Accurate Industrial Controls and KOMAC submit sole bid for Kandla shipyard project

Pune-based Accurate Industrial Controls Pvt Ltd, backed by Korea Maritime Consultants Co., Ltd (KOMAC) has submitted the lone bid for setting up an integrated shipbuilding cluster on 2,000 acres of land at state-owned Deendayal Port located in Kandla, Gujarat, multiple sources said. This is the first greenfield shipyard planned by the government after the Union Budget announced a slew of measures to boost the country’s shipbuilding sector. It is also the first shipyard of that scale being planned in more than 17 years, the last being the facility constructed by Larsen & Toubro at Kattupalli near Chennai in 2008.

The response to the tender was way below expectations as the Budget announcements and the government’s focus on strengthening India’s shipbuilding industry had caught the attention of shipbuilders in South Korea and Japan, some of whom even visited India in the last two months to assess the ground situation. These included top shipbuilders from South Korea such as Hanwha Ocean Co Ltd ((earlier known as Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Co Ltd) and HD Hyundai Heavy Industries Co Ltd as well as Imabari Shipbuilding Co.,Ltd from Japan. Entities seeking to participate in the tender should have designed, executed and constructed a shipyard with so-called very large crude carrier (VLCC) class ship production capabilities to qualify for the auction, according to the tender terms.

With no experience in shipbuilding, Accurate Industrial Controls roped in KOMAC, South Korea’s first private maritime design and engineering services company, to support its bid, the deadline for which closed a few days ago after multiple extensions of time.

Accurate Industrial Controls is an engineering, design and manufacturing company catering to customers across diverse areas such as defence, AI based solutions, fluid distribution systems, automotive, IoT, embedded and power electronics, industrial automation, telecom, industrial refrigerators and renewable energy systems, the company said.

Deendayal Port Authority had set a provisional reserve price of Rs 27,510 per acre/ year. The final reserve price will be intimated to the bidders at the time of pre-bid clarification or before the opening of technical bids, the port authority wrote in the tender documents. The bidder has to offer a premium over and above the reserve price in terms of land lease rental in the auction to win the deal. The land will be leased for a maximum of 30 years-starting from the date of handing over of possession of land-without any scope for renewal. The project does not have environmental clearance (EC) and the onus of securing the EC was put on the shipyard developer. Even if the Accurate Industrial Controls bid passes the technical and financial muster and wins the project, it will take at least 5 years before it can start operations.