ABG Shipyard Shares Their Budget Wishlist

Dhananjay Datar
Group Chief Financial Officer & Executive Director
ABG Shipyard 

Our wish list for the Union Budget 2013 is focussed on giving a boost to local shipbuilders in today’s challenging environment and addressing their issues. Shipbuilding is like any other infrastructure play, long delivery, capital and working capital-intensive industry. This typically generates large employment directly and indirectly.

To enhance this sector, we seek multiple initiatives from the Government. Revival of shipbuilding subsidy, infrastructure status, incentives for local built and owned vessels, expanding the scope of subsidy to cover all categories of assets built by shipyards (owned in India or for export), are some of the ideas that the government should consider, along with cheaper long-term finance for setting up of shipyards, encouragement and incentive to get into new areas like offshore construction for oil majors like ONGC etc. Shipbuilding must be incorporated in to the infrastructure sector and the budget should thus present a comprehensive package for it.

Another important step in this direction is to give a preference to Indian built assets in Oil & Gas and Shipping sector with a weightage to new assets over old ones.