JCB and Carillion eye multi-billion India deal
JCB and Carillion are part of a UK consortium hoping to win a share of a £25bn road building scheme in India.
Business secretary Peter Mandelson meets his Indian counterpart today to discuss UK trade links with the sub continent – and the country’s programme to build or upgrade 80,000km of roads is expected to be high on the agenda.
Staffordshire-based JCB and Wolverhamton’s Carillion have formed the British-India Roads Group with Balfour Beattie, Arup, KPMG and 3i, amongst others.
Road building in India is seen as a key plank of the country’s drive to modernise its infrastructure, and open up currently inaccessible towns and villages to trade and development opportunities. The launch last year of Tata’s ‘people’s car’, the sub-£2,000 vehicle, was explicitly linked by the manufacturer to the road-building drive.
Average speeds on many roads in India are less than 20mph, and a quarter of a million people live in villages that do not have adequate road links. The Inidan government has said it wants to increase the rate of road building to 20km per day.
JCB has three manufacturing plants in India, and last year, JCB invested $60million in the expansion of its Faridabad plant, which now builds 100 backhoe loaders a day, making it the largest facility of its kind in the world.
Lord Mandelson’s talks with Anand Sharma, India’s Commerce Minister, are also expected to touch on the campaign by accountancy firms to be given access to the country’s growing middle class population.
Opportunities in India for West Midlands firms were discussed at the Midlands World Trade Forum (MWTF) AGM, at the Banks’ Stadium, Walsall, this week.
Keynote speaker C Gururaj Rao, Indian Consul General in Birmingham, told delegates the Indian economy has been robust throughout the recession, and confidence was high amongst its business community.
“The country’s economy is slowly transforming from one of outsourcing to one of innovation,” he said. “International businesses are beginning to open up research centres as the country begins to look to the future.”
Ian Mason, former Head of Trade and Investment at the British Deputy High Commission in Chennai, said British firms should treat India as the continent-sized country that it is, with different languages and cultures throughout, rather than one single market, with UK Trade & Investment and the MWTF best placed to help companies exploit it.
“It is a market in transition,” he said. “But it has embraced the free market and its liberalisation has opened up the economy.”
Ray Spooner, who worked for JCB for 35 years, explained how the company gradually moved into the economy over three decades, starting off with small production and dealerships to eventually building several plants that now even produce parts that come back to the UK to be used on British-built vehicles.
