Marble quarries operator Fox Marble Holdings PLC (LON:FOX) has bagged a breakthrough order from an Indian marble export house.
The company upped its 2017 order book size from €2.9mln to €4.1mln as it unveiled a three-year deal with Mahadev Marmo, India’s second largest green marble export house, worth US$1.8mln a year.
To put that into perspective, in the first half of 2016, Fox Marble had sales of €262,000.
It is the company’s first customer in India, and follows delivery of three sample blocks of Fox Marble’s Illirico Selene (silver grey) block marble in December from its newest quarry, the Malesheva quarry in Kosovo.
Fox Marble’s quarry operations are currently shut down for the winter, but are scheduled to re-open in March, at which point the company will start shipping around 1,000 tonnes a month of marble to India.
"This new sales order and sales agreement marks our first move into the significant and potentially lucrative Indian marble market. After a marketing drive in country, we were delighted to see commercial traction and demand for our marble product as a new and exciting stone,” said Chris Gilbert, chief executive officer of Fox Marble.
“This new relationship with Mahadev has been the result of many months of work to establish a secure supply chain in India and we look forward to working with them during the course of 2017, where we anticipate receiving further significant orders," he added.
The news follows last week’s news of several prestigious orders to supply marble to top-of-the-range residential developments.
Shares in Fox Marble rose 17% to 9.32p on the news.
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