ZURICH: Even as the Narendra Modi government pushes for the infrastructure sector in India, Swiss infrastructure major, ABB, is looking at mergers and acquisitions to tap the growth in the company.
“All of our businesses and for all of our markets we are looking for areas where we could successfully deploy capital at attractive returns from M&A. And India is definitely one of those areas,” Ulrich Spiesshofer, global CEO ABB said. Spiesshofer further hinted that the company may be looking at acquiring software companies that could complement the infrastructure major’s India play.
“If I look at software there are tremendous software capabilities in India. Also on the engineering side and also on the application side and this could be the area where we could be looking,” he said. Spiesshofer was speaking to the Indian media in Zurich in October first week; around the time it announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft last week to drive industrial transformation.
ABB, which is one of the major players in the infrastructure sector in the country, is also looking to increase its foothold. The company, like most of its peer in the infrastructure segment, is baking on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Make in India.
“ABB is ideally positioned to work with India on its competitiveness, automation solutions which I think is very strong,” said Spiesshofer.
ABB along with BHEL is also executing the world’s first multi-terminal UHVDC 6,000 MW transmission corridor which will take power from the hydel plants in the northeast India to Agra with a provision for reverse flow. The distance is about 1,728km, Sanjeev Sharma, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, ABB India had told ET Energy world in September this year.
The company is also looking to aggressively expand in the solar energy segment in India.ABB recently said that is set to install microgrid at Vadodara facility that will provide uninterrupted power supply to ABB’s largest manufacturing facility. Vadodara is ABB’s largest facility in India and manufactures critical power equipment like transformers, high voltage products, distribution relays, primary gas-insulated switchgear, motors, generators and turbochargers for a variety of national projects, the company had said last week.
“Half of solar invertors in India are provided by ABB. We have fully localised value chains and have a strong team locally. I would expect a double digit growth for India in the sector in the coming years,” said Spiesshofer.
The company is also in talks with the Indian government for investing in public transportation segment. We have ambitions to go into electric vehicles as India as very high ambitions around electric vehicles till 2030, the global CEO said. ABB is currently one of the strongest local players in the power grid space in India. The company is not only using India as a manufacturing base for domestic consumption but is also exporting from India to South Asia and the Middle East. ABB’s stock price was up by 0.37% or Rs 4.20 on BSE to end at Rs 1153.60 on Wednesday. The company has a total market capitalisation of Rs 24,445.75 crore in India, as per BSE data on Wednesday.
