Kolkata, June 4 (IANS) Kishore Chhabria-promoted Allied Blenders and Distillers (ABD) is planning for an initial public offering (IPO) in the middle of 2011, a top company official said Friday.

‘Hope, around middle of 2011 we will be ready with the IPO,’ Deepak Roy, chief executive officer, told reporters here.

He, however, declined to divulge the IPO size. ‘Overall we are not going to dilute beyond 26 percent,’ he said.

Roy was in the city to launch the premium dark rum Jolly Roger.

The company with flagship brand Officer’s Choice has been planning to shift focus from one brand and diversify into multiple brands for sometime now. Recently, it had launched Class Grain Vodka and Wodka Gorbatschow.

‘We plan to launch one new brand every year for the next three years,’ Roy said.

ABD is also looking at diluting around 5-10 percent stake to some private equity (PE) players to raise around Rs.50 crore, Roy said.

The company is in talks with three-four PE players, most of whom are from overeas, he said.

ABD has a capital expenditure plan of Rs.250 crore for the next three years, Roy said. This money would be spent in setting up a new bottling unit, a distillery plant and launching new brands.

‘We are planning to come up with a bottling unit in south India in the next 12-18 months,’ he said.

About a distillery plant in West Bengal, he said the company is waiting for a licence from the state government for which it had applied nine months ago.

‘We have already got an expression of interest offering us some land in Haldia. The issue is getting the licence,’ Roy said.

ABD is planning to make a Rs.120-crore distillery plant in the state with a capacity of 100 kl per day. Asked about how the project would be funded, he said: ‘Rs.120 crore would be funded partly by private equity and the rest by debt. But the ratio of that has not been decided yet.’