Godrej Aerospace bags Rs. 200-crore Rolls-Royce deal.

Expanding its partnership with aerospace major Rolls-Royce, Godrej Aerospace, a business unit of Godrej & Boyce, has bagged a Rs. 200-crore contract. The Indian group will invest Rs. 50 crore in a new facility, called the Centre of Excellence, with an aim to strengthen its foothold in the aerospace sector.

Godrej is to manufacture unison rings, complex fabrication and external brackets and will supply 600 different parts to Rolls-Royce's civil aerospace engine portfolio. The company has secured the contract to make the parts at its new facility in Mumbai over the next five years.

Fabrication process

Jamshyd Godrej, Chairman and Managing Director, Godrej & Boyce, told BusinessLine that, “Fabrication has been a long term area of excellence for us. Right from the beginning of the supply of the Vikas engine (for ISRO’s rockets), the company has been doing a lot of fabrication, including the cone and all the turbine parts, machining, piping and welding. Over decades we have developed the knowledge that goes into making aerospace components. Our long heritage of doing fabrication processes will be put to best use at the new facility.'

The Centre of Excellence (CoE) will be capable of meeting the diverse needs of aircraft manufacturers, and can cater to fabrication, machining, assembly as well as testing of special processes required in aerospace and defence applications.

S M Vaidya, Executive Vice-President and Business Head, Godrej Aerospace told BusinessLine that the company 'specialises in fabricated items and actuators, and undertakes complex fabrications. As of now, we can produce 600 families of brackets, which is around 20,000 annually. This is for the first year. As demand goes up, we can scale it up, since our capacity at the Mumbai site is for 40,000 complex brackets.'

Noting that Godrej's partnership with Rolls-Royce would help the latter shave off '20-30 per cent of its costs', compared to what it would have incurred in another country, Vaidya said fabricating brackets was just the “beginning of a great journey to manufacture long beam longer on, which generally is the floor beam, the very foundation, and forms the basis of the aisle in wide-bodied aircraft”.

Godrej Aerospace has partnered with several global aviation and defence manufacturers, and has been supplying them components such as sheet metal and tubing assemblies, actuators and other complex structures. The company first bagged a contract from Rolls-Royce in 2014 for manufacturing unison rings. Since then, it has also started complex sheet metal fabrication.

HBL