Larsen & Toubro: L&T Enhances Collaboration with Defence Shipyards to Boost Naval Orders, ET Infra

Time of India

11-06-2025

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MUMBAI: Larsen & Toubro Ltd, India's biggest engineering and construction firm, will look at strengthening its 'working collaborations' with state-owned defence shipbuilders as well as direct wins to boost its naval shipbuilding business , a top official has said.L&T's defence order book is in excess of ₹3,000 crore and potentially growing.'For now, our focus has been on defence shipbuilding, and we do see a potential for growth, one in terms of the number of shipbuilding programmes which are on the anvil, and two, a few export opportunities and three, also working with the other yards. As you can see, the order books of most of the defence shipyards are quite swollen, and they are also looking at offloading some of the work,' Arun Ramchandani, Senior Vice President, Precision Engineering & Systems, L&T, told ET Infra in an interview on May 27.'In fact, we are working with Hindustan Shipyard Ltd for their fleet support ships; we are doing two of their fleet support ships out of the order of five which they got from the Indian Navy . We did four Anti-Submarine Warfare Shallow Watercrafts and Large Survey Vessel for Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd (GRSE). That's another model which is evolving and which we want to take a step further that we look at working collaboratively with the other defence shipyards as well as look at winning business competitively like we did for the multipurpose vessels and the cadet training ships,' Ramchandani said.Does such working collaborations with defence yards include building the entire ship or just a part of the vessel for them?'It has been evolutionary,' says Ramchandani.'When we started, we were delivering the whole ship from our yard. There are two models, one where there is a lot of free material that comes from the prime contractor to us and for the fleet support ships, there are about 15 equipment which we are buying for all the ships and some of the stuff we get from Hindustan Shipyard while the critical yard materials we buy ourselves. So, that way the size of our order book also swells,' he stated.'With the number of programmes which are coming up on naval shipbuilding, the fleet expansion that the Indian Navy is doing and the requirement to deliver on time and to scale our capacities and business, both direct wins as well as working with defence shipyards seem to be the way forward,' Ramchandani added.