Q. Please brief us about recent initiatives undertaken in machine tools space of United Grinding Group? Which are your focus areas?
For the United Grinding Group, a big portion of our worldwide business comes from Automotive & suppliers, precision engineering, aerospace & suppliers, & Tooling. We see a similar trend in India & obviously are our focus markets.
United Grinding Group consists of Swiss & German brands, which are known for their innovation, quality & precision in manufacturing technology.
United Grinding Group invests a substantial amount of our sales on R & D every year to bring out innovative solutions for the future & further development of our products.
Our company Studer introduced a new platform of machines for internal grinding applications in the automotive & suppliers, energy, medical, aerospace, tooling, machine manufacturers, die & mould, precision engineering and transport and heavy industry sectors.
For Laser technology, our company Ewag is the technology leader. Laser Line Ultra & Laser Line Precision are the 2 machine types for ultra hard materials like CBN, PCD, CVD, MCD etc.
Our company Schaudt, market leader for Camshaft grinding machines has added Crankshaft Grinding machine to the product portfolio.
Q. What are the market opportunities for your products in India? How do you plan to position these products?
We are the worldwide number 1 grinding machines manufacturing group & have the World’s strongest brands.
We see a big potential from the Indian market. We opened our own Branch Office in Bangalore in 2007 & before that our brands have been present in India through our business partners for more than 30 years. Our brands have a strong & long connection to the Indian market.
With the 8 brands of United Grinding Group, we offer our customers the broadest possible ranges of applications for grinding, eroding, laser finishing & combined finishing. We present our customers the biggest product portfolio of machines to suit requirements & the most complete array of services to support our customers.
Q. What is your marketing strategy for India?
You will find us where our customers are. Our group has produced & delivered more than 1500 machines to the Indian market. This is why we opened our branch office at Bangalore. In 2013, we established our technical center with demo machines to do test grinding of customer components, do training for customer machine operators both in handling of our machines as well as on the machine maintenance side, machine acceptances etc.
Our motivation is to increase our customers’ competitiveness. We always strive to support the long term success of our customers by offering the best possible solution for the application & being a reliable partner that our customers can trust.
We distinguish ourselves from competition by offering our customers innovative solutions for their applications & the best support to help their business succeed & become more profitable. Due to the above, we have seen a healthy growth on the order income & gain in market share for our brands in India.
Q. According you what are the factors affecting to your business?
I would like to say challenges.
The general perception – “Cheap is best”. Unfortunately this is not true. When something is manufactured cheap, it will obviously have compromises on material, quality etc.
Whenever you hear about German & Swiss machines, the first thing that comes into anybody’s mind is precision, reliable and long lasting machines. There is a definite reason why our machines are long lasting, reliable & still retain precision & accuracy.
We have been successful in educating & convincing our customers the benefits that they will derive in investing in high quality, high precision & reliable machines of United Grinding Group which will produce highly precise components in microns for many years & hence guaranteeing profits for a long time. Our customers have realized that they have made a wise decision in investing on our machines & hence placed this trust on us.
Import taxes in India is a challenge to any imported machine manufacturer & hopefully there will be a rationalization after the GST is rolled out..
Q. What are the key technological trends that are driving machine tools industry?
We get many requests from customers for complete processing of their components in the same clamping without setup changes.
Some of our solutions to satisfy our customers’ request are –
Studer S 242 machine which can do both grinding & hard turning of components in the same clamping.
Ewag Laser Line which is used for complete finishing of ultra hard material cutting tools from solid material including creating special geometries, negative chamfer, chip breakers & also for modifying surface characteristics to improve tool life.
Blohm & Maegerle 5 axis grinding centers for complete machining of nozzle guide vanes & blades for the aircraft & energy generation sectors.
For grinding process, we focus on reducing secondary process times to increase productivity for our customers, & as a result improve profitability.
Smarter machine software that supports the operator with optimizing process parameters is a key focus area which is getting better by the day, thanks to our in-house software development teams.
Q. What is your vision for your company?
My vision for United Grinding India is to be No.1 in our market & strive hard to continuously improve market share.
