The Hindu Business Line : Saint-Gobain to set up unit for solar control products

The Rs 100-crore advanced architectural processing facility is now under construction and will be ready by the year-end, Mr B. Santhanam, Managing Director, Saint-Gobain Glass India Ltd, told newspersons here on Friday.

He later told Business Line that this facility was being set up after a lot of research and would come out with products that were ideal for Indian conditions. These were products on typically green-based glass and could cut down the incidence of solar energy inside buildings by as much as 90 per cent.

Some of these products were being imported into the country and the products to be made here would have high solar efficiency and low reflective capacity, combining complex parameters in heat and light. The unit would have a capacity of 3 million sq. m of glass a year, he said.

Mr Santhanam said the products were highly priced - as much as $20-25 a sq. m. With glass prices likely to fall because of excess capacity, companies will have to go in for more value-added products. "Those who do not have more value added products will find the going as hot as a furnace," he said.

Mr Santhanam told the press conference that the company's share in the country was expected to go up from 26 per cent of a Rs 1,700-crore market in 2005 to 36 per cent in 2006, when the size would be above Rs 2,000 crore.

The company, he said, would earmark at least 50 per cent of the output of the second plant - whose capacity was 850 tonnes a day - for exports. Saint-Gobain hoped to export 15 per cent of the production at the automotive glass processing lines, which had a combined capacity of 2 million sets.

Saint-Gobain Glass India's exports had come down from 30 per cent when the first float glass plant began production in 2000 to less than 10 per cent in 2004, as the domestic demand for its products grew. The company found that demand for value-added products was growing significantly. It exported its products to South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, West Asia, Japan, Canada and Europe.

Asked whether the Saint-Gobain group would consider integrating its two glass businesses in India — Saint-Gobain Glass India, which produces float glass, and Saint-Gobain Sekurit India, a listed company that makes automotive glass — Mr Santhanam and Mr Anand Mahajan, General Delegate of Compagnie de Saint-Gobain for India, said there was no move now for a fiscal integration of the two companies. However, a lot of business and management integration had taken place, Mr Santhanam said.

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