The US-headquartered solar tracker manufacturer NEXTracker, having manufacturing facilities in the US, Europe, South and Central America as well as China, is set to add India to the list of its manufacturing sites.

“We have delivered some large equipment that right now is going through commissioning and we will commence high-value manufacturing in the coming quarter,” Dan Shugar, NEXTracker CEO, told BusinessLine .

Local partnerships

Earlier this year, the company partnered with APL Apollo Tubes Ltd and several other local steel fabricators in order to increase the local steel content to over 80 per cent in volume and weight of its final product.

“This allows us to deliver faster, lower logistics costs and lower issues with importing, and we also support ‘Make in India, so we think it really important to have this capability,” Shugar said. “We definitely contemplate our capacity to be able to serve both domestic ánd export markets”.

According to him, under the manufacturing agreement signed with local partners, NEXTracker, which has developed a specialised manufacturing technology, will supply the equipment to the local partner’s manufacturing facility. While Tamil Nadu emerged as the first manufacturing site for the company, it is planning to expand to other states too.

India entry

NEXTracker entered India two years ago and has so far delivered 21 projects with overall capacity of over 1 GW. Asked whether the company has faced decline in new orders due to slowed pace of new solar auctions in the country, Shugar said that while there are some uncertainties in the policies for solar market, NEXTracker anticipates an increase in business volumes in future. India is currently among top five markets for the company globally.

Despite the solar tracker market in India still being in the nascent stage, NEXTracker is facing competition from European as well as domestic players such as Pune-based Scorpius Trackers, Hyderabad-based SmartTrak Solar, L&T and Mahindra, among others.

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