He finally negotiated a R$1.8bn ($437m) deal for 377 of GE’s 1.7MW turbines.
“I tried to buy machines of around 2.5MW, 3MW, but had no success. Not all of them could deliver the machines by the time I needed,” he explains.
“The Chinese offered prices 30% below the Europeans, but the currency risk of buying in dollars made it impossible.”
He had hoped to find bigger turbines, but GE did not want to build larger machines in Brazil because of the extra investment that would be required to meet BNDES’s strict local-content rules.
