D.P. Mangal retired from the textile industry at 62, in 2009, after three decades running other people’s spinning mills. Instead of easing into retirement, he took his provident fund and his elder son’s savings, put in ₹31 crore, and started Lagnam Spintex, a cotton yarn manufacturer in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. Fifteen years later, Lagnam Spintex is listed on the NSE, exports yarn across three continents, and turns over roughly ₹600 crore a year.
Mangal’s career had already given him the two things most first-time founders don’t have: four decades of knowing exactly how a spinning mill works, and a retirement corpus to bet on it. What it hadn’t given him was any guarantee the bet would pay off. It very nearly didn’t, twice.
Who is D.P. Mangal, and why didn’t he retire quietly at 62?
Mangal was born in October 1948 in a small town in Rajasthan, into what he describes as a strict middle-class family that expected him to finish college and take a salaried job. He wanted to be a chartered accountant instead. In 1969, he left home for Bombay to article for his CA degree.
“In 1969, I was just having 72 rupees in my pocket.”
He qualified as a CA in November 1973, and spent the next 36 years climbing the management ranks of India’s textile industry: Financial Controller at RSWM (part of the LNJ Bhilwara Group) from 1980, a stint at a Birla-group hand tools company where a mentor pushed him off the finance track and onto the factory floor to learn production and quality control, six years as Chief Executive of JCT Limited’s textile operations from 1989 (roughly 10,000 workers across three plants, producing close to 10 million metres of fabric a month), and finally back to the Bhilwara Group in 1995 as President and CEO, a role he held until he retired at the end of 2009.
By his own account, retirement lasted about as long as it took him to get bored.
“I want to be active. I can’t be just have a retired life.”
He looked at consulting, at medical textiles, at geotextiles used under roads in Europe. He settled on the one thing he had done for 30 years: spinning cotton into yarn.
What did four decades at RSWM, JCT and the Birla Group teach him about running a mill?
Two lessons carried straight into Lagnam Spintex. The first came from his RSWM chairman, who insisted on buying the newest machinery available anywhere in the world, not just in India, on the logic that technology was the only reliable route to consistent quality. Mangal ran the same playbook at Lagnam: he opened with open-end spinning machines that were, in his words, the best available globally at the time, not merely the best he could afford in India.
The second lesson was about cash. Cotton is a seasonal, volatile commodity, bought heaviest between October and March, and a spinning mill without enough working capital gets squeezed by whoever it’s buying from or selling to. Mangal built Lagnam on a conservative financing policy from day one: enough of a liquidity cushion to buy cotton on his own terms, never the market’s.
Son Anand Mangal, a Bradford-educated banker who had spent five years in ICICI Bank’s corporate banking division, joined him as co-founder. They incorporated Lagnam Spintex in June 2010 and moved their base from Delhi to Bhilwara.
How did Lagnam Spintex turn a profit in its very first year on just ₹31 crore?
The first project cost ₹31 crore, all in: land, plant, machinery and working capital. Banks typically ask promoters to fund 30% of a project themselves; Mangal put in ₹9 crore from his retirement benefits and his son’s savings, and borrowed the remaining ₹22 crore from the State Bank of Bikaner and Jaipur, which sanctioned the loan within 15 days once it saw the promoters were funding the rest themselves.
Lagnam started small, with four open-end machines, and made a taxable profit in its very first year, an outcome Mangal calls rare in the industry. Revenue was ₹36.5 crore in the first full year and grew to roughly ₹84-85 crore by FY18, on the back of open-end yarn sold mainly to denim manufacturers. The company expanded machine by machine rather than all at once, adding capacity in 2015-16 and again in 2016-17 as cash allowed, and started exporting from its second year of operation, in a segment of the industry (open-end, or “waste,” spinning) that most Indian mills at the time treated as a low-quality afterthought. Mangal’s mills never ran it that way, which is a large part of why the export numbers eventually took off.
How does Lagnam Spintex turn raw cotton into export-ready yarn?
Lagnam buys raw cotton from ginners rather than directly from farmers, then runs it through blow room, carding and drawing frame machines to convert it from raw fibre into sliver, and finally into yarn on open-end and, later, ring spinning machines. Open-end yarn, coarser and cheaper to make, went mostly into denim and home textiles like towels. Ring-spun yarn, which needs a bigger capital investment and a longer manufacturing process, is finer and goes into higher-value products including t-shirt fabric.
The company’s current output splits roughly 60% into fibre and 40% into denim and other home-textile uses, with export accounting for effectively all of the fibre-grade ring yarn it produces. Lagnam sits upstream of a textile supply chain that other Founder Thesis guests are working to digitize further down the line, including Lal10’s push to bring India’s handloom and textile clusters online.
Why did Lagnam Spintex’s SME IPO crash within a month of listing?
By 2018, Mangal wanted to add a ring-spinning line, a ₹125 crore expansion against ₹84-85 crore in existing turnover. He raised ₹94 crore in term loans from SBI and PNB inside two months. The harder problem was the remaining ₹24 crore, which he decided to raise by listing Lagnam on the NSE’s SME platform, a lighter-compliance exchange built for smaller companies without a long track record.
The issue priced at ₹41 a share, valuing the company at roughly ₹68-70 crore, and was oversubscribed 5.5 times. Then it opened for trading.
“That was the most disappointing day I would say I remember in my life.”
The stock fell from 41 rupees to around 18 within a month, a straight decline with no buyers on most days, even as the company’s underlying numbers stayed strong. Mangal, whose entire personal net worth was tied up in the company, says he refused to intervene to prop up the price, since every rupee he had was already committed to the expansion, not to market support. The SME platform’s investor base, he found, skewed heavily toward short-term traders rather than the long-term institutional buyers a listing is supposed to attract. It took roughly two years, and the business actually getting bigger, for the stock to recover.
How did the company survive the US-China trade war and Covid, back to back?
The new ring-spinning plant was commissioned in July 2019, two months ahead of schedule. Almost immediately, the US-China trade war crushed international cotton prices, hurting margins across the Indian textile sector just as Lagnam had taken on new debt to fund fresh capacity. Then, in March 2020, the government ordered a nationwide Covid lockdown and the factory shut overnight.
Despite both shocks landing in the same fiscal year, Lagnam’s turnover still grew, from roughly ₹80 crore to ₹176 crore, on the strength of the new capacity coming online. The following year was, in Mangal’s words, one of the best in the company’s history. Lagnam paid its first dividend in FY20 and a combined 10% payout in FY22, and on 30 September 2021 it migrated from the restrictive SME platform, where a single trade requires a minimum lot of 3,000 shares, to the NSE mainboard, where anyone can buy a single share.
How big has Lagnam Spintex grown, and what’s the ₹218 crore bet on premium yarn?
At the time of this interview, Lagnam’s turnover stood at roughly ₹348 crore, with an EPS of about ₹16 and export revenue that had compounded at close to 95% annually over the prior six years. The company had also begun a third expansion, a ₹218 crore push into compact-spun yarn, a higher-value product used in premium t-shirt fabric, funded by a ₹163 crore term loan and ₹55 crore from its own reserves.
Public exchange data shows that expansion paying off since: Lagnam’s trailing revenue now sits in the ₹580-600 crore range, roughly 17x what the company made in its first full year, with Anand Mangal running day-to-day operations as Managing Director while his father continues as Chairman. Lagnam has also been certified by Uster Technologies for its open-end yarn quality, a distinction the company says fewer than two dozen mills worldwide hold.
For a man who started with ₹72 in his pocket and, decades later, a retirement package he chose not to spend on retirement, it is not a bad second act.
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