Emerson to ramp up Pune operations

US-based Emerson Electric plans to expand its base in India by setting up a second design engineering centre.

It also plans to expand the number of laboratories in Pune. Randall Ledford, the company's chief technology officer, told mediapersons on Tuesday that the company, buoyed by the success of the Emerson Design Engineering Centre (E-DEC) at Pune, is planning to open another centre. However, the company has yet to finalise the city where the centre will come up.

"We look at a city in its entirety," Ledford said, elaborating that factors such as availability of power, technical manpower, raw material and market access weigh significantly in the final decisions. Bangalore, he indicated, was almost ruled out; "somewhere in the north" being a more distinct possibility.

Ledford said the company will also increase the number of its laboratories in Pune and was on the look out for buildings that will withstand handling of heavy duty testing equipments.

"The common nature of buildings nowadays is more favourable for information technology or services operations, whereas we need differently built locations as we use a wide variety of resources including natural gas in our testing processes," he explained.

He, however, made it clear the company does not have plans to exit the current locations in favour of more acceptable ones.

On expanding R&D operations, Ledford said the firm's policy was to restrict it to about 10 per cent total manpower.

"Pune is the fourth largest development centre after Hong Kong, China and the US," he added.

Declining to disclose the financial indicators of the company's "success" in India, he did said the company was recording robust growth.

"We are growing at a high double digit rate of growth," he said. Emerson, worldwide, is a $17 billion company poised to grow to $20 billion.