Public sector HMT is eyeing aturnover of Rs 1,000 crore in the next five years and plans to foray into aerospace and manufacture of weapons and missile components, a top company official today said.
The machine and tools maker is making components for various weapons prompting it to think of making weapons, mainly guns and rifles of various specifications, company's Managing Director M D Sreekumar told reporters here. Discussions would be held with Ministry of Defence in this regard, he said.
The company's order book was full this year with orders worth Rs 260 crore, he said adding another Rs 200 crore orders were expected by March 31 next year.
Of the Rs 260 crore worth orders, about Rs 90 crore worth orders were from the Defence sector, he said.
The company was also keen to associate with the proposed Kochi Metro project, said Sreekumar, here for the launch of HMT Machine Tools Ltd's SBCNC 80 - Slant Bed CNC Turning Center, considered the highest capacity offered in India by any indigenous machine tool manufacturers.
The first machine was handed over by Sreekumar to P.S. Veera Raghavan, Director of Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, ISRO, Thiruvananthapuram, at a function held at HMT Machine
Tool's unit at nearby Kalamassery.
The company, a wholly owned subsidiary of Bengaluru-based HMT Ltd, has already bagged orders worth Rs 3.2 crore for the product from BHEL and BEML. The orders will be executed within another 2 months, a release said.
The new machine is designed exclusively for undertaking heavy jobs for heavy engineering industries, power sectors, aerospace and steel industries.
The Kalamassery unit was on the path to achieving a turnover of Rs 75 crores by the end of the current fiscal, targeting a growth of more than 15 per cent, it added.
The unit manufactures conventional and CNC lathes and single/multi-color offset printing machines and caters mainly to defence, Indian Railways and major auto manufacturers and the state governments.