Could you brief us about Vitesco's offerings for the automotive industry and its manufacturing footprint in India?
Vitesco Technologies is engaged in the development and production of innovative and efficient ICE as well as electrification technologies for all types of vehicle categories. Our portfolio includes 48-volt electrification solutions, electric drives, and power electronics for hybrid and battery-electric vehicles. Furthermore, the product range counts electronic controls, sensors and actuators as well as solutions for exhaust after-treatment. With each and every solution, Vitesco Technologies consistently pursues its mission - ‘Powering Clean Mobility’.

Vitesco Technologies has a global production and development footprint with more than 50 locations across the globe including India where we have a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Pune and a fully dedicated technology centre in Bangalore to cater global as well as domestic design and development needs of our customers in India.

What is your analysis of the market at present?
Indian auto industry has seen a healthy revival this year aided by recovery in economic activities and increased mobility. Demand sentiments for passenger vehicles, commercial vehicles and tractors have remained healthy. Although the two-wheeler industry struggles with overall volumes and is still below pre-Covid peak levels. The growth of the auto industry is expected to be a high single digit in the current year. The union budget has announced the highest allocation of incentives under FAMEII. The budget allocation for the FAME-II scheme for the financial year 2024 is €600 million, up from €340 million in FY23 which is nearly doubled. Customs duties have been exempted on capital goods imported for Li-Ion battery manufacturing and machinery from March 31, 2024, which means it would be cheaper to produce local batteries. This would act as a demand booster. This year's budget also includes green growth as one of the government's top seven priorities. So, the overall market is expected to grow across automotive segments in the mid to long term.

Vitesco Technologies inaugurated a new plant at Talegaon (Pune) last year in July. What is the significance of this development for the company?
India has always been an important focus country for Vitesco Technologies. With the growing market size and shift towards clean and more efficient next-generation technology, this shift towards clean mobility and implementation of new emission and fuel economy norms has generated more demand for our products/solutions from our customers in India. As a result, we have shown our strong commitment towards the clean mobility needs of our customers. Over the past few years by bringing emission reduction technologies and locally producing them here in our plant in Pune to cater our customer requirements locally from state of art new manufacturing plant. This was the most important milestone for us as this plant creates our strong foundation with a local manufacturing footprint for future technology requirements.

What are the key challenges faced by automakers in India? How is Vitesco helping them overcome some of these challenges?
The few challenges which we can come across are-

Vitesco Technologies have now started locally producing components and systems to meet advance technology requirements of our customers so that they do not have to face any major supply chain challenges. Our products can be reached easily and most of the components have been sourced locally from our side to become competitive. Our customers are benefiting from our local footprint and we are helping our customers in migrating to new BSVI phase two norms by providing them solutions which enable them to meet the regulatory requirements.

How are Vitesco Technologies helping the Indian auto industry's transition to electrification?
The Indian government is prioritising the shift towards clean mobility through favourable FAME II scheme to make electric vehicles more affordable. In addition, multiple production-linked incentive schemes for batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEV) components intend to create a local manufacturing ecosystem to support goals around greater adoption of electric mobility transport. As an electrification pioneer, we at Vitesco Technologies in India are offering propulsion solutions for all types of vehicle powertrains based on our long-standing expertise in powertrain systems, ranging from stand-alone components to intelligent operating strategies and full turn-key systems to our customers. We help our customers to meet the higher emission target challenges by offering our various emission reduction technologies, for example, NOx sensors which we now have started locally producing in India since last year.

Similarly, in the electrification area, we have been actively promoting our solutions to our customers for all segments. Recently we have also been awarded with new business in electrification by our esteemed customers.

In the two and three-wheeler electric vehicle segment, we have developed an innovative electric drive control unit (EDCU), and electric motor. We have been actively promoting it to our customers in India.

In passenger vehicles, we have solutions for a full range of electrification starting from 48-volt electrification to highly integrated high-voltage axle drive solutions consisting of a permanent-magnet synchronous e-motor, inverter and reducer. In a close partnership with our customers, we are working towards providing them with our advanced solutions for hybrid and electric vehicles to meet the stringent emission and fuel economy/CO2 targets. To increase the efficiency and range of electric powertrains, Vitesco Technologies uses inverters utilising state-of-the-art silicon carbide technology (SiC), HV inverters which can be used for plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEV) as well as for battery electric vehicles (BEV). We do offer a battery management system for batteries of high voltage hybrid and BEV. Our BMS has a modular structure including the Battery Management Controller (BMC), the Cell Supervising Circuit (CSC) and HV Sensor Device. We have scalable charging technologies with its family of onboard chargers (OBC) for standard alternating current (AC) charging, and vehicle junction unit for fast high-power direct current (DC) charging.

Our fuel cell technologies portfolio includes sensors, actuators, and electronics, our development also includes the fuel cell stack, in partnership with a leading university in Germany. Our thermal management solutions reduce charging times and prolong battery life by allowing all components to operate at their optimal temperatures. The portfolio covers full-system scope, from control strategies to intelligent components such as electric coolant pumps, multi-port valves, and sensors. Our key strength lies in our innovation and system capabilities: as a pioneer in electrification, we gathered experience through several product generations and can offer innovative system and platform solutions.

How is Vitesco adopting the latest manufacturing technologies like advanced automation, robots/cobots, Industry 4.0 etc in India?
Vitesco Technologies’ production in the worldwide sites is based on consistent digitalisation and a comprehensive sustainability concept. Our latest manufacturing technologies in India use robots/cobots and we are among the innovators in this field with Industry 4.0 strategy. A high level of digitalisation, networking, automation, and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes the worldwide Vitesco Technologies’ plants perfect examples of intelligent and sustainable production. More than 800 cobots are in use – collaborative robots which closely interact with human workers in a safe way to carry out particularly unergonomic tasks. Innovative AI solutions are employed in the area of quality control through automated visual parts inspection, they monitor processes and enable predictive maintenance of industrial facilities. AI is highly instrumental in utilising data to optimise delivery and manufacturing processes, achieve zero-defect quality and increase economic efficiency – all the while speeding up production and bringing down raw material consumption. Modular, scalable products can be flexibly manufactured on a single production line with the design for manufacturing.

What are your growth plans for India in the next two to three years?
We are very optimistic about the long-term growth of our market. In the next few years, we have prepared a plan to grow more than the market with deeper penetration of new technologies/products. We have already invested in the new state-of-the-art plant and the establishment of a local manufacturing footprint. We are further adding more production capacities for products of 2W and 4W in the newly built plant in the coming years. Our strategy is to further increase the localisation content and add more product portfolios in local production. We have a very broad product portfolio for our customers and therefore we continue to work with our customers in coming years to introduce them. We are not only focusing on the local demand but also planning to export the components from India.