Feeling positive about the government’s Make in India initiative, French engineering and transport company Alstom of France will double its business in the country to almost $1billion in the next three years.
“We love doing business in India. We are finding good business environment in India. We are looking at doubling the order book in the next three to four years,” Alstom (Transport) President Henri Poupart-Lafarge told The Economic Times. Alstom will bid for projects in the urban transport sector which is expected to witness rapid growth and it will hire about 250 engineers every year for the next four years depending on the growth in business, he added.
The company is expanding its manufacturing facility in Chennai and opening a new factory for building traction systems in Coimbatore this year – both these cities are located in the south eastern state of Tamil Nadu. It says it will also supply the German market from India.
Alstom notes that India is the only country where it has a complete supply chain from design to manufacturing sourced locally, and that it expects growth from the dedicated freight corridor, the largest railway infrastructure project currently in the country creating a freight quadrilateral across India.
In India, the company runs the Train Information Systems for the Delhi, Bangalore, Jaipur and Kochi local train systems, and it has provided the initial coaches and the technology for the LHB (lightweight all-metal) coaches used on the country’s high speed Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains.
