Ishani MehroliaChief Strategy Officer

Personal correspondence

A reactor is a ten-year promise

Chief Strategy Officer India

I decide which molecules and customers deserve a reactor for ten years, and which inherited business the company should stop defending.

In the winter of 2001 I was a production engineer at Narmavati Organics in Ankleshwar when our plant manager stopped a half-finished campaign of a reactive-dye intermediate. A Surat buyer had telephoned to say that Chinese material was now available for less than our cost of raw materials. Nobody on that shift had done anything wrong. The reactor was running well, the yield was on plan, and the product was suddenly worth less than the acid we had charged into it. I was twenty-four, and it was the first time I understood that a plant could be efficient and still be in the wrong business.

A multipurpose reactor at Sarigam can make many molecules, but only one at a time, and every campaign we accept closes the slot for another. Strategy in a chemicals company is mostly the discipline of deciding which campaigns, customers and inherited lines deserve that slot. I try to make each refusal as explicit as each commitment.

Company revenue
₹1,180 Cr
Saranvik Chemicals, year ended March 2026
Share of revenue exported
64%
Europe, the United States and Japan
Largest customer's share of revenue
31% → 21%
2022–23 to 2025–26; about half from new customers
Sarigam block approved
₹236 Cr
In place of a ₹610 crore greenfield plan

I treat reactor time as the scarcest asset in a specialty-chemicals company and argue openly about who should receive it.

I am chief strategy officer of Saranvik Chemicals Limited, a family-promoted specialty-chemicals company headquartered in Vapi, Gujarat, and listed on the NSE and BSE since 2010. We make halogenated aromatic intermediates, performance chemicals and custom-synthesised molecules for crop-protection innovators at two sites, Vapi and Sarigam. Revenue for the year ended March 2026 was ₹1,180 crore, about 64 per cent of it exported, and we employ roughly 1,860 people. I report to our managing director, lead a nine-person strategy and portfolio office, and take the capital-allocation papers to the board every quarter.

My route here was unusual for a strategy role in this industry. I began on a dye-intermediates shop floor in Ankleshwar in 1999, spent five years developing agrochemical-intermediate accounts for the Indian arm of a German producer, and then five years advising chemicals and engineering promoters at a Mumbai strategy firm. Saranvik was one of those clients, and in 2014 the family asked me to build its export custom-synthesis business myself. I still avoid recommending a capacity bet I would be unwilling to defend a year later.

Three questions take most of my time. How much of the China-plus-one demand that arrived after 2020 is durable? How much revenue should any single customer represent? Which parts of a company built by its founder should the next generation stop funding? The cases on this site record what we decided, who disagreed and what each decision cost. None was settled by analysis alone.

One block instead of a new site

In 2022 the proposal was a ₹610 crore greenfield plant near Jhagadia. We built a ₹236 crore multipurpose block at Sarigam with 140 kilolitres of reactor volume. It ran at 58 per cent of available hours in its first full year; a new site would have opened into the 2023–24 destocking.

The founder's first product, sold

In September 2024 we sold the reactive-dye intermediates business, with its Vapi unit and 164 employees, to a Surat dye-maker for ₹68 crore. It had earned ₹118 crore of revenue at an operating margin below 8 per cent. Our chairman opposed the sale for most of a year.

One customer from 31 to 21 per cent

Our largest European customer made up 31 per cent of revenue in 2022–23 and 21 per cent in 2025–26. Four new innovators now buy ₹142 crore a year from us; the rest of the change, less comfortably, came from that customer's own lower orders.

Current focus

I am preparing the board's review of a second Sarigam block, which will be judged against the volume rule we set in 2022: signed supply agreements covering at least 60 per cent of its first three years. Two customers have signed. A third is still negotiating its raw-material price-adjustment clause.

Conversations I welcome

I am open to a first independent directorship with a listed or unlisted public manufacturer outside chemicals, where export demand, capacity timing or a founder's succession is a live board question. I have about twenty-two days a year, subject to my board's consent and a review of customer, supplier and competitor relationships.

The leadership record

Trusted with consequential decisions.

In the boardroom

  • Saranvik Solvent Recovery Private LimitedNon-executive nominee director · 2023–present

Formation

  • Executive MBA (part-time)Konkanvel School of Management · 2008
  • Bachelor of technology, chemical engineeringPashmira Engineering College · 1999
Ishani's papers tell the board what management is choosing not to do, which is rarer than it should be. During the sale of the dye business she made sure the chairman's objections reached us in his own terms, and that made our review of the buyer more careful.
Gautami MirvadiaIndependent director and audit committee chair, Saranvik Chemicals Limited
The full record ↗

Contact

I am open to a first independent directorship with a listed or unlisted public manufacturer outside chemicals, where export demand, capacity timing or a founder's succession is a live board question. I have about twenty-two days a year, subject to my board's consent and a review of customer, supplier and competitor relationships.

  • Board appointments
Write to Ishani Contact page