Spain’s state-owned shipbuilder Navantia and engineering major Larsen & Toubro signed an agreement on Monday to jointly bid for a ₹43,000-crore project to build six advanced submarines for the Indian Navy.
The agreement will put the firms in competition with Germany’s ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems (TKMS) and India’s state-owned Mazagon Dock Shipbuilders Limited (MDL), which signed a similar pact on June 7 to bid for the same project under the Indian government’s strategic partnership (SP) model.
The teaming agreement for submission of a techno-commercial bid for the P75-India submarine programme was signed by officials of the two firms in the presence of Spanish ambassador José Domínguez, L&T CEO SN Subrahmanyan and Augustin Alvarez Blanco, Navantia’s vice president for naval construction.
Project 75I requires an Indian bidder to tie up with a foreign collaborator and build six conventional submarines equipped with air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems, which allow vessels to remain submerged for longer periods. The first submarine must have a minimum of 45% indigenisation, with the indigenous content going up to 60% in the sixth.
Asked about the race with Germany’s TKMS, Subrahmanyan said: “At the end of the day, it’s competition. I wish we get sweetheart deals but that doesn’t happen. So, we’ll have to bid good. One cannot predict what will be the end result, but we are two competitors, let’s say it’s 50-50 at the moment.”
Subrahmanyan contended the AIP system offered by Navantia is “much better”, and the “transfer of technology in our agreement would be of far higher content and value addition from the Indian defence point of view”. He added, “I would rate it fairly high-end, but let’s go through the competitive processes.”