Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) is planning a capital expenditure of Rs570 crore spread over the next two years to be invested in modernising all its nine manufacturing plants in the country.

The proposed capital expenditure will be over and above its new projects. This year its budget for modrnisation is Rs260 crore, up from the Rs120 core last year. It plans to spend an estimated Rs360 crore in 2009-10.

BEL is now trying to further modernise its plants, to strengthen its contract manufacturing for foreign companies; it has already signed MoUs with global defence equipment suppliers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, EADS and Northrop Grumman for opportunities arising out of defence offsets in the aerospace sector.

BEL has also signed MoU with Israeli firm Elisra, for airborne electronic warfare programmes for the Indian defence services and with IAI-Malat for unmanned aerial vehicles, aqpart from having signed a term sheet with Rafael, for a joint venture for missile electronics and guidance technology systems.

BEL's forte is its strong R&D spread across the 9 units as well as the two central research laboratories at Delhi and Bangalore and last year, 83 per cent of the turnover was accrued from products using indigenous technology.

BEL had invested Rs8 crore to modernise of its mass manufacturing facility which produces electronic voting machines (EVMs) recently, and yesterday announced that it would supply over one lakh electronic voting machines to the election commission for the forthcoming assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Sikkim and for the forthcoming parliamentry elections in 2009, in an order valued at Rs100 crore.

Of its Rs61 crore export income for the year ended March 2008, 36 per cent of the export turnover came from contract manufacturing. The countries that it exported to included Surinam, Honduras, Israel, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, CzechRepublic, Middle East, Germany, UK and USA. BEL had an export order book of $19.68 million as of April,2008.

BEL is in the process of consolidation and has targeted a turnover of $2 to $2.5 billion by the year 2011-12.

With a strong focus on R&D, strategic tie-ups with its partners to enhance business, it is expects to further boost its order book position which was around Rs.9,450 crore as on 1 April 2008.