Korea's Doosan plans power gear unit in India

South Korean company Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction Co Ltd is planning to set up a power equipment manufacturing facility in India.The Union Power Minister, Mr Sushil Kumar Shinde, told newspersons here that Doosan's Chairman, Mr Y. H. Park, will visit India on June 28 to hold talks in this regard with the Government. Mr Shinde did not give details about the investment for the project but such projects depending on their scale, involve an investment between Rs 2,000 crore and Rs 4,000 crore.

Mr Shinde said that Doosan might not enter into any joint venture with any Indian company for setting up the manufacturing facility. “They might set up a fully-owned subsidiary in India as we allow 100 per cent foreign direct investment in the Indian power sector,” Mr Shinde said.India currently has an installed capacity of 1.60 lakh MW and plans to add another 62,000 MW during the current Five Year Plan. However, power projects in India are facing undue delays following lack of domestic manufacturing capability. This has led to large power equipment imports from countries such as China.

With Government mulling a safeguard duty on imported equipment, more and more foreign power equipment companies are planning to set up manufacturing facilities in India. Some of them have gone in for tie-ups with Indian companies. For instance, Mitsubishi of Japan has tied up with L&T, Toshiba with JSW, Italy's Ansaldo with GB Engineering, and Alstom with Bharat Forge. Doosan Heavy Industries and Construction, according to its Web site, has EPC contracts in West Asia, India and across South-East Asia and hopes to bag similar contracts in Europe and North America.

Thermal plant

Doosan Heavy recently won a mega project to construct the Raipur-Chhattisgarh coal-fired thermal power plant worth $1.1 billion from the GMR Group. The Raipur-Chhattisgarh plant with power generation capacity of 1,370MW (685MW X 2 units) is slated for completion in the second half of 2013. For this project, it will will supply the main assembly in entirety, including turbine generators.

It will implement the project as a package deal through an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) method, in which it will take charge of the entire process ranging from the supply of main equipment, including boilers, turbines and power generators, to their production, and installation, as well as test operation of these equipment.

The company also plans to bid for new thermal power (coal) projects across India over the next 10 years. In 2004, it bagged the boiler package for the Sipat thermal power plant (660MW x 3) project, a press statement from the company said.