The Hindu Business Line : Rolta India sees opportunities in power plant design space

High drive
India has plans to set up 15 nuclear plants over next 20 years.
Rolta expects to up income contribution from defence sector.
Plant design works expected to bring in 20% to revenues.

Adith Charlie

Mumbai, July 30With the Indo-US nuclear deal back on track, city-based technology firm Rolta India aims to double revenues from its power plant design & automation (PDA) practice by 2011.

Also, the company expects revenue contribution from defence services (in India) to significantly improve as the space is seeing increased spend by the government.

Rolta offers engineering design and geospatial information services (GIS) to clients in the infrastructure, oil & gas, power and defence sectors.

Nuclear programme

The Indo-US nuclear programme, which involves setting up 15 nuclear power plants in the next 20 years, calls for investments in the range of $50-60 billion by 2025, Mr Hiranya Ashar, Chief Financial Officer, Rolta India, told Business Line.

Well positioned

“About 8-10 per cent of this spend would go into project design, installation, commissioning and project management; Rolta is one of the few vendors in the country well positioned to capitalise on this opportunity, owing to our joint venture with Shaw Stone & Webster,” he said.

India’s plans

India plans to set up 15 nuclear plants over the next 20 years; the installed capacity of nuclear energy in India would go up to 20,000 MW by the year 2020 from 4,000 MW at present.Hence, the company expects to up revenues from PDA to 20 per cent of overall revenues (from 10 per cent now) in the next three years, according to Mr Ashar.

In 2004, Rolta entered into a joint venture with Stone & Webster to focus on areas such as nuclear power engineering. Stone & Webster has been associated with almost 95 per nuclear plants in the US and six nuclear plants in China.

Defence share

The defence sector, which accounts for about 13 per cent of Rolta’s turnover, is expected to go up to 20 per cent of company revenues by 2011, added Mr Ashar.

India spends only about 1.6 per cent of GDP on defence, which is minuscule compared to that spent by neighbouring countries such as China and Pakistan.

Hence, there is a lot of pressure on the Government to increase spend on systems related to digital soldiers, electronic warfare, tactical systems etc., according to Mr Ashar.

The increase in investments has already begun; the government has upped its defence budget for this fiscal by 10 per cent to nearly Rs 1,05,000 crore, which is a positive trigger for the Mumbai-headquartered firm .

For the Indian army, Rolta currently provides services related to digital mapping (in various locations); it leverages the joint venture with France-based Thales for developing information systems.

Performance

For the quarter ended June 30, Rolta reported a 4.1 per cent rise in net profit to Rs 50.8 crore as compared to Rs 48.8 crore reported in the year-ago period.

Total revenues for the quarter were up by 48.3 per cent to Rs 307.6 crore (Rs 207.4 crore).

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