Established in 1975, Rajamane Industries Pvt Ltd is a leading manufacturer of coolant pump in India with a large OEM customer base. The company also manufacturers electric motors for in-house requirements and OEMs. The company is known for offering a comprehensive product line to cater to ever changing requirement of the market. In this interview with Rakesh Rao, Rajendra S Rajamane, Managing Director, Rajamane Industries Pvt Ltd, highlights on how the company is gearing up for the future as industry moves towards electrification and energy-efficient products.

How has the market evolved post-Covid?
Rajamane Industries offers a wide range of coolant pumps to industries like machine tools, plastics, packaging, printing, etc. We also make electric motors for OEMs. Overall, we manufacture about 12,000 pumps in a month.

In the last 12 months, the market has picked up with robust demand from various industries. We have crossed our 2018-19 peak figures in the last financial year. Order booking is quite robust for this financial year as well. We expect the trend to continue with sales of machine tools picking up and the country, as a whole, witnessing all round industrial growth with the push from the government towards manufacturing.

Is the growth coming from all sectors that you are serving to?
Most of the growth is happening in machine tools segment driven by automotive industry. At the same time, railways and defence are also generating a lot of demand with changes initiated by the government in the procurement policy. The government is also encouraging some sectors (called "Champion Sectors") and has launched PLI for many industrial segments which are expected to drive the growth. Electronics is also generating demand for machine tools.

How has been the exports performance?
At present, exports contribute about 10% to our turnover. Thanks to China Plus One policy (of big global manufacturers) many countries, who were not buying from us, are now sourcing products from us. We are supplying countries like USA, Germany, etc. We see lot of growth in exports in the coming years with many countries looking for an alternative to China for sourcing their products. Our exports should increase by 20-25% from the present level.

What are key challenges before manufacturers today?
Raw material prices and availability are major issues right now. We are in between the raw material supplier and the end-user industries, and hence we take a lot of hit on the prices as we are unable to pass on the prices hike completely to our customers. With availability becoming an issue, delivery time of products has increased and has forced us to maintain high inventory to reduce delivery time.

What kind of industrial trends you are seeing?
Machine tool builders are looking at ramping up manufacturing with most companies looking at 18-20% YoY growth for the next 3-4 years. The government's initiative to push infrastructure projects is also giving a boost to demand. About 50% of machine tools consumption in India is meet through imports. If we are able to capture 15-20% of this imported machinery market, then that itself will give a big boost to the industry.

On the technology front, additive manufacturing (or 3D printing) is the next big thing in the industry. Besides, many customers are asking for Industry 4.0 elements to be added to the machines. We are also increasing efficiency level of our pumps by moving from IE2 motors to IE3. At the recently held IMTEX Forming 2022 trade fair, we launched a pump with IE4 motors. Energy saving and automation are the key trends to observe for in the industry.

Could you please elaborate on the new IE4 pumps and other new initiatives?
Pumps with IE4 motor are application based. Currently, we are testing these pumps at our customer’s sites. Hopefully, at IMTEX 2023 in January next year, we will be able to showcase some machines that are running on our IE4 pumps. Push for energy efficient pump is also coming from end-user industries. For example, a lot of automotive customers are looking for energy savings and IE4 pumps are best suited for this application.

We have also ventured into a different vertical of brushless DC motor manufacturing for usage in automotive and non-automotive segments. While non-auto applications include AGVs, storage devices, etc; electric vehicles are the major end-users in auto segment. In off-road vehicles (like tractors) - which are undergoing electrification - will be major customers for these brushless DC motors.

What are your growth plans in the coming year?
The industry itself is growing at 18-20% naturally boosting the demand for our products. In addition, right now, we are focusing on electric motors, which will be a major business vertical for us by the end of next financial year. From the start of this financial year (i.e. April 2022), we have got into series production of electric motors, which is gaining traction among the customers. We expect large volume of business - maybe close to 25% - will come from electric motors by the end of 2023-24.