Plans to bid for smart city projects with Hitachi: Rolta

Talking about the Rolta & Hitachi India partnership to explore new opportunities, KK Singh, CMD, Rolta India said the partnership would give the company access to international markets like Japan and also exposure to Hitachi clients.According to Singh, the partnership would bring together the cutting edge hardware technology of Hitachi and Rolta’s application software expertise and would help to bid aggressively for infra projects related to smart cities.The partnership with Hitachi is for big data analytics, said Singh.The company plans to set up a joint venture with Hitach for manufacturing facility in India and do certain exclusive projects with Hitachi. The JV, if established would bring in a captial of around Rs 50-100 crore, of which around fifty percent share could be that of Rolta, said Singh.

Below is the transcript of KK Singh's interview with Latha Venkatesh & Sonia Shenoy on CNBC-TV18.Sonia: If you can describe what exactly the partnership between Rolta & Hitachi India is. Is this a joint venture that you will form with Hitachi India and what kind of investments are you looking at?A: This is a partnership to explore certain new areas which are in focus of Hitachi especially in infrastructure and that of Rolta in big data analytics. Therefore, we are going to do some projects exclusively together and bid them.

In the meanwhile we will also explore if we can setup a joint venture for manufacturing anything under Make in India programme here and also look for setting up some exclusive team for marketing to start with.Latha: When you say big data, it largely ties in with what you are already doing, isn’t it?A: Hitachi provides lot of cutting edge hardware and we have lot of application software. They also have some platform software, so we will be combining our solutions and taking them to various parts of the world.Latha: Does it give you an advantage. Are you able to bid for larger projects or maybe Japanese clients? What advantage does Hitachi give you?A: They give us access to the Japanese market as well as to international markets, where they are more established and they their clients. The advantage is that we have the application software which enables their platform and their other solutions to be sold and then we can go forward.

Sonia: It’s very early days but what is the kind of revenue potential that you see from this partnership and what is the ballpark quantum of projects that you are likely to bid for?A: We are going to bid for infrastructure projects especially in smart cities, which is our big focus. We have very good smart city and safe city solutions, and so does Hitachi have very advance smart city and safe city solutions.The government is setting up special purpose vehicle (SPVs) for each of the smart cities so that these vehicles become the carrier for smart city initiative. We will be bidding the projects through them. There will be projects in the arena of IT as well as automation.Latha: You said Make in India – what might that be?A: There are lots of electronic items which Hitachi manufactures and they are used into automation of electric distribution or smart metering and into other such areas. So, if something like that can be manufactured in India where our software can too be used then that is something which we will look into. These are some exploratory ideas.Latha: You are not going to do anything with Hitachi Homes. They are already established entity in India?A: We are not going to do something which already is being done but do something different. Latha: How much money is Rolta prepared to put from its kitty into this joint venture and how early?A: We believe that if this JV is established then that will be with a capital of about Rs 50 crore to Rs 100 crore and we will be able to take our share. Latha: Which will be half of it?A: That is still to be decided but yes, we believe half of it.