Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. said it may make mergers and acquisitions or forge alliances to help it make a full-fledged push into the fast-growing European wind power market.

Mitsubishi Heavy has a strong presence in the United States, but its wind power operations in Europe are limited to a smaller number of countries such as Portugal. Mitsubishi Heavy lags behind local rivals in the region including Vestas, Siemens, Enercon and Gamesa. By 2010, Mitsubishi Heavy said it expects its production capacity to go up to 2,000MW a year and about 300MW of that to come from the European market. As part of efforts to study business strategies for Europe the company opened earlier this month a wind turbine design office in Hamburg, Germany by inviting wind turbine engineers from Denmark, Germany and Spain.