"We want to make the Kharagpur plant a global manufacturing hub," managing director of Tata Hitachi Ranabir Sinha said.
The company, which launched a new 20-tonne class hydraulic excavator manufactured at the Kharagpur plant, plans to service markets in Africa, Middle-East and South East Asia, Sinha told reporters here last night.
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The modernised Kharagpur plant was inaugurated last December and built at a cost of Rs 550 crore to make a host range of small and medium-sized earth moving equipment for multifarious construction activity.
Sinha said that Tata Hitachi (formerly Telcon) had a market share of 38 per cent in the excavator market in the country.
He said that in the last fiscal, the company had witnessed a degrowth due to economic slowdown and the plant was running at 35 per cent capacity utilisation. Sinha said that a vendor park was also coming up near the plant on 90 acre. President and CEO of Hitachi Construction Machinery of Japan Suji Moto said that India would be a major manufacturing hub for Hitachi which has 60 per cent stake in Tata Hitachi.
"India will be the hub of global sales and service network," he said.
Tata Hitachi has two other plants in Jamshedpur and Dharwad in Karnataka.