Dear Shareholders,

I am proud to say that the year gone by has been a record year for us in many aspects. We hit our all-time highest ever revenues, volumes, EBITDA and profitability. We must also remember that this was a year of increasing costs. Freight, energy costs, packing costs, costs of auxiliaries such as SPCs, spin finish oils, chemicals, dyes, etc. went up significantly. It was especially encouraging to achieve these numbers in such a fiscal. This year was important not just for the financial records but also a few non-financial milestones that our business accomplished this year which I've highlighted below.

• This year was yet another year where we grew the volumes of value-added products such as Comfeel, Automotive Yarns, IDY, Wonderfeel, Sorona, SDN etc.
• For the first time in our company's history we been able to successfully commercialise patent pending yarns. Due to the popularity and market fitment of some of these innovations, we have been able to commercialise several of these proprietary products in an incredibly short time frame. This year we have received bulk orders (post successful customer trials) in innovations such as Synergy, Kashmere and Hygeia. We hope to add more to this list in the coming few years. This together with our value added yarns mentioned above should make our business incrementally more robust.

I believe that we continue to become incrementally more robust as a business with each passing year. While we will feel the gyrations of economic cycles, I believe that the amplitude of the fluctuation of our results will reduce as we continue along our journey. While we haven’t completely transformed yet, I believe that we are closer than when we started. Our view of the competitive environment and corresponding investment decisions, too, have come a long way since we started this journey and we are incrementally outsourcing parts of the business which can easily be made by others.

As I write, however, while the cost pressures have begun to ease, slowing demand is already beginning to dent our capacity utilisations. The biggest impact is coming to us from the fact that people world over are moving their spending habits from purchasing goods to services which was artificially suppressed during the peak pandemic years. This, of course, was a tailwind for us in the previous fiscal as people sat at home and spent significantly on goods, in particular, on improving their homes. Furthermore, if we see drop in raw material prices, while this may be good for the medium to long term, this may create an impact on short term profitability as we take stock losses. Nonetheless, we continue to tirelessly execute on previously identified opportunities and discover new ones that will help us to maintain or increase our base of earnings

• We have committed capacity expansion in some of the value added products named above with customers expecting us to increase volumes. We hope to commercialise this additional capacity towards the end of H2. We have also geared up sales/marketing efforts in these areas and hope to widen our net.
• One of the key challenges in the coming year will be maintaining capacity utilisations in an atmosphere of slowing global economy. As I write this letter, utilisations are down 10% and one of the biggest priorities this year will be to find business with which we can fill this gap.
• Needless to say, moving up the pyramid of specialisation is a continuous goal for us at AYM. We continue to work on identifying new niches in and around the market areas that we operate in. We hope to introduce some new products in the technical area this year through new capacity (and capability) that we hope to commission this year. Our interest would be to find more such small to mid size opportunity baskets which might not be sizeable enough to attract some of the larger low cost players but are significant in size and margin accretive for us