,700 (£14) for nine pieces of salmon nigiri at a pan-Asian restaurant; only a select few can drop Rs36,000 (£103) for the 20-course 'experience' at Izakaya's omakase bar. Izakaya's proprietor, Mustafa Sardar, is the grandson of the singer Madam Noor Jehan, one of the most famous singers and actors in Pakistan after Partition, beloved as the 'Queen of Melody'. He is also a graduate of Le Cordon Bleu. When we met, Sardar was dressed in a pristine cream shalwar kameez and black Hermès sliders. Izakaya is located in a residential neighbourhood, and there is no sign outside. A house across the street displays angry signs reminding people that commercial activity is not allowed in such a neighbourhood. But if you know the right people and have enough money, a sign is easy enough to ignore. At Izakaya, the food is secondary. '[Of] the people that have the money to come here, 95% of them don't know what a Michelin star is,' Sardar said. He has served truffle foam only to have customers query, 'Ye jhaag kya hai?' ('What is this foam?') Give them tuna sashimi and they say, 'Thora saa jalaa do' ('Char it a bit'). I asked Mustafa if this was frustrating. 'I miss being around people who like food,' he said. 'But I like money. You want fried rice? I don't give a shit. I'll make you fried rice.' I asked about Sardar's earliest encounters with Japanese food. As a teenager, he would visit Sakura after school to have lunch before tuitions. 'I'm hella spoiled,' he said. As a freshman at college in the US, he flew to Mykonos for a break and encountered 'food theatre' at Nammos, the luxury beach club and restaurant. There was drama to the whole thing: chefs presenting him with knives to cut the Angus beef, the still-wriggling fish displayed before it was salt-baked. 'That's what Izakaya is,' Mustafa explained, 'an experience.' Izakaya was not the first experience Mustafa pioneered: after his stint at Le Cordon Bleu in London in 2017, and work experience at restaurants in London and Antwerp, he returned to Pakistan for a break. Then the pandemic hit and, bored in Karachi, he converted the basement in his mother's home into a kitchen and restaurant and invited friends and family for elaborate plated services. Word spread and he was summoned to politicians' and celebrities' homes to cook. 'Gangsters, underworld dons, people who can't just turn up to a restaurant – no, I can't tell you who – would give me a call,' he said. 'The most wanted criminals. That's who I was cooking for.' And what do dons and criminals like to eat? 'I make a mushroom rice and a garlic rice with mushroom stock – they love that sort of thing,' Sardar told me. 'They're actually very nice, simple people.' For these meals, he charged up to Rs20,000 (£58) per head, often serving 30 or 40 people for a party. His business boomed and, while he won't disclose how much he made, he does show me photographs of two Italian mastiffs he imported to Pakistan. He was able to buy horses and start playing polo: a boyhood dream come true. Sardar wanted to replicate this privacy and exclusivity of the basement venture at Izakaya. 'Imagine you're at the fanciest restaurant in Karachi, enjoying some wine and cheese with your girl, and then you see the girl's uncle,' he said. 'You gotta hide that bottle of wine! Or if you lied to someone about being sick so you couldn't come to their party, but they see you out for dinner. Awkward! I thought there had to be a better way to have a night out.' Members can bring their pets to Izakaya – one gentleman dines alone with his pet parrot – and there's a dog walker and Filipina nanny available on request. Sardar gets calls from mothers wanting to send daughters and their friends for a dinner – the girls want to dress however they wish without being ogled by strangers. 'Izakaya is a 'safe space',' he said. Until recently, Izakaya's Instagram did not feature photographs of the restaurant, and menu updates were shared only via Instagram stories, disappearing after 24 hours. Patrons often take photos in front of the restaurant's distinctive duck-egg blue door – you'd recognise it if you'd been. 'People want to show off,' Mustafa shrugged. #IYKYK. With all the talk of Norwegian salmon and nori imported from Dubai, it is easy to forget that Karachi is a coastal city. On a December morning, I joined 13 people on the docks at Ibrahim Hyderi, a fishing harbour on the outskirts of Karachi, for the mahigeer boat tour through the mangroves ('mahigeer' means 'fisherfolk' in Urdu). The tour was led by Fatima Majeed, an activist and member of the community, and her father, Abdul Majeed. While father and daughter told stories about the community and their history, others prepared a meal of fried fresh fish, prawn biryani and prawn karahi. The winter sun warmed our backs as the boat gently wound along Karachi's coastal mangroves. Two men sat in a small space below deck, oil bubbling in a wok on a stove at their feet. They coaxed fillets of mushka (croaker fish) into the oil. Fatima tore warm roti into pieces, spooning chutneys on to them as she talked. 'These mangroves, this water, they are the auliya and wali [protectors] for the people of Karachi,' she said. Between 2010 and 2022, the WWF estimates that 200 hectares of mangroves in Karachi were lost to coastal land reclamation and commercial projects, leaving the city vulnerable to windstorms, cyclones and flooding. Fisherfolk have been protesting against the deforestation for years, to little avail. Despite its potential impact on the city, the problem feels removed from the average Karachiite's life, and this sense of disconnection spills over into how we eat; we ignore our coasts as worthy providers of the foods we consume. In Karachi, most people are hesitant to cook fish, which they have not grown up eating regularly. Crucially, good fish can be expensive, so the average household budget prioritises chicken or meat. 'We do not eat like we are a coastal city,' Asad Monga, a Karachi-based chef, told me when we spoke. 'We don't have a connection to our sea.' Until 2022, Monga worked at buzzy new restaurants. Then he quit his job and began to take trips with local fisherfolk, learning about the fish in Karachi's waters (surmai, boi, tuna, ghissar, parrotfish, barracudas, squid and prawns). He would cook for them, using a fatty fish like snapper to make sashimi seasoned with lemon, salt and chillies. They loved it. This was the kind of cooking Monga had not been able to do in any of the kitchens he'd worked in – using entirely local ingredients from the city in which he was raised. One day, Monga gathered seaweed and clams at Karachi's most popular beach, Clifton Beach. He dipped the seaweed in a batter of besan, salt, chilli and sesame seeds and fried it up. He called these 'seaweed pakoras'. Then he added the clams to mayo to make a dip, which he used to top the pakoras. He shared the dish on Instagram and took orders for two days, selling boxes for Rs700 (£2) each. It was such a hit that Monga made a higher-end version for a charity benefit at Izakaya (I laughed when he told me this: the patrons of Izakaya would never set foot on the trash-strewn sands of Clifton Beach). At Izakaya, the dish was modified to fit: the delicate wafer of a webbed pakora was topped with sashimi and served with prawn-head mayonnaise. There have been other attempts in Karachi to encourage us to appreciate local ingredients. In 2021, siblings Anum and Mustafa Karim opened Fishop, a hole-in-the-wall restaurant on Karachi's Boat Basin 'food street'. Fishop sold fresh and marinated fish – like red snapper, lobster, eel, calamari, tuna and pomfret – alongside English-style bekti fish and chips, fish burgers, nuggets and sushi. The siblings were keen on giving the city something different: affordable, good-quality sushi (you could get tuna maki rolls for Rs1,000, or £2.50). 'We're so used to eating budget-friendly sushi abroad, and we wanted to have sushi that was accessible for everyone,' Anum explained. 'Why should it be so expensive when the fish is from your own shores?' While other restaurants in the area served barbecued tikkas and kebabs, the 14 plastic tables outside Fishop filled up on weekends with people trying sushi for the first time. Fishop was a deliberate far cry from the air-conditioned environs of Fujiyama or Sakura. Often, people from the nearby Ismaili Jamat Khana would stop by on their way home and order platters of sushi to take away (the crispy California rolls accounted for almost 50% of all orders). By 2023, however, Fishop had closed. Between their day jobs and the demand for sushi, Anum and Mustafa were unable to give the restaurant the time it needed. While these attempts to celebrate the local and seasonal find some curious customers, they have not been consistent enough to build a movement or change the ingredients found in most high-end restaurant kitchens in Karachi. Whereas sushi is prized for the freshness of its ingredients, the patrons who have the money to keep such businesses going like to know how far food has travelled to get to their plates: rice from Okinawa, tsukemono, wakame, and wasabi from Japan; nori and king crab from Dubai; and octopus, lobster, eel and yellowfin tuna available on demand from around the world. In Pakistan, the local is ordinary and, often, suspect. 'We would rather pay for foreign ingredients than our own,' Monga explained. 'We assume our own Pakistani produce is third-rate.' In 1986, the thrill of something new lured people through the doors of the Avari Hotel – just as in 1948, when Karachiites were curious about the first water-front hotel in the city. But now, four decades after Fujiyama first opened, there is a generation of globalised mobile consumers in Pakistan for whom very little is truly new. Chefs like Asad Monga and Mustafa Sardar understand that to keep these Pakistanis' interest piqued, you must present them with something novel in the most familiar settings. Seaweed from a local beach; a hole-in-the-wall restaurant serving up the freshest tuna sashimi in the city; a members-only restaurant with no sign, tucked away in a residential neighbourhood. In 2024, Fujiyama reopened after an extensive three-year renovation. The Avaris hope this revamp will draw curious people in. 'We're the new kid on the block now,' Byram's son Dinshaw Jr told me. 'Well, the old new kid.' When I visited Byram in 2022, his three Labradors – Blondie, Barney and Buddy – ambled around the office and snoozed as he told me stories about his father. Byram remembered playing at his father's feet with a bucket and spade as he surveyed the land and dreamed up a creek-side hotel. 'All of this,' Byram said, pointing out the windows to the palm-tree-lined hotel gardens, 'all of this was barren land.' Byram Avari passed away in 2023. His office at Beach Luxury Hotel has been left as it was, and his sons Xerxes and Dinshaw Jr, along with their children, continue to work in the smaller adjoining offices. Byram and Dinshaw Sr's edicts have been framed, and they now line the walls of the office. Who makes the rules? You and I, they read. Who amends the rules? You and I. They still guide the business today. A longer version of this article first appeared in issue 1 of Vittles, a magazine about modern food and culture Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
Rupee likely to be buoyed by Fed cut bets, softer US trade signals
MUMBAI, June 12 (Reuters) - The Indian rupee is expected to open marginally higher on Thursday, supported by a weaker dollar following further signs that U.S. President Donald Trump is taking a conciliatory approach on tariffs and on rising expectations of Federal Reserve rate cuts later this year. The 1-month non-deliverable forward indicated an open in the 85.42-85.44 range, versus 85.51 in the previous session. The dollar index fell 0.5% on Wednesday and extended losses in the Asia session on Thursday. The decline lifted regional currencies, with most Asian units rising between 0.1% and 0.4%. The dip in USD/INR at the open may "at best" extend to the 85.30–85.35 zone, a currency trader at a state-run bank said. A move below that zone would mark a significant victory for rupee bulls, he added. The trader's remarks come against the backdrop of relatively range-bound trading in the Indian currency over recent sessions. Expectations of cooing trade tensions and potential Fed rate cuts kept the dollar under pressure. Trump said on Wednesday he would be willing to extend a July 8 deadline for completing trade talks with countries before higher U.S. tariffs are imposed. Further, Trump said that a deal to get the fragile truce in the U.S.-China trade war back on track is done. Meanwhile, data on Wednesday showed U.S. consumer prices rose less than expected in May, leading traders to ramp up bets of a rate cut at the Fed's September policy meeting. The inflation report "eased some fears around persistent inflation acceleration" and accordingly, additional Fed easing was priced in with about 5-6 basis points of incremental easing added to end-2025 and 2026, Morgan Stanley said in its daily commentary. KEY INDICATORS: ** One-month non-deliverable rupee forward at 85.54; onshore one-month forward premium at 9 paisa ** Dollar index down at 98.40 ** Brent crude futures down 0.6% at $69.4 per barrel ** Ten-year U.S. note yield at 4.4% ** As per NSDL data, foreign investors bought a net $359.6 million worth of Indian shares on June 10 ** NSDL data shows foreign investors bought a net $159.4 million worth of Indian bonds on June 10
Reuters
2 hours ago
- Reuters
China's 240-hour transit visa-free policy extended to 55 countries, Xinhua reports
HONG KONG, June 12 (Reuters) - China's 240-hour transit visa-free policy has been extended to people arriving from 55 countries, including Indonesia, Russia and Britain, who will be able to engage in tourism and business, the official Xinhua news agency said. The changes take effect from Thursday.
