India's Sterling Infotech buys into Finnish WinWind

Avis Ventures, a Mauritius-based investment company subsidiary of India's Sterling Infotech Group (SIG), has injected EUR 20 million into Finnish wind turbine maker WinWind to become its biggest single shareholder with a 40% stake. The shares are being acquired from Proventia Group, an environmental technology systems development company that bought a 65% majority stake in WinWind in October 2004. Proventia maintains its holding in the 60% of WinWind not held by Avis along with other Finnish investors, including private equity company Head Invest Oy, mutual pension insurer Varma, Powest, and Pohjolan Voima Oy. WinWind expects sales in the current financial year will climb 30% to EUR 45 million, with exports accounting for more than 80%. The company's main export markets are Estonia, Sweden, Portugal and France. WinWind's chairman, Matti Vuoria says SIG regards WinWind as "an excellent platform to create a world leading energy solutions provider." For its part, SIG boss V. Srinivasan says his company's involvement in WinWind will create new opportunities in Asia for the wind turbine maker. Established in 2000, WinWind makes 1 MW and 3 MW turbines from assembly plants in Ii and Loviisa in Finland and subsidiaries in Portugal, Estonia and China. SIG is a diversified global business conglomerate founded in 1988.