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French power and transport equipment maker Alstom SA is planning to shift some of its global production to India as the country has a “competitive” workforce and huge growth opportunities in the infrastructure segment.
“We have the intention to work with our most competitive factories. And today, the competitive balance has shifted in favour of India,” Gregoire Poux-Guillaume, Executive Vice-President, Alstom, told Business Line .
The company has made significant investments for expanding its India capacity.
This has provided Alstom more room for exports, and with the rupee depreciation, exports from India are even more competitive.
“So, this gives us an opportunity to potentially shift some volume from other factories to the Indian factories.”
The company has four plants in India – Coimbatore (Tamil Nadu), Durgapur (West Bengal), Shahabad (Karnataka) and Vadodara (Gujarat) – and is building one more in Mundra, Gujarat.
Alstom has a 19 per cent market share in the country, the highest in the world for the company.
Orders, more investmentAbout 70 per cent of the power flow of India's transmission grid is managed with Alstom’s technologies, said Poux-Guillaume, who also heads the multinational’s grid business globally.
The company has backlog orders worth ₹6,000 crore. It makes all equipment ranging from 66 KV to 765 KV in its India plants.
He said India is expected to invest ₹1.68 lakh crore in the central grid, with an additional equivalent amount in the State grids and the public-private partnership projects in the transmission domain.
“So, even if you take into account the 12th Plan, which will see an addition of 88 GW traditional power generation and another 30 GW of renewables, the investment in the grid for the next five years should be more than the stipulated amount.”
Therefore, structurally the business case for investing in India in the grid is good.
Poux-Guillaume added the States have not been able to keep pace with national grid backbone, which is 765 kV, because of the lack of investment on their part leading to significant amount of power being stranded.
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