Hindustan Dorr-Oliver Ltd plans to expand manufacturing capabilities with another base near Pune-Sholapur industrial cluster, as it begins to address new areas such as material handling, nuclear sector and balance-of-plant work for the power sector.

These diversification initiatives of HDO, an engineering and EPC services provider, were taken up after it acquired the Sheffield, UK-based engineering services company DavyMarkham.

The Vice-Chairman of HDO and Chairman of IVRCL Infrastructures and Projects Ltd, Mr E. Sudhir Reddy, said the company has made inroads into the nuclear power sector projects from Uranium Corporation of India.

Speaking to Business Line , Mr Reddy said: “The acquisition of DavyMarkham has enabled us to focus on new areas not only in markets other than the UK and Canada, where it was initially focused on, but also bring in several of its capabilities, including engineering and design services to India.

“Apart from a capital expenditure of Rs 50-60 crore, to strengthen the manufacturing and machining capabilities of HDO, this will serve as backward integration of services we provide as EPC contractor.”

IVRCL is the major promoter of HDO, Mr Reddy said. “For an investment of about Rs 55 crore, we now have a company with a turnover of about Rs 870 crore. Several MNCs are looking to address opportunities in infrastructure, we will be well positioned to partner them.”

Admitting to some unsolicited bids for HDO, Mr Reddy said: “We had open discussions. We did consider one proposal, as we felt that if it returns, say, about Rs 1,000 crore or so it would be fine as we could redeploy the funds for other business opportunities. However, the talks failed due to valuation mismatch,” he said.

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