Tecumseh commissions rotary facility at Hyd

Tecumseh India, a 100 per cent subsidiary of Tecumseh Products Company (TPC), US, commissioned state-of-the-art rotary compressor manufacturing facility at its Balanagar plant in Hyderabad on Monday.

Tecumseh is a leading supplier of compressors to LG, Voltas, Hitachi and Bluestar in India, and to Gree and Midea of China, Alessa of Saudi Arabia and Vestel of Turkey.

Speaking to mediapersons, Vipin Sondhi, MD of Tecumseh Products India Pvt Ltd, said, "The new plant offers our original equipment manufacturers an option to source rotary compressors from within India instead of relying only on imports and also expand our export base especially in the Middle East."

The rotary manufacturing facility, spread over 48,000 sq ft is the first in India, and the only rotary compressor plant of Tecumseh in the entire Asia-Pacific region including China, apart from those in the US and Brazil, he added.

The new rotary facility adds to Tecumseh's already existing reciprocating compressor plant at Hyderabad. While the r plant has been raised to a current capacity of seven lakh units pa year, the new rotary facility has an installed production capacity of 7.5 lakh units annually.

Sondhi said that the rotary usage in the Indian market was growing at the rate of 30-35 per cent over the last three years and hence offered an opportunity to capture the domestic market which earlier depended on imports. Currently, more than 80 per cent of the 12-lakh unit domestic AC market uses rotary technology and, at present, all these compressors are imported from China or Southeast Asia, he said.