New | China General Nuclear Power expands overseas plant construction business

China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN), whose pipeline of reactors under construction is the world’s largest, is eyeing opportunities to develop nuclear plants in 13 nations in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa, as its seeks to bump its revenue from abroad to 15 per cent by 2020.

The Shenzhen-based firm, the largest of the nation’s three state-owned nuclear power plant builders, is seeking to export reactors it has learned to build over the past three decades through the import of foreign technology, on which it has made innovations and claimed its own intellectual property.

“We are still at a start-up stage in the overseas nuclear business, we hope to ramp up its contribution,” Yang Maochun, CGN’s deputy general manager of international nuclear power business development told the South China Morning Post.

He said there are around two dozen nations that have plans to build nuclear reactors in the coming decades and need overseas help to do so. CGN has been forging business relationships with 13 of them.

“We aim to have a minimum of 15 per cent of our revenue coming from overseas by 2020, to be derived from nuclear power plant investment and engineering services, uranium mining and trading, besides non-nuclear clean energy generation,” Yang said.

Having set up an overseas business development team in 2009, he said the firm sourced some 10 per cent of its total sales from overseas in 2014, mainly from uranium trading and mining of the fuel in Central Asia’s Kazakhstan, wind and solar energy projects in Singapore, Australia, United States and Europe.