An investment of Rs. 1,000 crore envisaged Initial capacity will be three lakh tonnes Unit to go on stream in the first quarter of 2010 Saint-Gobain Glass India, a fully-owned subsidiary of the Paris-based euro 4.1 billion Saint-Gobain Group, has decided to set up a second plant in India. The unit will come up at Bhiwadi in Rajasthan. The company has already a state-of-the-art global standard facility on a 177-acre land at Sriperumbudur, near here. In the first phase, the company is planning to put up a three lakh-tonne float glass plant at Bhiwadi. The initial investment will be Rs. 1,000 crore. The plant is expected to go on stream in the first quarter of 2010. "This first phase of investment will be followed by investments in other facilities, so as to equip Saint-Gobain Glass India to provide end-to-end solutions to architectural, automotive and solar industries,' says a release from the company. Addressing a press conference here on Monday, B. Santhanam, Managing Director, said the choice of location for the new plant was primarily driven by logistics considerations. The proposed plant at Bhiwadi would take Saint-Gobain closer to its customers up North. Close to one-third of the company's sales (308 million euro in 2007) originated from the North, he said. A plant up North would result in a substantial saving in fuel cost for the company. According to Mr. Santhanam, it cost the company around $70 per tonne to transport the glass to its customers in North India. "This would now be reduced to half,' he said. Once the Bhiwadi plant went into to full production (sometime in 2013), it would result in an addition of 30 per cent to the country's float glass production. Mr. Santhanam said that the Sriperumbudur facility "is far from saturation level'. He even hinted at the possibility of further investments at this facility, which had already seen largest investment of Rs. 1,500 crore thus far. The facility has two float glass plants with a cumulative capacity to make 1,500 tonnes of glass daily. It also has automotive processing line for tempering and laminating windshield, scalable to two million car sets. It houses a solar control reflective glass unit, a mirror processing line and a magnetron coater facility. Sriperumbudur unit "We are in the Phase III of our growth,' he said. Expressing happiness over the way the company had created a mass consumer brand within a short period in the building material space in India, Mr. Santhanam said Saint-Gobain had grown three times faster than the industry in India. Today, it enjoyed a market share of 40 per cent. Green building movement, the move towards legislation and codification and the like were all indicators for fresh growth momentum for float glass, he said. Anand Y. Mahajan, General Delegate, South Asia, Compagnie de Saint-Gobain, said funds would not be an issue for the Indian subsidiary. The new unit would be funded partly by equity and partly by debt (either rupee loan or European debt). Dwelling on the growth of the group in India since 1996 when it acquired majority control in Grindwell Norton, Mr. Mahajan said the group had now eight companies operating in three spheres