Increasing our capacities through greenfield and brownfield projects
We are continuing to increase our capacities through the construction of new facilities. We believe that increasing our capacities is critical to our ability to continue to capitalise upon the growing demand for metals in India and abroad, particularly in China, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. We seek to expeditiously and efficiently implement our expansion projects with the minimum necessary capital costs in order to generate a high internal rate of return on the projects.
As of 31 March 2008, we had total production capacities of 650,000 tpa of copper cathodes, 754,000 tpa of zinc and lead and 385,000 tpa of aluminium. Of our $8.8 billion in expansion projects that we have announced since the time of Vedanta’s initial public offering and listing on the LSE in 2003, we have delivered on $1.9 billion of projects which are included in our production capacities as of 31 March 2008 and we expect the remaining $6.9 billion of projects to increase our total production capacities to 950,000 tpa of copper cathodes, 1,065,000 tpa of zinc and lead and 885,000 tpa of aluminium.
Our goal is to achieve 1.0 million tpa of total production capacity in each of our base metals through our existing and future expansion projects, while implementing our expansion projects at industry leading benchmark capital costs, within budget and ahead of schedule. We believe we have made significant progress towards achieving this goal.
