Mani. N, Managing Director and Uday Mukherjee, Director, Sales & Marketing, Messer Cutting Systems India (P) Ltd, speaks about the company’s origin, achievements and future plans.

Share us about yourselves and your role in Messers India.

Mani: I was born and brought up in Coimbatore and have been working since 1983. I have almost 34 years of experience in various engineering fields and have been with Messer since 2009 since its beginning in India. I am passionate about setting up companies, this is the fourth company I have set up now from scratch.

Uday: I am Uday Mukherjee and I have been in the Indian industry since 1988. My focus is sales and marketing and a little bit of training as well. I joined Messer Cutting Systems in 2013 and prior to that I was associated with Messer as a distributor with Larsen and Toubro who they have been partners with since 2001. My career has been mainly in welding and cutting. I am currently posted in Mumbai and it is our sales and marketing headquarters. We have almost 65 people in the field. Our focus is mainly from the service point of view, we have maximum number of our service engineers in the field because this company’s goods and services play the most important role. Cutting machines have been in India since 1985. Messer is not new in India, it has been here for more than 3 decades. The biggest tagline for Messer is reliability and serviceability.

What are all the verticals coming under Messer Group?

Mani: Messer as a group is known as Messer World. Messer World has two verticals: one is the gas vertical and other is the engineering vertical. Messer Group under Messer World takes care of gas verticals, we produce industrial gases and have gas exploration plants around the world in many places. About 60-65 per cent of the turnover comes from the gas business, other 35-40 per cent comes from the other vertical. We have many small divisions in other verticals. We have a hold in a company called MEC. If you divide into three phases, Messer Eutectic Castolin. Messer is one company we belong to and Eutectic Castolin is a welding group which we purchased a few years ago and is now called MEC. Messer Cutting systems as a company comes under MEC holding company. There are many other divisions as well.

Marketing strategies and sales performance of Messer in India?

Uday: The team was set up in 2013 and in our first year we had around 42 crore of business and subsequently we grew to 108 crore last year. This year we have an ambitious target growth of 20 per centincrease over previous year. The trend so far was that by the end of May the order book was good, hopefully we should be able to maintain that booking till the end of the year and with the addition of laser business we are getting a high number of enquiries. I am sure we should be able to make bigger plans moving forward. Keeping that as a base, we are planning to make a strategic plan until 2020 that we should be able to touch a figure of 200 crore by then, that is our aim.

Reason of setting up Messer in southern part of India?

Mani: When we decided to come to India we looked at many locations like Nashik, Baroda, Chennai, Pune, Coimbatore, then L&T decided to shift from Mumbai to Coimbatore. We thought we would look into why L&T was shifting. Then we explored Coimbatore and found that Coimbatore has plenty of engineers available and it was still, cost wise, cheaper than other areas that we looked at climatic conditions are also better with maximum temperatures of 34-35oC. We expected there to be less attrition. They do not opt out, as it is a conservative city. These are the reasons why we decided to be in Coimbatore. Our attrition level is less than 5 per cent as of today.

Why should customers choose Messer?

Mani: Messer cutting systems is a brand. We are an ethical company and always strive to do more and help customers. We are a brand anybody can trust. You can buy, ask for enquiry, get a quotation and finalise order in a simple manner. If we work together, we will understand what is the requirement and what can be offered and then we can proceed. We continue to do that. Anybody who buys our machine will definitely grow.

Inputs by SRIPATHY B