What goes into the price of a kilo of Ne 30s yarn

Yarn prices change every week because they follow the cotton market, which can make quotes feel arbitrary. Here is roughly how a kilo of our carded Ne 30s hosiery yarn breaks down at a typical recent price of ₹255 ex-mill Salem, before GST. Cotton is by far the largest part. To produce one kilo of carded yarn, we need about 1.12 kg of cotton, because roughly 11 per cent is lost as waste in the blow room, carding and spinning. At a cotton price of around ₹165 per kilo of lint, that comes to about ₹185 per kilo of yarn. Some of the waste is sold to open-end spinners, which recovers about ₹6.

Power is the next big cost. Spinning one kilo of Ne 30s uses around 3.5 units of electricity, including the humidification plant that keeps the floor at the right moisture. At industrial tariffs, that is roughly ₹28 a kilo, and finer counts use more.

Labour across three shifts, including supervisors and the testing lab, adds about ₹14 a kilo. Packing in HDPE bags with paper cones costs around ₹4. Maintenance, spare parts such as rings, travellers and card wire, and depreciation of machinery add ₹12. Interest on working capital, since we buy cotton months before we sell yarn, adds about ₹6.

That totals about ₹243 per kilo, leaving a margin of about ₹12, or under 5 per cent. This is why spinning margins are thin and why a change of ₹5 in the cotton price moves our quotes immediately. Contract buyers who fix monthly prices take some of that uncertainty away.