NEW DELHI, May 6: Finland based Outotec, a global sustainable technology solutions provider, is planning to expand its presence in India by making the country its design hub, a top company official said.
“We are looking to make India as our design hub. Our first priority is India and then also leveraging it to global levels. We have started to do local design of our solutions to optimise to the market here as well,” Outotec’s President and CEO Pertti Korhonen told.
The company provides services to minerals, metals and energy sectors.
Declining to comment on company’s investments in India, he said, India is a “sizeable and significant” market for Outotec.
“We believe in providing technological solutions for the sustainable use of natural resources. The way India is growing, we think size of our Indian business would be growing very significantly. We are talking about hundreds of millions of business in next few years,” Korhonen said.
The company’s India Managing Director Apurba Chakravarty said, “In a year or two years time, we would be able to do entire design of a plant from here. We are forming a task force and moving in that direction, with total supervision coming from our Finland and Germany facilities.”
The company has also evolved a plan to deliver technologies for smaller iron ore pellet plants of 1.2 million tonnes (MT) or above to reach out to the smaller mining firms in the country, he said. Outotec’s 78 per cent India business comes from ferrous metals segment.
“We are looking at mini pellet plant of 1.2 MT on the lower side or it can be tailored to the demand. It is very India specific. There is a lot of interest in smaller pellet plant,” Chakravarty said.
Last month, company’s executive board, led by Korhonen, had reviewed its India strategy in Kolkata.
The Finish technology firm has global presence in four segments broadly—non-ferrous solutions, ferrous solutions, energy, light metals and environmental solution and services (engineering, equipment and maintenance).
The company has been delivering technologies to Indian firms for last 30 years and its customers in India include some big names in metals and mining sector like Vedanta group, JSPL, Hindalco are company’s customers, Chakravarty said.
In 2011, the Finish firm had reported sales of 1,385.6 million euros, while its operating profit was 121.5 million euros. The company has a global order book of 1.98 billion euros at present. (PTI)