Welding engineering and Metallurgy

Mechanical engineering, 8th Sem

Roll no.-1520019
QUIZ TEST No. 1

"It’s all about Imagineering"

Larsen & Toubro Limited

Q.1. Larsen & Toubro in its founding years.

The multi-billion dollar company having numerous sectors under its wings, has a
very intersecting history of its emergence, started by Larsen’ and ‘Toubro’ two non-Indian
names, distinctly Danish. So, what are names from a distant Scandinavian country doing on
the marquee of an organization which was described by India’s Home Minister as being so
intrinsically Indian that it belongs neither to the private sector nor the public sector but to the
country’s ‘national sector’? The answer takes us right back to the late 1930s when two young
engineers – Henning Holck-Larsen and Soren Toubro – turned east from Denmark to seek
their future in India. Larsen and Toubro studied together in school in Denmark and after
graduating in chemical engineering joined a company manufacturing dairy equipment, the
marketing of which brought them to India. Initially these equipment were being imported to
India. Seeing the future potential for such business they developed to start on their own.
In the summer of 1938 the duo felt, as true entrepreneurs do, that the best way to predict the
future was to create it. They set up a partnership firm in a single room in the sedate and leafy
business enclave of Ballard Estate in south Mumbai. Legend has it that the room was so tiny
that the two partners could not sit in it together.
But what they lacked in physical space, the partners more than made up for in vision. Their
vision was transcending. They would provide engineering equipment and products for Indian
industry of a kind and quality that the country had seldom seen earlier. Beginning in the

tumultuous years before World War II, the firm played a distinctive role in shaping the
industrial history of independent India. However, the World War II in 1939 put paid to the

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trading business as imports stopped. They converted this adversity into an opportunity by
developing to manufacture in India and set up in Powai, in what was then a remote suburb of
Bombay. Land was acquired and a small manufacturing unit was set up.
The question of christening their enterprise must have crossed their minds. It was an age
when big ticket brand consultants and corporate branding agencies had not come into vogue.
So almost before you could say ‘power point presentation’, the partners dewp972ed that their
firm was best known by their own names. In a sense, the simplicity mirrored the values of the
company – plain, business-like and straightforward.
In the interests of easy articulation however, Holck-Larsen chose to drop the first part of his
name. As he put it much later in an interview to an in-house magazine: “We thought if we
call it ‘Holck-Larsen & Toubro’, we would never get any business!” And so the eponymous
partnership set up shop. Unlike international corporations which set up affiliates and
transplanted themselves in India, L&T was intrinsically indigenous, a native of Indian soil
and endeavour. So when India became independent, L&T had nothing to change or replace. It
was a company that was already primed for the new destiny of the nation.
In the fifties, when the Indian Government stopped imports due to scare foreign exchange, it
presented yet another opportunity to diversify into many other areas of fabrication and
engineering. Moving from the import of Danish equipment, the company took on a variety of
fabrication and engineering assignments, which included, in a celebrated instance, building
the bridge that was featured in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. The firm became a
private limited company in February 1946, and a public limited company in December 1950.

. . . . And Now,
An Indian Success Story Larsen & Toubro has always nurtured two major passions. The
more general of these was to consistently play the role of a resource institution for as many
technologies as could be brought within the reach of its engineers. The second was to
participate in the crucial core areas of India’s development. Company managers were
required to examine opportunities so that L&T could step in with the requisite product or
technology. Almost as soon as a need arose, L&T had the capability to meet it. When the
needs of Indian industry changed, L&T kept pace by staying at the vanguard of technological
development.

Q.2. Larsen & Toubro’s ownership history( Shares)

In 1987, a move by Manu Chhabria to pick up a one per cent stake in Larsen & Toubro
(L&T) triggered multiple controversies that ended only 16 years later in 2003, after many
riveting political and boardroom dramas. By then, two of the corporate protagonists were
dead and employees of the giant engineering conglomerate had taken charge of its destiny
Dubai-based Chhabria had burst on the Indian business scene only two years before with a
series of high-profile buys like Shaw Wallace, Dunlop, Hindustan Dorr-Oliver, to name a

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few. His entry, however, was less than welcome for India's professional managers not least
because of his brash management style. So, when Chhabria turned his attentions to the blue-
chip L&T, a company that had been established in 1938 by two Danish engineers but lacked
identifiable promoters and an attractive target for takeover tycoons, the company's
management duly reacted.
Chairman N M Desai asked Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman, Dhirubhai Ambani to invest
in the company's shares as a white knight. Now, Ambani, then well on his way to becoming
one of India's most powerful businessmen, rarely let any opportunity pass and he
immediately bought 12.4 per cent from the open market. Backed by the Congress Party,
Ambani continued to corner more shares from the open market and by 1989 increased his
stake to 18.5 per cent by spending close to Rs 190 crore. Remember, all this took place long
before the takeover code and market regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India came
into play.
But Ambani was no white knight in the conventionally understood sense of the term. Armed
with his sizeable stake, he immediately sought, and was granted, board seats for himself and
for his sons Mukesh and Anil. It was Desai, the man who had invited Ambani on board, who
paid the price for his defensive strategy. He was shunted out as chairman in favour of
Dhirubhai.
L&T soon realised that the advent of the Ambanis may have warded off the threat from
Chhabria but it was to be no picnic under the Ambani dispensation. L&T was important for
Reliance because the company was constructing RIL's petrochemicals complex. But Ambani
was also interested in L&T's substantial cash flows.

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As chairman of L&T, one of Ambani's first decisions was to ask the company to grant RIL
supplier's credit of Rs 570 crore. The cash-rich construction company was also asked to buy
RIL shares worth Rs 76 crore from the market from entities close to Reliance. Another
controversial decision by Ambani was to make L&T take on more debt.
But the party soon ended for the Ambanis.
In 1989, in a humiliating defeat, the Congress, led by the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi,
lost power to V P Singh. Soon it became clear that the new Prime Minister Singh was not a
friend of the Ambanis or any big business, for that matter; Singh's tenure saw the revival of
the raid raj. The government immediately asked state-owned Life Insurance Corporation, the
dominant shareholder, to make sure that the Ambanis were out of L&T.
Ambani was forced to resign from the board and former State Bank of India chairman D N
Ghosh was asked to replace him. This was also the time when Ambanis were fighting a bitter
battle with Nusli Wadia of Bombay Dyeing for supremacy in the petrochemicals business.
The Indian Express, led by its feisty Chairman Ramnath Goenka and editor Arun Shourie,
wrote a series of exposes about RIL, its controversial takeover of L&T among them.
Meanwhile, under Ghosh, L&T immediately withdrew the supplier's credit to Reliance and
started off-loading RIL shares in the market. Though Dhirubhai's sons Mukesh and Anil were
still on L&T's board, they soon realised that with a hostile government at the Centre, it was
impossible to control the company, since the majority shareholding was still with
government-owned institutions.
But luck favoured Ambani. V P Singh's minority government soon collapsed and was
replaced in 1990 by Chandra Shekhar, who had closer links to the Ambanis. Ghosh was
asked to resign. The Supreme Court also ruled in Ambani's favour. But the economy was also
in ruins as a result of a drain on the country's forex reserves. With the general elections of
1991 bringing the Congress back to power in a minority government under PV Narasimha
Rao , the Ambanis tried to make a comeback.
In June 1991, the Ambanis had enough shares and proxies to vote Dhirubhai Ambanai back
as chairman and Mukesh as the managing director. But following pressure from the
Opposition, Prime Minister Rao decided to stay away from the battle. In fact, following
orders from the then finance minister Manmohan Singh LIC sought an adjournment of the
Extraordinary General Meeting in August 1991 which was to vote on bringing Ambanis back
to L&T. Shareholders close to Ambanis, however, refused to vacate the hall.
By then, the Ambanis also realised that it would not be possible for the Congress-led minority
to openly support them. Hence, by September they decided to stay away from L&T and
dropped resolutions to be installed as chairman and managing director.
After that, the Ambanis stayed on as passive investors in L&T for more than a decade. The
calm seemed to have returned on L&T with professionals managing the company. But the
Ambanis had one more surprise in store for the company.

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In November 2001, the Ambanis abruptly sold their remaining 10.05 per cent stake in L&T to
Kumar Mangalam Birla's Grasim. Grasim was directly competing with L&T in the cement
business, which is why it wanted to take over the company.
But Birla completely misunderstood one person: A M Naik, the doughty CEO & MD of the
company appointed only three year before. Born and educated in a Gujarat village, Naik was
not to be cowed down by the corporate raiders. He soon rallied L&T employees behind him
and exhorted them to take destiny in their own hands. Instead of remaining servants to others,
Naik asked his employees to become owners of the company. "We should perform so well
that it should become impossible for anyone to buy shares in our company because good
results will make the stock expensive," Naik told them.
Under Naik, L&T finally found its true leader from within. Naik fought Birla's entry into the
company tooth and nail and made representations to everyone from the prime minister to LIC
to let L&T retain its professional management culture. After months of negotiations, Birla
exited L&T by selling its stake to an employees' trust run by L&Ts employees in June 2003.
In return, Birlas received L&T's cement division and named it UltraTech. It was a win-win
deal for both. The fate of L&T was finally in the hands of its own employees.
From then on, there has been no turning back for L&T and Naik. Since June 2003, the market
value of L&T has gone up 25 times, from Rs 6,000 crore to Rs 1,47,000 crore now, with its
employees owning 12 per cent of the company. That makes it impossible for anyone to make
a hostile raid on it. Naik's dream to make L&T create its own destiny has finally come true.

Q.3. L&T Industry & Businesses

L&T leads in nearly every sphere of business it operates in. Serving customers in more than
30 countries, across various industries.

Construction
L&T Construction, India's largest construction
organization and ranked among the world's top
30 contractors, has been over the past seven
decades transforming cityscapes and landscapes
with structures of immense size and grandeur.
The company's capabilities span the entire
gamut of construction - civil, mechanical,
electrical and instrumentation engineering - and
its services extend to all core sector industries
and infrastructure projects.

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L&T ECC (Wankhede Stadium Refurbished by L&T before World Cup 2011)

Hydrocarbon Engineering:-
L&T Hydrocarbon Engineering, a wholly owned subsidiary of L&T, is dedicated to serving
the oil and gas sector around the world. It delivers turnkey engineering and construction
solutions to offshore and onshore hydrocarbon projects.
L&T’s Hydrocarbon Engineering Business serves the Oil & Gas sector across multiple
geographies.
 Upstream
 Mid &
Downstrea
m
 Constructio
n&
Pipelines
 Plant &
Equipment

Power:-
L&T provides integrated concept - to - commissioning solutions for supercritical thermal
power plants. We also offer comprehensive services for gas-based power plants.
Integrated solutions, systems and equipment for the entire Power value chain. Design &
engineering for power plant equipment.

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 Coal & Gas Power

Plants
 Nuclear Power
Plants
 Renewable Energy
 Power Transmission
& Distribution
 Power Development
- Projects
 Turbines
 Boilers
 Plant Equipment

Heavy Engineering
L&T Heavy Engineering manufactures and supplies custom designed equipment & critical
piping to process industries such as fertilizer, chemical, refinery, petrochemical, and oil &
gas, as well as to sectors such as thermal & nuclear power and aerospace.

Defence:-
L&T provides indigenous, design-to-delivery solutions across the defence spectrum – from
surveillance to strike capabilities, and mobility platforms essential to enhance their
effectiveness. We also offer specialised turnkey defence construction solutions like
underground structures, military bases, storage depots, smart infrastructure and modernisation
of existing facilities

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 Shipbuilding
 Defence Systems
 Aerospace
 Shipbuilding

L&T Finance:-
L&T Finance Holdings offers a diverse set of financial products and services, covering
mutual funds, infra finance, home loans and more.
 Mutual funds
 Infrastructure Finance
 Housing Finance

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L&T Realty
The real estate arm of L&T extends the Company’s values of trust, professionalism and
commitment to the domain of commercial and residential properties. All properties of L&T
Realty embody a sustainable design philosophy and focus on fostering integrated
communities.

Infrastructure
Turnkey ‘Design and Build’ solutions backed by experience and capabilities across multiple
sectors.
 Buildings and Factories
 Heavy Civil Infrastructure
 Transportation Infrastructure
 Smart World & Communication
 Geo-Structure
 Water & Effluent Treatment
 Infrastructure - Concessions

Process Industry
Custom designed equipment and
systems for critical process
industries, delivered to customers
around the world.
 Process Plant Equipment
 Metallurgical & Material
Handling
 Valves

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 Special Steels & Forgings

 Critical Piping

Information Technology:-
IT Solutions and services offered worldwide, through a network of offices.
 LTI
 L&T Technology Services

Products, Systems & Equipment:-

A wide range of innovative products, equipment & systems for various industries.
 Electrical & Automation
 Valves
 Construction & Mining Equipment

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Q.4 L&T Fact List (As on 25th Jan 2019)

Source: Company Annual Reports, Regulatory Filings, Equitymaster

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Q5 L&T Global Presence and brief information about Powai Branch

Global Presence

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L&T has a global presence. A thrust on international business over the years has seen

overseas revenues growing steadily. It has a global supply network with offices in 10

locations worldwide. Customers include global majors in over 30 countries.

ASIA

 Kuwait
 UAE
 Saudi Arabia
 Oman
 Qatar
 Russia
 Indonesia
 Malaysia
 Japan
 China
 Kurdistan
 Srilanka
 South Korea

AFRICA
 South Africa
 Kenya

NORTH AMERICA
 USA
 Canada

OCEANIA
 Melbourne

EUROPE
 United Kingdom
 Italy
 France
 Germany
 Denmark

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 Sweden
 Netherland

About Powai
Powai Works was the first manufacturing plant of L&T Heavy Engineering. It is among the
world’s top fabrication facilities with processes streamlined to achieve high efficiency and
benchmarked to the latest technologies; catering to precision equipment manufacturing for
Process Plant, Nuclear, Aerospace & Defence industries.
Powai has an ASME approved workshop with U, U2, S, R, N and NPT stamps:
 Site Area: 385,000 sq. m
 Shop Area: 37,500 sq. m.
 2500 strong highly skilled workforce
The shops can handle equipment of 4.6m diameter x 55m length, weighing up to 400 MT.
About 70% of the products manufactured here are exported. The shops have the capacity to
manufacture equipment in mono/multi-wall constructions, with materials ranging from
carbon steel, stainless steels, monels to titanium, high-nickel alloys, CrMoV alloy steels and
high strength creep resistant maraging steels for the aerospace industry.
The shops are equipped with sophisticated facilities for fabrication, machining, handling and
quality control. Fabrication facilities include CNC gas/underwater plasma profile cutting
machine for maximum 300/150 mm thickness, edge planing machine, 1000T hydraulic press,
plate bending machines up to 140/180 mm thick in cold/hot conditions, heavy duty welding
manipulators including 6-axis robot, column and booms, automatic grinding and cutting
machines, tube coiling machine, large heat treatment furnaces and environment controlled
clean rooms. Facilities also exist for proof pressure testing and ageing of aerospace motor
casings.
A wide variety of welding processes are carried out comprising submerged arc (single and
tandem), TIG, MIG, automatic pulse TIG, automatic tube-to-tube sheet welding, Electro Slag
strip cladding, SASC, FCAW, internal bore welding, hot wire TIG, automatic nozzle welding
and plasma arc welding.
Machining facilities include deep hole drilling up to 900mm thick, CNC horizontal boring
machines with 200mm spindle dia., CNC vertical boring machines up to 8500 mm dia. and
60T load, facing lathe of 6000 mm dia. and 80T weight between centres, and a five-axes
vertical machining centre.

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There are four X-ray enclosures, the biggest being 25(L) x 10(W) x 10(H) m used along with
Co-60, Iridium and 420KV X-ray machines. The facility also regularly performs UT using
conventional normal beam & angle beam methods and phased array / TOFD methods. In
addition, NDT includes Magnetic Particle Testing - conventional & high contrast, Dye
Penetrant testing - conventional and fluorescent, Helium and Ammonia Leak Testing to suit
customers’ and project requirements.
Site Plan Layout

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