The government-owned IRCON would give CMI an easy access to Nepal cable market and has already bagged a turnkey project for Nepal Railways.

April 27, 2017

Faridabad-based CMI Cables, which has supplied cables for the railways in Iran and Bangladesh, is now looking to expand to Nepal through Ircon, a government-owned engineering and construction company as reported by reputed business daily. “Ircon has bagged a turnkey project for a railway network in Nepal. For supply of cables, we have emerged as the lowest bidder and are likely to get the award,” said Amit Jain, Managing Director, CMI Cables, while declining to share the value of potential order.

CMI is also getting several orders in dedicated freight corridors. “We have contracts from L&T, KEC, Monte Carlo, Kalindi, and so on — all are working with dedicated freight corridor (DFC),” said Jain.

Last year, the company acquired a factory located at Baddi, Himachal Pradesh, belonging to the Indian subsidiary of a US-based firm that was closed in India, and is now operating the plant. “The Indian operations are now up and running. The goods and services tax (slated to be rolled out in July) will be a big positive for us. We expect 2-2.5 per cent benefit on taxes,” he added.

Jain said the firm was also seeing major demand from solar power. The demand is mainly from ACME, Schneider, Tata Projects, as the electricity generated needs to be transmitted. “At the Baddi plant, we are planning to install a captive solar power plant,” he said, adding that there will be substantial savings.

For Engineers India Ltd, a public sector major, CMI has developed cables to ensure fire safety wherein the circuit integrity is maintained for 90 minutes at high temperature of 950 degree Celsius. Since copper melts at 850 degrees, a special coating is applied to increase the melting temperature, Jain said. “We are developing products that act as import substitutes for ISRO, Alstom, Siemens and Delhi Metro Rail Corporation,” he added.