Pragnesh Jethwa of KRN Heat Exchanger and Refrigeration Limited outlines the company’s journey from a quality-led startup to a fast-growing manufacturer, driven by strong delivery and word-of-mouth growth. He highlights expansion into new products, a state-of-the-art facility, and emerging opportunities across HVAC, data centre cooling, and global markets.
Anjali Palod: Hello and welcome, you are watching Small Cap Spotlight and today on the show we are joined by Pragnesh Jethva, the President of Sales and Export at KRN Heat Exchanger. Welcome Pragnesh to the show. Thank you.
And I want to start right at the very basics. Take us through what the business of KRN Heat Exchanger is and the journey that the company has had so far.
Pragnesh Jethva: Okay, so KRN Heat Exchanger and Refrigeration Limited, the journey started about 7 years back in 2017 when Mr. Santosh Kumar Yadav, the founder and now the Chairman and Managing Director of the company, so he started, he had a vision to initiate and manufacture good quality coil, let’s say heat exchanger coils to India as well as a vision to export, so develop business for making India and that’s how we started manufacturing in 2018 and never looked back, so without a dedicated sales, marketing and business development team for last 5-6 years, we have been growing pretty good with just word of mouth, with dedicated consistency in quality and delivery of products, we managed to achieve such a good growth in the business and KRN is into manufacturing and design of heat exchanger coils for both HVAC and refrigeration industry and I think we became one of the youngest manufacturing company in India to go for a full-fledged IPO in 2024 and within one year, we managed to kind of gave a return almost like 4-5 times to the investors who trusted in KRN and with the money, we’ve invested in a fully kind of state of the art manufacturing facility which we just inaugurated yesterday, although we started manufacturing couple of months back but the facility was officially inaugurated yesterday and which has got much more capabilities and capacity compared to our current manufacturing where we were able to manufacture about 1 million units annually and with the new facility, we are able to manufacture additional 4 million units capacity we have plus we added a couple of new products, also the assembly units.
Anjali Palod: So, what are your key products right now, the key category is the best selling product that you have?
Pragnesh Jethva: So, currently I would say the main product we have is heat exchanger coils which is actually an expanded tube and fin design coil. So, that’s the main product and then we ventured into all aluminium products which is going to be a trend in near future, we are investing also into micro channel heat exchanger which I think the plant will be ready to produce by end of this year and that will I think suffice because you know current trend of metals, the copper prices are going high. So, everybody is looking at an alternate solution and aluminium would be a good solution because the pricing has been consistent at around 2 to 3 thousand.
Anjali Palod: So, that is a new category also that you will be exploring, but I also want to get a sense of your journey with KRN so far, how long have you been working here, what is it that you got from your previous experiences to KRN?
Pragnesh Jethva: So, I started, I would say like I started my journey with automotive industry, so about 18 to 19 years of experience in the automotive field, but that too into heat exchangers with for engine cooling side and then I got into HVAC and refrigeration industry about 7 years back. So, I had almost like 6 years of experience in HVAC and refrigeration industry also again into from the heat exchanger coil side or component side I would say and then was back for about a year and a half into automotive and that is where like about 2, 2 and a half years back I met Mr. Santosh Kumar Yadav and I personally liked him very much, he was like very down to earth and very, I would say, approachable person and I saw his vision and mission to grow and that is what we see in reality as well that the company has been growing pretty fast, good decisions and good quality product at competitive lead times which is what is the demand or need for the day to day.
Anjali Palod: So, Mr. Pragnesh, give us an idea of the industries that you largely serve and are there newer industries that are now coming up that are seeing much more demand than what they had earlier?
Pragnesh Jethva: Yeah, so we started serving to the refrigeration industry and then I mean HVAC definitely, so HVAC and refrigeration was the industry we started serving in but in that HVAC side the heat pump was a growing market starting from I think 2021, 2022 onwards especially in the European continent the heat pump was into demand and the growth was kind of exponential which again got little bit stagnant in 2024, 2025 because of the government policies but again we see there will be a huge demand both in European, I would say continent as well as North American continent and that’s going to like I would say as we speak the market potential would be more than $160 billion that’s what we see and the other segment which has even I mean as rapidly grown in recent past and we have been successfully or we have been successful in supplying our heat exchanger coils to that segment is a data centre cooling.
Right. So that is growing like today as we speak the business is around $400 billion and the expectations of or the projected growth for this business somewhere 10 years down the line let’s say 2035 would be over $1 trillion.
Anjali Palod: Right, of course. So since you look at the export part of the business Mr. Pragnesh, I want to ask you over the past year and a half you’ve also mentioned that there was stagnation. So how does a company your size look at these geopolitical risks and has there been a change in the strategy at KRN when it comes to exports?
Pragnesh Jethva: Well I mean that was the time when we were investing in this new facility and already we had enough you know capacity utilisation or kind of for the old or for the earlier units. So we were not much affected I would say in terms of this geopolitical situation on the heat pump segment side.
However, a couple of projects were put on hold kind of for the US market especially due to the terrorist situation but which has been resolved early this year. So again those projects have started moving and we do not see any hindrance kind of to expand our business especially in both these segments like data centre cooling as well as heat pump segment. Of course refrigeration is another segment especially in North American market which is also in demand and I mean our export is not right now I would say our export is very small percentage of our turnover like it’s under 20% and we would like to continuously or expand it further to a bigger percentage and that’s where I think our new facility which we set up and the complete product range we have which is one of the best in the industry I would say we got about 20 different fin tube geometries which not or rather none of our competitors have.
Anjali Palod: But other than the product range is there anything that helps you stand out from the competition?
Pragnesh Jethva: So consistency in quality and like competitive lead time. So we have one of the shortest manufacturing production lead times which helps us to support our customer and this way we are able to manage the company to grow and business to grow.
Anjali Palod: But another question I had about you know the industries that you are in heat exchangers how do you also address problems like we have seen with the copper prices surging? I am sure this is one of the many instances that you have seen of the raw material costs surging but like you mentioned having shorter lead times is one of your strengths.
So in situations like these how do you ensure that you know you are still able to deliver supply on time but also how do you maintain the pricing there?
Pragnesh Jethva: So we currently do quarterly pricing so like every quarter we issue new pricing based on the previous quarter average metal cost. So that way we mitigate the risk of price going up or down and also customer does not lose or we do not gain. So it’s a win-win situation for both customer and the supplier.
So manufacturers like us. So by giving some sort of a visibility of what prices for the next quarter will also look like gives the customers also some confidence in you know that the prices will remain at that level. So I take an example of this quarter Q1 2026 where everybody has seen a steep increase in copper prices.
However, we maintain our prices for this quarter based on the previous quarter average which are like about 10-15% lower on the average side.
Anjali Palod: But how does that affect your numbers?
Well, I would say in this quarter we have seen the order inflow a little more compared to the last quarter because everybody sees that the next quarter pricing will be slightly higher compared to this quarter because that will be this Q1 average for the Q2 pricing. So of course a lot of customers also I mean if they have advanced planning they take an advantage maybe order more and we are committed to the customers and the pricing we give.
So we deliver adhere to those pricing and deliver the products to them. That way it helps to the customer and we manage our average. Right.
Anjali Palod: But you spoke about new manufacturing units coming up, new products that also you are launching but give us more sense of what’s in store over the next year or the next 5 year horizon for KRN. What are some new industries you want to explore, new products or any financial timelines that you have in mind?
Pragnesh Jethva: Yeah, so new products we introduced I would say end of last year where one is a complete refrigeration segment where we introduced frost free evaporators, then roll bond evaporators as well as wire on tube condenser. These are the three main products for refrigeration industry.
Then we started doing some small assemblies like evaporator unit assemblies or condensing unit assemblies for our customers based on their requirements. Also we introduced dry coolers and adiabatic coolers. So these are some of the assemblies or kind of value add products which we do in addition.
So there the major component involved is the heat exchanger coil and then we have a complete backward integration of all the components including the sheet metal job. So that’s also in house. So then only I mean with few components outsourced we are able to you know offer a complete product.
Anjali Palod: And are you planning to also integrate that into your supply chain?
Pragnesh Jethva: Yes, that’s what. And plus new product what we are going to introduce by end of this year or beginning next year would be micro channel heat exchangers. So that is all aluminium and it will have a cost advantage as against the current copper and aluminium heat exchangers.
So since the pricing is going to go up that’s what we see right now it’s not coming down or consistently so we feel that we will be able to offer price advantage using the all aluminium micro channel heat exchanger to our customers.
Anjali Palod: Oh, where exactly is this cost advantage coming from?
Pragnesh Jethva: So all aluminium is made with aluminium. Right.
And the current one is copper tube with aluminium fins. So copper currently is trading at around $13,000 per tonne LME whereas aluminium is traded at around $3,000 per tonne. So there’s a clear cost advantage.
Anjali Palod: And do you feel like you will be the first ones to sort of make an all aluminium product there and give that cost advantage?
Pragnesh Jethva: Yeah, I would say for the HVAC industry we will be one of the leading manufacturers in India with a large capacity I would say. So today with this new facility which we inaugurated yesterday officially we have become I think one of the largest heat exchanger coil manufacturing company in India in terms of both capacity and capabilities. Yeah, so KR invested in a fully equipped psychometric lab with four chambers which we can use individually as lab or simultaneously together like we can have one ODU and three IDU can be tested simultaneously.
And the products we can test not only heat exchanger coils but also complete HVAC and refrigeration units from 0.5 tonne going up to 55 tonne rating which is equivalent to 200 kilowatts and we can maintain the atmosphere temperature from minus 20 degree going up to plus 60 degree. So these technologies and these new products that you are launching even the use of aluminium instead of copper you said comes with a cost advantage. Yeah.
Anjali Palod: So it will help you address more obviously more demand and be able to get more customers within the industries that you are in. Yes.
Anjali Palod: But does that also open up newer industries that you were not serving till now will that also become you know an opportunity for KRN?
Pragnesh Jethva: It will be because see microchannel we are introducing microchannel coil but it’s already there existing in the market.
Right. So we will be able to capture those business as well so that’s additional business plus we will be able to approach new segments like new automotive segments where we can offer just the condenser only as part. So definitely it will help us in both getting additional business as well as some new segments.
Anjali Palod: Okay. And any financial milestones that you have in mind for this year next five years?
Pragnesh Jethva: Yes. I think we are planning to with this introduction of new products and the new facility we are planning to almost double the sales.
Okay. In the next financial year and I mean we are going to have reasonably good exponential growth in the next coming years. So that’s our target.
Anjali Palod: And you have also mentioned that experts contribution to the overall revenue will also go up. Exactly. Now that you are also identifying different markets and if there’s anything that the past year and a half has taught all kinds of industries that diversification is something that is essential.
And I’m sure that KRN will also be doing its fair part in diversify. But with that Mr. Pragnesh thank you so much for joining us on SmallCap Spotlight and taking us through the business of KRN Heat Exchanger. This was a lovely, lovely chat.
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. So that was Pragnesh Jaita of KRN Heat Exchanger on Small Cap Spotlight.
Thank you so much for watching this video. Please like, share and subscribe.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
, the President of Sales and Export at KRN Heat Exchanger. Welcome Pragnesh to the show. Thank you.
And I want to start right at the very basics. Take us through what the business of KRN Heat Exchanger is and the journey that the company has had so far. Okay, so KRN Heat Exchanger and Refrigeration Limited, the journey started about 7 years back in 2017 when Mr. Santosh Kumar Yadav, the founder and now the Chairman and Managing Director of the company, so he started, he had a vision to initiate and manufacture good quality coil, let’s say heat exchanger coils to India as well as a vision to export, so develop business for making India and that’s how we started manufacturing in 2018 and never looked back, so without a dedicated sales, marketing and business development team for last 5-6 years, we have been growing pretty good with just word of mouth, with dedicated consistency in quality and delivery of products, we managed to achieve such a good growth in the business and KRN is into manufacturing and design of heat exchanger coils for both HVAC and refrigeration industry and I think we became one of the youngest manufacturing company in India to go for a full-fledged IPO in 2024 and within one year, we managed to kind of gave a return almost like 4-5 times to the investors who trusted in KRN and with the money, we’ve invested in a fully kind of state of the art manufacturing facility which we just inaugurated yesterday, although we started manufacturing couple of months back but the facility was officially inaugurated yesterday and which has got much more capabilities and capacity compared to our current manufacturing where we were able to manufacture about 1 million units annually and with the new facility, we are able to manufacture additional 4 million units capacity we have plus we added a couple of new products, also the assembly units.
So, what are your key products right now, the key category is the best selling product that you have? So, currently I would say the main product we have is heat exchanger coils which is actually an expanded tube and fin design coil. So, that’s the main product and then we ventured into all aluminium products which is going to be a trend in near future, we are investing also into micro channel heat exchanger which I think the plant will be ready to produce by end of this year and that will I think suffice because you know current trend of metals, the copper prices are going high. So, everybody is looking at an alternate solution and aluminium would be a good solution because the pricing has been consistent at around 2 to 3 thousand.
So, that is a new category also that you will be exploring, but I also want to get a sense of your journey with KRN so far, how long have you been working here, what is it that you got from your previous experiences to KRN? So, I started, I would say like I started my journey with automotive industry, so about 18 to 19 years of experience in the automotive field, but that too into heat exchangers with for engine cooling side and then I got into HVAC and refrigeration industry about 7 years back. So, I had almost like 6 years of experience in HVAC and refrigeration industry also again into from the heat exchanger coil side or component side I would say and then was back for about a year and a half into automotive and that is where like about 2, 2 and a half years back I met Mr. Santosh Kumar Yadav and I personally liked him very much, he was like very down to earth and very, I would say, approachable person and I saw his vision and mission to grow and that is what we see in reality as well that the company has been growing pretty fast, good decisions and good quality product at competitive lead times which is what is the demand or need for the day to day. So, Mr. Pravesh, give us an idea of the industries that you largely serve and are there newer industries that are now coming up that are seeing much more demand than what they had earlier? Yeah, so we started serving to the refrigeration industry and then I mean HVAC definitely, so HVAC and refrigeration was the industry we started serving in but in that HVAC side the heat pump was a growing market starting from I think 2021, 2022 onwards especially in the European continent the heat pump was into demand and the growth was kind of exponential which again got little bit stagnant in 2024, 2025 because of the government policies but again we see there will be a huge demand both in European, I would say continent as well as North American continent and that’s going to like I would say as we speak the market potential would be more than $160 billion that’s what we see and the other segment which has even I mean as rapidly grown in recent past and we have been successfully or we have been successful in supplying our heat exchanger coils to that segment is a data centre cooling.
Right. So that is growing like today as we speak the business is around $400 billion and the expectations of or the projected growth for this business somewhere 10 years down the line let’s say 2035 would be over $1 trillion. Right, of course.
So since you look at the export part of the business Mr. Pravesh, I want to ask you over the past year and a half you’ve also mentioned that there was stagnation. So how does a company your size look at these geopolitical risks and has there been a change in the strategy at KRN when it comes to exports? Well I mean that was the time when we were investing in this new facility and already we had enough you know capacity utilisation or kind of for the old or for the earlier units. So we were not much affected I would say in terms of this geopolitical situation on the heat pump segment side.
However, a couple of projects were put on hold kind of for the US market especially due to the terrorist situation but which has been resolved early this year. So again those projects have started moving and we do not see any hindrance kind of to expand our business especially in both these segments like data centre cooling as well as heat pump segment. Of course refrigeration is another segment especially in North American market which is also in demand and I mean our export is not right now I would say our export is very small percentage of our turnover like it’s under 20% and we would like to continuously or expand it further to a bigger percentage and that’s where I think our new facility which we set up and the complete product range we have which is one of the best in the industry I would say we got about 20 different fin tube geometries which not or rather none of our competitors have.
But other than the product range is there anything that helps you stand out from the competition? So consistency in quality and like competitive lead time. So we have one of the shortest manufacturing production lead times which helps us to support our customer and this way we are able to manage the company to grow and business to grow. But another question I had about you know the industries that you are in heat exchangers how do you also address problems like we have seen with the copper prices surging? I am sure this is one of the many instances that you have seen of the raw material costs surging but like you mentioned having shorter lead times is one of your strengths.
So in situations like these how do you ensure that you know you are still able to deliver supply on time but also how do you maintain the pricing there? So we currently do quarterly pricing so like every quarter we issue new pricing based on the previous quarter average metal cost. So that way we mitigate the risk of price going up or down and also customer does not lose or we do not gain. So it’s a win-win situation for both customer and the supplier.
So manufacturers like us. So by giving some sort of a visibility of what prices for the next quarter will also look like gives the customers also some confidence in you know that the prices will remain at that level. So I take an example of this quarter Q1 2026 where everybody has seen a steep increase in copper prices.
However, we maintain our prices for this quarter based on the previous quarter average which are like about 10-15% lower on the average side. But how does that affect your numbers? Well, I would say in this quarter we have seen the order inflow a little more compared to the last quarter because everybody sees that the next quarter pricing will be slightly higher compared to this quarter because that will be this Q1 average for the Q2 pricing. So of course a lot of customers also I mean if they have advanced planning they take an advantage maybe order more and we are committed to the customers and the pricing we give.
So we deliver adhere to those pricing and deliver the products to them. That way it helps to the customer and we manage our average. Right.
But you spoke about new manufacturing units coming up, new products that also you are launching but give us more sense of what’s in store over the next year or the next 5 year horizon for KRN. What are some new industries you want to explore, new products or any financial timelines that you have in mind? Yeah, so new products we introduced I would say end of last year where one is a complete refrigeration segment where we introduced frost free evaporators, then roll bond evaporators as well as wire on tube condenser. These are the three main products for refrigeration industry.
Then we started doing some small assemblies like evaporator unit assemblies or condensing unit assemblies for our customers based on their requirements. Also we introduced dry coolers and adiabatic coolers. So these are some of the assemblies or kind of value add products which we do in addition.
So there the major component involved is the heat exchanger coil and then we have a complete backward integration of all the components including the sheet metal job. So that’s also in house. So then only I mean with few components outsourced we are able to you know offer a complete product.
And are you planning to also integrate that into your supply chain? Yes, that’s what. And plus new product what we are going to introduce by end of this year or beginning next year would be micro channel heat exchangers. So that is all aluminium and it will have a cost advantage as against the current copper and aluminium heat exchangers.
So since the pricing is going to go up that’s what we see right now it’s not coming down or consistently so we feel that we will be able to offer price advantage using the all aluminium micro channel heat exchanger to our customers. Oh, where exactly is this cost advantage coming from? So all aluminium is made with aluminium. Right.
And the current one is copper tube with aluminium fins. So copper currently is trading at around $13,000 per tonne LME whereas aluminium is traded at around $3,000 per tonne. So there’s a clear cost advantage.
And do you feel like you will be the first ones to sort of make an all aluminium product there and give that cost advantage? Yeah, I would say for the HVAC industry we will be one of the leading manufacturers in India with a large capacity I would say. So today with this new facility which we inaugurated yesterday officially we have become I think one of the largest heat exchanger coil manufacturing company in India in terms of both capacity and capabilities. Yeah, so KR invested in a fully equipped psychometric lab with four chambers which we can use individually as lab or simultaneously together like we can have one ODU and three IDU can be tested simultaneously.
And the products we can test not only heat exchanger coils but also complete HVAC and refrigeration units from 0.5 tonne going up to 55 tonne rating which is equivalent to 200 kilowatts and we can maintain the atmosphere temperature from minus 20 degree going up to plus 60 degree. So these technologies and these new products that you are launching even the use of aluminium instead of copper you said comes with a cost advantage. Yeah.
So it will help you address more obviously more demand and be able to get more customers within the industries that you are in. Yes. But does that also open up newer industries that you were not serving till now will that also become you know an opportunity for KRL? It will be because see microchannel we are introducing microchannel coil but it’s already there existing in the market.
Right. So we will be able to capture those business as well so that’s additional business plus we will be able to approach new segments like new automotive segments where we can offer just the condenser only as part. So definitely it will help us in both getting additional business as well as some new segments.
Okay. And any financial milestones that you have in mind for this year next five years? Yes. I think we are planning to with this introduction of new products and the new facility we are planning to almost double the sales.
Okay. In the next financial year and I mean we are going to have reasonably good exponential growth in the next coming years. So that’s our target.
And you have also mentioned that experts contribution to the overall revenue will also go up. Exactly. Now that you are also identifying different markets and if there’s anything that the past year and a half has taught all kinds of industries that diversification is something that is essential.
And I’m sure that KRN will also be doing its fair part in diversify. But with that Mr. Pragnesh thank you so much for joining us on Small Cap Spotlight and taking us through the business of KRN Heat Exchanger. This was a lovely, lovely chat.
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity. So that was Pragnesh Jethva of KRN Heat Exchanger on SmallCap Spotlight.
Thank you so much for watching this video. Please like, share and subscribe.