Four businesses, and one of them earns three-quarters of the profit. SRF makes refrigerant gases, industrial chemicals, fluoropolymers and made-to-order intermediates for agrochemical and pharmaceutical innovators; BOPET and BOPP packaging film and aluminium foil; nylon tyre cord and conveyor belting fabric; and a small coated fabrics business. Sixteen plants across India, Thailand, South Africa and Hungary, and half of turnover earned overseas. In the year to March 2026, Chemicals was ₹7,779 crore of ₹15,787 crore — 49.3% of revenue and 75.2% of segment profit, at a 29.1% EBIT margin. Performance Films & Foil was ₹5,764 crore at 8.8%. Is it good at it? The chemicals business earns 21.4% on its own net assets. The company earns 14.1% on capital employed, which India Ratings notes is below SRF's own decadal average of about 15%. The rest of the group is what pulls the average down, and it is also what has been paying for the chemicals plants.
Three businesses, three scorecards, and SRF publishes the profit on each but the utilisation on none. In chemicals the measures are EBIT margin and how full the fluorochemical plants run. Margin was 29.1% for the year to March 2026 against 24.9%, and 27.6% in the June quarter. There is no utilisation figure — only the chief financial officer saying the HFC facilities "continue to operate at high utilization levels". In packaging film the measure is the share of value-added product, because thin film is priced off polyester. SRF does not give that either. What it gave was a June-quarter EBIT margin of 17.3% against 9.9%, on plants management described as "operating flat out 100% capacity" while competitors' were not. In technical textiles it is domestic position, where the company says it leads Indian tyre cord and is the world's second largest maker of conveyor belting fabric. That margin went from 8.1% to 18.1%, helped by a stay order on quality control rules management expects to normalise. The gap is the same in all three: no capacity utilisation number anywhere.
No, it is not debt free, and it is not trying to be. At 31 March 2026 SRF owed ₹5,083 crore against ₹611 crore of cash — net debt of ₹4,472 crore, set against ₹14,043 crore of shareholders' money. Debt to equity of 0.36, on borrowings that rose during the year from ₹4,726 crore. For a company mid-way through a building programme, coverage matters more than the ratio. Net debt was 1.1 times EBITDA, down from 1.3, and operating profit covered interest 12.3 times against 7.2. India Ratings affirmed IND AA+/Stable in June 2026 and expects leverage below 2 times through the FY27 and FY28 capex, with its downgrade trigger at 2.5. Repayments of ₹1,060 crore fall due in FY27, against ₹2,554 crore of operating cash flow and ₹3,040 crore of undrawn lines. The debt is deliberate, and the schedule is not tight.
Barely growing at the top line and profit up nearly half — which tells you the problem was the two years before this one. Revenue for the year to March 2026 was ₹15,787 crore, up 7.4%. Profit after tax ₹1,835 crore, up 46.7%. EBITDA margin went from 18.5% to 21.6%. The three-year record puts that in proportion: revenue has compounded at 2.0% a year since FY23 and profit has shrunk at 5.3%, because FY23 was a peak — ₹14,870 crore of revenue, ₹2,162 crore of profit — that FY24 and FY25 gave back. FY26 has only just passed the old revenue peak. Profit is still 15% below it. Then the June 2026 quarter: revenue ₹5,033 crore, up 32%, profit ₹759 crore, up 76%, the best quarter the company has had. Management's own framing is that it does not repeat at this level.
Comfortably — profit grew about six times faster than sales. Year to March 2026: revenue ₹15,787 crore against ₹14,693 crore, up 7.4%. Profit after tax ₹1,835 crore against ₹1,251 crore, up 46.7%. Earnings per share of ₹61.92. The gap is margin recovery rather than volume, and the two time frames disagree about what that means. Over three years revenue has compounded at 2.0% and profit has fallen 5.3% a year; over five, revenue has compounded at 13.4% and profit at 8.9%. The five-year reading is the fairer one, because FY23 sits in the middle of the three-year window as an unrepeatable peak. June 2026 quarter: revenue ₹5,033 crore, up 31.8%, and profit ₹759 crore, up 75.5%. Every segment grew, and the two that grew fastest were not the big one — packaging film and foil up 42%, technical textiles up 28%, chemicals up 26%.
No acquisitions at all, and most of last year's spending has not started earning yet. SRF bought no company during the year to March 2026 and sold none. It spent about ₹1,820 crore of capital expenditure, up from ₹1,230 crore, while the gross block moved 1.5% — from ₹13,720 crore to ₹13,926 crore. The money went into capital work in progress, which more than doubled from ₹811 crore to ₹1,889 crore. The named projects say where. At a new site in Odisha: a 20,000-tonne plant for fourth-generation refrigerants, a 30,000-tonne anhydrous hydrogen fluoride plant, a specialty fluoropolymers facility, and HFC capacity taken beyond 65,000 tonnes. In films, a capacitor-grade BOPP line capitalised in the June quarter and a ₹250 crore BOPET thick film line approved in July 2026 on a 24-month build. A ₹490 crore BOPP expansion has been deferred indefinitely. Planned spending for FY27 is ₹2,500 crore, with 75% to 80% of it in chemicals. All of it enters the return calculation before any of it earns.
Wider, by three points, and where it widened matters more than by how much. Group EBITDA margin was 21.6% for the year to March 2026 against 18.5%. Net margin, 11.6% against 8.5%. The segments locate it. Chemicals went from 24.9% to 29.1% at the EBIT line. Performance Films & Foil went from 6.6% to 8.8% — better, and still under a third of what chemicals earns on a business almost as large. The June quarter widened much further, to 27.3% against 22.3%, and that is the figure to hold at arm's length. Film earned 17.3% against 9.9%, on what the chief financial officer put down to competitors' plants going off stream and customers panic buying. He expects a fall back in Q2, to a floor he argues is above the 8% to 12% the business has averaged over a decade.
Fourteen per cent, rising, and still short of what this company used to earn. Return on capital employed was 14.1% for the year to March 2026 against 12.3%. Return on equity, 13.1% against 9.9%. Return on capital was 24.0% in FY22 and 22.4% in FY23, then fell to 12.7% and 12.3% as the chemicals downturn arrived and the asset base kept growing through it. India Ratings puts SRF's decadal average near 15%. Chemicals earned 21.4% on its own net assets, up from 17.1%. What pulls the average down is ₹5,764 crore of film and foil revenue at an 8.8% EBIT margin — and another ₹2,500 crore of spending is planned for FY27, none of it earning until it is finished.
Cash comes through. Collections have slipped. Operating cash flow over the three years to March 2026 was ₹7,135 crore against ₹4,422 crore of reported profit — 1.61 times. For FY26 alone, ₹2,554 crore against ₹1,835 crore. Getting paid took longer. Debtor days went from 53.9 to 59.2 and receivables from ₹2,169 crore to ₹2,562 crore, on revenue up 7.4% — the amount owed grew more than twice as fast as the sales behind it. Inventory days went from 58.4 to 64.5, and India Ratings puts the working capital cycle at 114 days against 94. Free cash flow was still positive, at about ₹200 crore after ₹1,820 crore of capital expenditure, for the second year running. Neither the annual report nor the July call explains the longer cycle.
Two brothers run it, with their father as chairman emeritus, and the stake that controls it sits in a separately listed company above them. Ashish Bharat Ram is chairman and managing director. Kartik Bharat Ram is joint managing director, reappointed from June 2026 to March 2031 subject to shareholder approval. Arun Bharat Ram is chairman emeritus. Pramod G. Gujarathi is a whole-time director for safety and environment. Samir Kashyap is president and chief financial officer, and takes the earnings calls; Rajat Lakhanpal is company secretary. The board is ten. Six are independent — Bharti Gupta Ramola, Puneet Yadu Dalmia, Ira Gupta, Yash Gupta, Vineet Agarwal and Raj Kumar Jain — and Vellayan Subbiah sits as non-executive but not independent. One person holds both the chair and the chief executive's role, which is a structure worth noting rather than a finding. The group underneath is simple for its size: eight subsidiaries, every one wholly owned, two in India and six abroad, holding the plants in Thailand, South Africa and Hungary and the aluminium foil business at home. Above it, KAMA Holdings Limited is the holding company and the ABR Family Trust the ultimate holding entity.
Clean opinion, tax claims cut in half, and one disclosure about who did the audit rather than what it found. B S R & Co. LLP signed both the standalone and consolidated accounts for FY26 with no qualification, reservation, adverse remark or disclaimer, and no emphasis of matter. One key audit matter on both: the judgement in hedge accounting for foreign currency derivatives. Contingent liabilities fell from ₹541 crore to ₹265 crore, or 14% of a year's profit. A ₹235 crore goods and services tax demand on export refunds was set aside on appeal, and income tax demands of ₹19.96 crore and ₹57.94 crore were reduced to nil by the tribunal. What remains is ordinary: GST, customs and captive-power matters, none above ₹50 crore. The item worth naming sits in the audit report's other-matter paragraph. All eight subsidiaries were audited by other firms — ₹3,293 crore of revenue, about a fifth of the group. Normal for overseas plants, plainly disclosed, and it means the opinion on that fifth rests on other auditors' reports.
Its competition comes in three separate sets, and no company appears in more than one of them. In fluorochemicals the rivals are Navin Fluorine and Gujarat Fluorochemicals. In packaging film, the Indian and Asian BOPET and BOPP makers — where SRF's edge is eight plants across four countries, which is why it kept supplying through the Middle East disruption when others could not. In technical textiles, a short domestic list, and SRF says it leads Indian tyre cord and is the world's second largest maker of conveyor belting fabric. The case for the shape is that the parts do not fail together: film earned a 4.6% EBIT margin in FY24 and 6.6% in FY25, and chemicals carried the group through both. The case against it is arithmetic — a business earning 29.1% averaged with one earning 8.8% returns 14.1% on capital. Management is resolving that by weight rather than by exit. Chemicals has gone 47.9%, 45.5%, 49.3% of revenue over three years, and 75% to 80% of planned capital spending goes there.
It is the largest of the specialty chemicals companies covered here and the cheapest of them, and both facts come from the same place. Revenue of ₹15,787 crore in the year to March 2026 is twice Deepak Nitrite's ₹7,887 crore and nearly five times Navin Fluorine's ₹3,314 crore; Acutaas Chemicals and Aether Industries are smaller again. On earnings, SRF traded at 41.7 times against Deepak Nitrite at 44.0, Navin Fluorine at 66.1, Acutaas at 74.9 and Aether at 100.1 — the lowest multiple of the five. The margin column explains it. SRF's group EBITDA margin is 21.6%, where Navin earns 32.6%, Aether 31.3% and Acutaas 35.9%. Its chemicals business is in their league — 29.1% EBIT margin, 21.4% return on its own net assets — but it is half the company, and the other half is packaging film at 8.8%. A buyer of SRF gets the chemicals business at a discount and the film business as part of the deal. The comparison that is missing matters more than any of these. Gujarat Fluorochemicals is SRF's closest rival in refrigerants and fluoropolymers and is not covered on this site.
Helping: refrigerant gas prices management says have finally arrived, and a war that handed the film business its best quarter ever. Hurting: Chinese pricing in specialty chemicals, and the fact that neither of the first two repeats at this level. Refrigerants drove both the FY26 recovery and the June quarter. Management holds guidance of 15% to 20% revenue growth in chemicals for FY27 after delivering 26% in Q1, and says the Odisha capacity will put SRF among the top three or four refrigerant gas makers in the world once commissioned. The film quarter has a stated cause. "In a perverse way, the war has helped us," the chief financial officer said — competitors' plants going off stream while SRF ran flat out, plus a spell of panic buying that brought in buyers who had never been customers. He expects Q2 to fall back, while arguing the floor is now above the 8% to 12% the business has averaged over a decade. Against that: specialty chemicals still faces "pricing pressure across both our and customers' end-markets due to competition from Chinese players", and the six or seven agrochemical active ingredients SRF has ready are waiting on registrations its customers control — "we definitely are ready. But there is this last mile piece." The fluoropolymer programme, including the Chemours arrangement whose timelines slipped this quarter, does not reach meaningful volume until FY29.
Three industries with three different clocks, which is the whole reason to read SRF one segment at a time. Refrigerants are the closest thing here to legislated growth. The global phase-down of high-warming gases turns supply into quota and pushes demand toward fourth-generation molecules — a decade-long shift rather than a cycle, currently in the good half of it. Fine chemicals for agrochemical innovators is the opposite. It has spent two years being priced down by Chinese capacity and by generic pressure on the innovators themselves, and it turns only when those customers restart product registrations — a decision taken on someone else's timetable. Packaging film is a commodity priced off polyester, in an industry that adds capacity in waves: the last two years took its margin to 4.6%, and the June 2026 quarter took it to 17.3% on a supply shock nobody planned. None of this is boom-and-bust the way a sugar mill is. But the group number averages four things moving independently, and reading one quarter of it as a trend is the mistake this business invites.
The cheapest entry on this site into a chemicals business earning 29% margins — provided you accept owning a packaging film business alongside it. At ₹2,583 on 26 August 2026 SRF was worth ₹76,560 crore: 41.7 times the year to March 2026's earnings, 5.4 times book, 4.9 times sales. That is the lowest earnings multiple of the five specialty chemicals companies covered here, on a share that has fallen 9.4% over twelve months in which profit rose 46.7%. The bull case is that the multiple is attached to a depressed number: profit is still 15% below FY23's ₹2,162 crore, and ₹1,889 crore of plant sits in construction earning nothing. The bear case is that it is attached to a flattered one. The June quarter was the best in the company's history and management said it does not repeat. You are buying the average of four businesses, not the quarter.
Expensive against the market, cheap against everything it is usually compared with. On 26 August 2026 the share was ₹2,583 — 41.7 times earnings of ₹61.92, 5.4 times book and 4.9 times sales. Most Indian companies trade between 20 and 30 times earnings, so on the absolute yardstick this is dear. The earnings yield is 2.4%, and the stock sits 19% below its 52-week high of ₹3,190. Set against the other specialty chemicals companies covered here it is the cheapest of five: Deepak Nitrite at 44.0, Navin Fluorine at 66.1, Acutaas at 74.9, Aether at 100.1. No growth-adjusted multiple is shown, and the reason is worth stating rather than leaving blank. Profit has fallen at 5.3% a year over three years. Dividing a multiple by a negative growth rate produces a number that looks like information and is not.
Both, in opposite directions, and they very nearly cancel out. Institutions held 37.89% at 30 June 2026 against 37.08% a year earlier — up 0.81 of a point, which is stability rather than a trend. Underneath it are two straight lines. Foreign institutions have sold in every one of the six quarters filed, from 18.27% in March 2025 to 15.45%. Domestic institutions have bought in every one, from 18.43% to 22.44%, with mutual funds alone going from 10.36% a year ago to 13.47%. The retail public went from 12.61% to 11.81%, and the number of shareholders fell 7.9%, from 192,618 to 177,423 — fewer individual holders, each owning a smaller share, over a year in which the stock fell 9%. Promoters did not move a share.
Seven holders clear 1%, and the list turned over almost completely in a year. At 30 June 2026: Kotak Aggressive Hybrid Fund 4.88%, LICI New Endowment Plus-Secured Fund 3.33%, Government Pension Fund Global — Norway's sovereign fund — 1.98%, the Government of Singapore 1.75%, an NPS Trust account run by LIC Pension Fund 1.42%, Amansa Holdings 1.17% and HDFC Life 1.04%. Mutual funds together hold 13.47%. Four of those seven were not above 1% a year earlier, and three that were have dropped below — though some of that is one fund house shifting money between its own schemes, with Kotak and LIC on both lists under different scheme names. The name to follow is Amansa Holdings, the only foreign holder here that is neither an index nor a sovereign fund. It held 3.22% in March 2025 and 1.17% in June 2026.
₹9 a share, not one new share issued, and no buyback. SRF paid two interim dividends for the year to March 2026, ₹4 and ₹5, totalling ₹266.77 crore against ₹213.43 crore the year before. No final dividend was proposed. That is 14.6% of profit, and a yield of about 0.35% at ₹2,583 on 26 August 2026. The board declared a further ₹5 interim alongside the June 2026 results. It raised no equity — the annual report states that no funds were raised through a preferential allotment or a qualified institutions placement — and there was no buyback. The share count has stood at 296,424,825 since FY22 and has moved 0.07% in five years. Almost nothing here is unusual except how little has happened. For a company spending ₹1,820 crore a year on plants and planning ₹2,500 crore next year, funding that from cash flow and borrowing rather than from shareholders is the coherent choice, and the small dividend is the residual it leaves.
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