ISGEC Heavy Engineering began in 1933 as a sugar mill and has spent nine decades transforming itself into a diversified heavy-engineering house whose equipment and turnkey plants now reach 93 countries - sugar still runs, but engineering products and projects now drive 87% of consolidated revenue. The recurring approach is to license world-class technology from global specialists, manufacture the pressure parts, presses and process equipment in its own foundries and fabrication shops, and then stitch them together into complete industrial plants on a fixed-price turnkey basis - so the company earns both from selling machines and from building the factories that house them.
Business segments
Five engines at different stages - a heavy-manufacturing core that feeds a larger project-construction business, a legacy sugar-and-ethanol operation, and an international arm that exports all three - each built on the same in-house engineering and foundry backbone.
1. Manufacturing of machinery and equipment: the custom-engineered product engine
Short-cycle, high-margin fabrication of presses, pressure vessels, castings and gas containers - sold to industrial buyers worldwide, with intellectual property embedded in the design and metallurgy rather than in mass production.
- Presses built for automotive lines - the company has shipped over 6,000 mechanical, hydraulic and servo presses, mostly to carmakers and their suppliers, and is now expanding into Southeast Asian markets such as Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. A technology partnership with AP&T of Sweden lets it offer press-hardening lines that form high-strength steel body parts.
- Process equipment for refineries and green energy - it fabricates reactors, heat exchangers and thick-walled columns that go into oil refineries, fertiliser plants and, increasingly, green-hydrogen and nuclear projects, with several global process licensors listing ISGEC as a preferred manufacturer.
- One of the world’s largest ton-container makers - over 375,000 liquefied-gas containers shipped to more than 65 countries, with a global lead in chlorine containers and production capacity expanded to 1,800 units a month.
- Castings that sit inside soda-ash plants and power turbines - its iron foundry ranks among the top three soda-ash casting manufacturers globally, while the steel-castings plant in Muzaffarnagar exports close to 30% of its output, helped by the “China plus one” shift and demand from oil-and-gas valve makers.
- Contract manufacturing for defence and mining - the built-to-print group supplies repeat orders for 155 mm howitzer components, high-wall mining equipment and hydro-power castings, turning the Yamunanagar factory into a shared workshop for global OEMs.
2. Industrial projects (EPC): the turnkey plant builder
Fixed-price engineering, procurement and construction contracts that assemble ISGEC’s own boilers, pressure parts and sugar machinery into complete operating plants - longer cycles, lower margins, but the largest share of the order book.
- Boilers are the anchor - the company has built over 900 boilers and 85 power plants with a cumulative EPC capacity above 2,000 MW, covering biomass, waste-to-energy, heat-recovery and circulating-fluidised-bed designs. The biggest advantage is that it makes its own pressure parts - drums, water-wall panels, superheaters - rather than buying them.
- Sugar and ethanol plants from cane to crystal - ISGEC is a market leader in sugar-plant machinery in India, having executed over 850 cane mills and 235 sugar-and-distillery projects, including a 2,500 TPD stand-alone refinery in Saudi Arabia. It now offers complete ethanol and bio-CNG plants and has signed an MoU with Nigeria’s National Sugar Development Council for technical support.
- Air-pollution control as a regulatory tailwind - the company holds all three major flue-gas desulphurisation technologies (wet, semi-dry and dry) through licences from US and German partners, and has executed over 250 electrostatic precipitators and 75 bag filters for power and industrial plants.
- Bulk handling and railway workshops - it builds port conveyors, stacker-reclaimers and ship unloaders for mines and power plants, and constructs turnkey metro depots and railway workshops complete with tracks and signalling.
- Moving into refinery process plants - a first integrated EPC order for a sulphur-recovery unit, tail-gas treatment and amine-regeneration unit at an oil refinery marks a step up the complexity ladder in the process-plant business.
3. Sugar and ethanol (Saraswati Sugar Mills): the legacy cash engine
A single large sugar mill and distillery in Haryana that crushes cane, sells refined sugar under the government release mechanism, and produces ethanol for fuel blending - a regulated but steady contributor.
- A 10,000 TCD mill with a refining edge - the Yamunanagar factory has recorded the highest sugar recovery in Punjab and Haryana for a decade and has shifted to refined sugar, winning an excellence award for quality in 2025.
- Ethanol from multiple feedstocks - the distillery started at 100 kilolitres per day in December 2021, was expanded to 160 KLPD, and produced 33,508 kilolitres of ethanol in FY25 from syrup, B-heavy molasses and C-heavy molasses.
- Landlocked and policy-bound - the mill is far from ports, making sugar exports uneconomical, so sales depend on the domestic monthly release mechanism and the government-set minimum sale price.
4. International operations: the export and overseas manufacturing arm
Equipment sold to 93 countries, a press factory in Canada, an ethanol plant in the Philippines, and a growing order book from developing markets - roughly a quarter of the consolidated order book sits overseas.
- Exports are largely made-to-order equipment - international revenue was about 22% of the total in FY26, with the export order book at roughly INR 1,450 crores, concentrated in developing countries across Southeast Asia and Africa.
- Eagle Press in North America - the Canadian subsidiary manufactures mechanical and servo presses for automakers in Canada, the US and Mexico, giving ISGEC a local manufacturing footprint in a key automotive market.
- Cavite Biofuel in the Philippines - a 90%-owned step-down subsidiary operates a 130 KLPD ethanol plant that runs on sugarcane juice during the harvest season and switches to purchased molasses off-season; it began commercial sales in March 2026 and has received bioethanol allocations of 6 million litres per quarter from the Philippine Department of Energy.
Group structure and partners
A web of wholly owned manufacturing and project subsidiaries, plus joint ventures that lock in process technology and fabrication skills from Japanese, Finnish, American and Italian partners.
- Wholly owned operating arms - Saraswati Sugar Mills runs the sugar-and-ethanol business; Eagle Press serves North America; Isgec Eswatini was incorporated in December 2025 for plant erection in Africa.
- Three active manufacturing joint ventures - Isgec Hitachi Zosen (51% with Hitachi Zosen, Japan) builds heavy process equipment at Dahej and exports to 24 countries; Isgec Titan Metal Fabricators (51% with Titan Metal Fabricators, USA) welds reactive-metal equipment in Yamunanagar; Isgec Redecam Enviro Solutions (51% with Redecam, Italy) delivers dry and semi-dry emission-control systems for steel and cement plants.
- Isgec SFW Boilers restructured - the 51% JV with Sumitomo SHI FW of Finland was reduced to a 26% associate stake in June 2026, with the Finnish partner taking majority control of the engineering unit.
- Technology licences from fifteen global specialists - the company’s boiler, pollution-control, press and process-equipment lines are built on licensed know-how from firms including Sumitomo SHI FW, BHI FW, Siemens Heat Transfer, CB&I, Babcock Power, Fuel Tech and Bosch Projects.