Voltas senior vice-president K.J. Jawa in Calcutta on Tuesday. A Telegraph picture

Calcutta, March 22: Voltas Ltd is setting up a new plant in Panthanagar, Uttaranchal at an investment of Rs 120 crore to expand the production capacity of air-conditioners and commercial refrigeration. The commercial refrigeration operation is scheduled to start from June.

The capacity expansion would support Voltas’s aggressive plans to increase the sales volume to 300,000 units in the domestic market and 200,000 for exports next fiscal.

Voltas, with its sub-Rs 10,000 air conditioners (AC) for the Indian semi-urban markets, will target towns with a population of one lakh or more.

“The new plant will increase split AC and room AC capacities by 300,000 units, which will be operational by September-October. The capacity for central ACs will also go up by 50,000 and it will be operational around December-January 2007. Capacity for commercial refrigeration will rise by 100,000 units, which will start operations by June,” said K.J. Jawa, senior vice-president, unitary products business group, Voltas.

It plans to spend Rs 20 crore on marketing and promotional activities and Rs 6 crore on retail expansion. Currently, Voltas has a 16 per cent share in the domestic AC market and plans to raise it to 20 per cent by next fiscal.

The AC market size of 1.2 million units could go up to 3 million units by 2010 on a conservative estimate by penetrating the interior markets, Jawa said.

Exports comprise 20 per cent of its turnover and Voltas’s order position will contribute over 30 per cent to the turnover for next fiscal.

“We aim to increase our global footprint. We have made some headway through projects like the air conditioning of Hong Kong airport and the metro, the Singapore water reclamation project and projects in Muscat and hope to expand operations in West Asia,” he added.