BHEL Ranipet Looking to Enter the Water Business

Last week, state-owned Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd signed a technology partnership with Japanese company Mitsubishi Heavy Engineering Industries, and expects business opportunities of 1500 crore annually from the pact. The company, through its partnership with Mitsubishi, provides FGD services to power plants, which helps power plants reduce sulphur emissions by about 25%, from 1500 milli gram per cubic meters to 400 mg per cubic meter.

Increasingly more number coal-based power plants today use imported coal, which incidentally has high sulphur content, given the difficulties in securing indigenous coal. This gives the BHEL-Mitsubishi partnership a huge opportunity.

“We have an immediate opportunitiy at the Vindhyachal power plant set up by the NTPC,” said T N Veeraraghavan, executive director, BHEL Ranipet.

FGD apart, the BHEL Ranipet division is also looking at entering newer business segments like sewage and water treatment plants. For starters, they have set up a 200 MLD (million litres per day) sewage treatment plant at their unit in Ranipet. BHEL Ranipet expect the two new business lines could bring in revenues of about Rs 400 crore by 2016-17.

For the financial year 2012-13, the boiler auxiliaries division of BHEL at Ranipet posted profits of 1,118 crore, a fall from 1,316 crore last year. Turnover too fell to 3,710 from 4,213 crore last year. Order book for the Ranipet division went up to 1741 crore from 1005 crore last year, of which direct orders for BHEL Ranipet went up to 437 crore against just 38 last year. Going forward too, BHEL Ranipet will increasingly focus on securing direct orders for the Ranipet division alone.