PVP plans two more plants

Even as the demand for pre-engineered steel buildings is yet to pick up, Ahmedabad-based Phenix Varco Pruden (PVP) is aiming high.

The pre-engineered steel building manufacturing division of Manibhai & Brothers Enterprise (MBE), a civil construction company, is planning to expand its capacity by setting up two more plants in the country.

The division is a licensing agreement between MBE and US-based Varco Pruden, a 40-year-old company with pre-engineered buildings expertise and capacity of 250,000 tonnes per annum and operations in five other countries including India.

PVP recently commissioned its first pre-engineered steel building manufacturing unit near Ahmedabad, set up with a capacity of 60,000 tonnes per annum at a cost of Rs 80 crore.

According to VR Rajan, joint managing director and chief executive officer of PVP, the board of directors of the company would decide upon expanding into two more such plants with equal or higher capacity in other parts of the country.

"The competition is direct with conventional steel construction companies. The demand for pre-engineered steel buildings is set to grow in the coming days. Currently, the market for pre-engineered steel buildings forms roughly one million tonnes per annum of the total three million tonnes per annum steel construction industry," said Rajan.

He added that the buildings have been gaining acceptance in the industrial warehousing sector, airport hangars, railways, malls and other kinds of infrastructure.

Compared with conventional steel buildings where the gestation is a little longer, PVP's pre-engineered steel building manufacturing business involves prefabricating main frames, secondary frames and roofing frames of steel using an integrated software 'VP Command', developed by Varco Pruden.

Apart from using only one-tenth of the manpower, pre-engineered steel buildings reduces tonnage by 50 per cent and cost by around 6 per cent.