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Punj Lloyd is looking to expand the scope of its small-arms manufacturing unit in Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh.
Ashok Wadhawan
By January next year, the unit is expected to start making small-arms such as pistols, mostly for exports. The unit has been primarily focussed on exports of assembly components for small-arms.
Export hub
Ashok Wadhawan, President - Manufacturing Business, Punj Lloyd, spoke to BusinessLine on the sidelines of the Make-in-Odisha Conclave, the biennial investor summit, in Bhubaneswar.
The unit currently manufactures and exports 35,000-40,000 gun parts for weapons such as X95 assault rifle, Galil sniper, Negev light machine gun and the Ace assault rifle.
“The number of components that we are manufacturing is growing. We started with rifles,” Wadhawan said, adding that the unit will be one of the hubs for export across the world.
Israeli collaboration
The Gwalior facility, a joint venture with Israel Weapons Industries (IWI), is an integrated defence manufacturing plant which has different units inside it. They include fabrication, machining, air defence as well as small arms, on a 65-acre plot. This, incidentally, is also the country’s first private small arms making facility.
According to Wadhawan, the company could look at more units depending on order-book size and demand. “Yes, we may look at having more such facilities depending on the demand scenario,” he said.
The company does not give a separate order book size for its defence segment. But, Wadhawan said the order books included both domestic and export orders across all verticals. It entered the defence segment in 2009 and later streamlined the vertical to ensure greater focus on it.
Looking for tie-ups
Punj Lloyd is also in talks with other global defence equipment makers to explore tie-ups and joint ventures in the aerospace.
“We are in talks for more tie-ups across different categories. But for security reasons, I cannot reveal the details,” he said.
Apart from small arms component supplies, the other verticals that the company is into include small arms, aerospace and engineering components, air-space guns, artillery and homeland security.
(The writer attended the Make-in-Odisha Conclave on invitation.)
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