Recording the history of Nellore

Business, People

Dodla Sunil Reddy of Dodla Dairy, Nellore

Dodla Sunil Reddy is the son of leading Nellore industrialist Dodla Sesha Reddy, founder chairman of Nelcast Ltd in Gudur. Nelcast manufactures a wide range of ductile iron and grey iron castings like cylinder blocks, housings, rear hubs, spring, shackle, brackets, and exhaust manifolds for the automotive industry.
Dodla family hails from Buchireddypalem, near Nellore. In fact Buchireddypalem is a settlement established by their ancestors in 18th century (Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchireddypalem).  Dodla family donated hundreds of acres of land for health and educational purposes and even built the first women’s college in Nellore.
After completing his industrial engineering degree from Manipal, Sunil Reddy tried his hand at various businesses including mushroom cultivation, mango exports and construction business. Taking a clue from his father-in-law MS Reddy, a dairy scientist, Sunil Reddy finally launched Dodla Dairy from Chennai in 1995. The company moved its headquarters to Hyderabad in 2006.
Dodla Dairy’s first factory in Nellore, on the banks of Pennar river, became operational in 1997. Dodla family’s goodwill came in handy to easily procure milk from Nellore villagers. The company now processes over a million litres of milk per day in 11 processing plants with the milk sourced from over 2 lakh farmers and 66 chilling stations in Andhra, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. The dairy employs about 1400 people and clocked sales of ₹1,600 crore last year. In the next five years, the company aims to boost sales to ₹2,500 crore and go for an IPO.
Besides milk, the dairy makes and sells milk products like curd, ghee, butter and paneer, not only in South India but also in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. It plans to enter into health drinks segment soon.
Sunil Reddy forayed into the African market in 2014, by acquiring Hillside Dairy and Agriculture Ltd, which owns a processing unit in Mbarara, Uganda. He also plans to enter Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the US in next 2-3 years.
Sunil Reddy established Global Vet Med Concepts, a company in private public partnership with the Government of AP and involved in the research of Dairy farming, Animal Nutrition and Animal Breeding.

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