With Samputensili acquisition, EMAG offers new solutions for gear grinding

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With Samputensili acquisition, EMAG offers new solutions for gear grinding

With Samputensili acquisition, EMAG offers new solutions for gear grinding

Articles
Jun 27,23

German-based EMAG, a foundry and machine tool company offers CNC metalworking machines from turning to grinding. Gururaj Patil, Managing Director, EMAG India in this interview shares about company’s operations in India with current market trends amongst Indian machine tools manufacturers.

With Samputensili acquisition, EMAG offers new solutions for gear grinding

How is your company serving its customers?

EMAG is a technology company engaged in providing end-to-end manufacturing solutions to various industries including automation. EMAG is a solution for those customers who would like to manufacture precision metal parts, in large volumes consistently, with minimal human intervention. Today in India we serve varied customers from OEMs to Tier 1 and Tier 2 component manufacturers. Many of these customers export and their volumes are going up alongside the investment in EMAG machines. This is due to the fact that, once an export customer gets consistent quality and in committed volumes, the ‘word of mouth’ spreads. In fact, our customers provide very strong brand visibility for EMAG.

We have two manufacturing facilities, one in Zerbst, Germany and the other in Jintan, China.

We cover almost the entire chain of manufacturing from soft machining to gear teeth grinding. The automotive business contributes to a major share of our overall revenue globally. However, we have made a foray into off-road vehicles, agriculture and medical and aviation segments as well.

According to you, what is the present status of the machine tools industry in India?

The machine tool industry is going through a disruption today. Customers want many manufacturing solutions from a single supplier. This increases accountability and brings in an element of ‘peace’ to the customer. Imagine a customer speaking to three vendors, one for soft turning, second for grinding and a third for automation. This has a tendency to make the entire process less reliable as there are three parties involved.

Most of machine tool companies are doing well today due to the demand in the domestic market and in certain export markets. The supply chain issues do exist, but the customers are willing to wait now than turn down a lucrative deal they have in front of them.

With automation and digitalization gaining prominence in companies (i.e. your customers), how are you gearing up to serve your customers better?

At EMAG we started digitalisation almost two decades ago. Most of our machines are diagnosed online and in many cases rectified as well if they are non-mechanical issues. Through IoT, we have most of the optimisation of lines done through this route today remotely. Also, we have introduced the feature of monitoring machine health and compensation on line. This helps faster turnaround of our service and also supports quick uptime of the same for continuous production.

What are some of the emerging trends in the industry?

Today, manufacturing lines with complete operations are monitored by one supplier. Even though some machines may be from some other vendor, the accountability needs to stay with one agency. Besides this, the average life cycle of a component in the auto industry is shrinking as more and more new models are being launched. EV is gaining fast momentum and hence the components associated with this class of vehicle. Industries today are bringing in closer accuracy in components and a quick change over time for a new component. The ability to combine operations rather than investing in different machine tools is the order of the day and definitely, an opportunity in the market is out there in that regard.

How was the company's performance in FY23? What are your growth plans for the coming year?

Despite supply chain disruptions and unpredictable global demand, EMAG INDIA grew at over 20 per cent year-on-year in FY23. Through the acquisition of Samputensili, EMAG SU is offering new solutions for gear grinding, hobbing and shaving.

Buoyed by increased domestic consumption, FY24 is also expected to be on similar lines. We intend to offer test cutting, simpler overhauling, customisation and tooling up from our India operations in the years to come.