Renishaw, a global engineering technologies company, formally inaugurated a 4,875 sq.m extension to its Pune facility on February 15, 2011. This expansion represents a near trebling of space at the Pune site, which is intended to meet the long-term growth needs for the company's Indian operations in terms of product assembly, software development, sales and marketing, and customer support.

The newly expanded facility, which now totals some 7,500 sq.m, includes additional space for Renishaw's Indian customer demonstration and training centre, which was first opened in 2008. With a rapidly expanding customer base and network of local offices, the extended space will be used to house larger numbers of CNC machine tools and coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) to aid pre-sales demonstrations and product training.

To ensure the best conditions for metrology performance, one of the new demonstration rooms will also be tightly temperature-controlled to 20 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 0.5 degrees. Speaking about the opening of the new extension, Sir David McMurtry, Renishaw's Chairman and Chief Executive, said, "This significant investment highlights the confidence that we have in our Indian operations, both in the ability to assemble products that meet the exacting standards set for our metrology products, and in the strong growth potential that we can achieve for our products within the Indian manufacturing community. We have been trading in India for almost 30 years and I am proud to see the contribution that Renishaw is making to Indian manufacturing and software engineering, both as an employer and through our products that help companies to raise quality standards and productivity levels."

The manufacturing facility at Pune is a 100 per cent export-orientated unit (EOU) and produces a range of components for the Renishaw Group that were previously procured, or where assembly costs are critical to competitiveness, including cables for the company's machine tool, CMM, and encoder products. Within India, Renishaw also has a wholly owned trading company, Renishaw Metrology Systems, which was created in Bangalore in 2000, plus regional sales offices in Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai, and Vadodara, supported by resident sales engineers in other important industrial centres.

Further operations at the Pune facility include software development, and a procurement team sourcing high-quality components from Indian vendors.

Speaking about the next stage of sales development, Ben Taylor, Assistant Chief Executive, Renishaw, said, "The new facility will enable us to move towards our goal of becoming a solutions provider. In our probing businesses, we are now providing retrofit services and extensive applications support to end customers and in our healthcare markets we are developing end-to-end solutions for dental, neurological, and diagnostic processes."

The Renishaw Group currently has operations in 31 countries, with total employee numbers now over 2,300. For the year-ended June 2010, its worldwide sales totalled USD 280 million.