Engineering and construction major Larsen & Toubro (L&T) is targeting a 20-30% share of the $150-billion global modularisation market over the next five years.
Modularisation is a project delivery method in which entire process units are prefabricated in controlled off-site facilities and then transported for rapid assembly at the project site.
“That is the kind of market we want to address and gain market share,” Subramanian Sarma, deputy managing director & president, Larsen & Toubro, said on Friday at an event to announce the completion of fabrication and delivery of modules for Project Ceres, Australia’s largest urea manufacturing plant, with a capacity of 2.3 MTPA.
Off-Site Fabrication
L&T currently undertakes modularisation at three yards — Katupalli in Tamil Nadu, Hazira in Gujarat and Oman — with a combined capacity of 200,000 tonne.
“Modularisation is a game changer in the delivery of large and complex energy projects,” Sarma said, adding that shifting substantial construction, integration, testing and pre-commissioning activities from the project site to a controlled fabrication environment enables parallel execution, strengthens safety and quality oversight, improves predictability and reduces complexity at the site.
Sarma said, “We can assemble in India and ship it to anywhere in the world,” he said, adding that the company is seeing modularisation opportunities in the US, Canada, Australia and Mozambique, among other markets.
He said the company wil use a lot of modularisation capacities for their own captive use.”We want to extend this beyond hydrocarbon industry to sectors like steel industry and even thermal power plants,” he said.
N Subrahmanyan, chairman & managing director, L&T, said the company currently faces a shortage of around 60,000 workers.
“Nobody wants to come to site and tie a reinforcement and shuttering and pour concrete or weld a piece of steel. And therefore, it was inevitable that we start something called modularisation,” Subramanyan said.
On addressing the labour shortage, Sarma said L&T has more than 23 training institutes and trains nearly 46,000 people every year, with each institute training around 2,000-3,000 people. The company also has development centres at various project sites.
He said a significant amount of labour migration is taking place to West Asia, while e-commerce and quick-commerce companies have also attracted workers. Government schemes have also contributed to the movement of workers away from construction sites, he added.