After an acquisition spree in the automotive business, the Kalyani Group has gone shopping in the non-automotive space to expand its non-automotive portfolio. After aerospace, oil and gas, it is now the wind energy sector that the group is foraying into. The Kalyani Group has acquired a 100% stake in RSBconsult GmbH (RSB), a German wind energy systems developer and producer. This marks the group?s entry into the high growth wind energy sector. The Kalyani Group has ambitious plans to target the fast growing renewable energy market. Initial focus will be on Europe and India, and by 2010, it plans to expand to US and China. For this venture too, the Kalyani group will be using its own manufacturing base, as RSBconsult does not have any manufacturing business in its portfolio.
The company has not disclosed the value of the deal nor the company through which this acquisition has been made.
?We will be using India as the manufacturing base and will manufacture whole wind turbines from here. Initially it will be more bought out components but we will manufacture whatever components are needed here when full-scale production begins. But this will be after 2008 and not in this financial year,? Amit Kalyani, ED, Bharat Forge, said. He did not disclose the specifics of the plan. However, in a recruitment ad in Germany for RSBconsult, the company has called for engineers who could provide ?support in establishing a blade manufacturing facility in India?.
RSB is a four-year-old design-and-consulting company based in Muenster, Germany. It has end-to-end design capabilities in components for wind turbine systems and is currently working on wind industry projects with customers across Europe as well as China, Japan and India.