Saint-Gobain setting up facility near Chennai

Saint-Gobain Glass India (SGGI), the subsidiary of French glass major Saint-Gobain, is setting up an advanced architectural processing facility for solar control products at its facility near Chennai. The Rs 100-crore facility is likely to be ready by the end of this year.

"We see the evolution of glass industry in India as the buildings are going hi-tech and modern. Glass for solar control is crucial and important," said Jean-Louis Beffa, chairman & CEO, Saint Gobain, at a press conference. Beffa was here recently on the occasion of the inauguration of its second float glass line at Sriperumbudur recently. The plant was inaugurated by Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa.

The company has set up the plant to boost its market share in the domestic flat glass industry and to tap the potential in the export market. Set up at a cost of Rs 800 crore, the second float glass unit will have a capacity to produce 850 tonnes of glass per day. About 50 per cent of its output will be exported.

With this new float line at its integrated manufacturing complex spread over 177 acres at Sriperumbudur, 46 km from Chennai on the Chennai-Bangalore highway, SGGI has the capacity to produce about 1,500 tonne of float glass per day.

In its second phase of expansion, the company has also set up two automotive glass processing lines, one for windshields for half-a-million cars and another for tempered glass for 1 million cars. As these plants are modular, the capacity of the plants can be scaled up to address the needs of 2 million cars. About 15 per cent of the output from this automotive plant would be exported.

B Santhanam, managing director, SGGI, said that company was targeting a market share of 36 per cent in 2006 when the domestic glass industry would be over Rs 2000 crore. Its market share was 26 per cent in 2005 when the size of the industry was about Rs 1,700 crore.

The total investment in the Sriperumbudur complex would be Rs 1,400 crore, making this integrated manufacturing facility the largest glass complex of Saint-Gobain family to be set up in the recent decades. The company has rechristened this complex as the World Glass Complex. Beffa said that the Indian experience for Saint-Gobain was the best among the Asian countries and SGGI would vital role for technological advancement in the Saint Gobain group, particularly in Asia. We will put India as a priority zone for further investments over the next five years, he added.