MUMBAI: Indonesia is all set to become the biggest export client of JCB India Ltd in Asia and worldwide with a planned import order of almost 100 excavators by the end of this year.

JCB India Ltd, which was selling most of its machines domestically, entered the export market when its new manufacturing facility was commissioned at Talegaon near Pune a couple of months back. The plant was officially inaugurated on Friday.

Talking at the sidelines of the inauguration, Frisca Ong, managing director of PT United Equipment Indonesia, a dealer of the company in Indonesia, said, “This year we intend to import as many as 100 JS200 excavators from JCB India’s new plant.” She said the excavator market in South-East Asia is growing at the rate of 20% and is expected to clock even higher growth rates in the coming five years.

“We were earlier meeting our export requirements from JCB India’s parent company - JC Bamford Excavators Ltd in the United Kingdom. However, off late, because of a tremendous demand of excavators worldwide, JCB’s home territory was not able to meet the requirements of Asian countries completely,” she said.

Now with the new plant in Pune, she intends to source PT United’s import requirements of 20 tonne JS200 from India. This would help PT United cut down the freight cost and time in delivery, besides sufficing its needs completely.

She said apart from Indonesia, there were several other South-East Asian countries which are planning to source excavators from JCB’s India plant. “It is expected that the new plant will have export orders of almost 250 plus machines this year. This would include orders from Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, apart from Indonesia,” she said. Next year she sees an order of approximately 150 machines flowing to JCB India from PT United Equipments.

John Patterson, managing director and chief executive officer (CEO), JC Bamford Excavators Ltd, said the company wants to make India the hub of its export activities.

“The new plant has an installed capacity to roll out 2,000 machines a year and we plan to export almost 50% of the total units rolled out every year,” he said. The new plant is the third facility of JCB India in the country, with the first two operational in Haryana and Talegaon, Pune.

“The Haryana plant is currently undergoing expansion and will be complete by the mid of 2008,” said Vipin Sondhi, managing director and CEO, JCB India Ltd. Once the expansion is complete, the Haryana plant would have a capacity of manufacturing 100 machines in a day, thereby taking the total capacity of

JCB India to 27,000 machines a year,said Sondhi.