HMT Watches will relocate to Tumkur

HMT Watches, a fully-owned subsidiary of the financially troubled PSU HMT, is relocating its base to its relatively new plant in Tumkur from Bangalore.

The Tumkur plant, set up in 1978, produces the market-savvy quartz watches as opposed to the mechanical watches made by the Bangalore and Ranibagh divisions. This unit also has the capacity to turn out 5 million of HMT's 7 million units.

M S Zahed, chairman and managing director, HMT said, "Our aim is to consolidate the core activities of the division and move the headquarters to Tumkur from Bangalore within a year. By then the Tumkur plant will be integrated with full co-ordination between the marketing, design and the production team."

Currently, the marketing and core design aspects, besides administration are directed from Bangalore.

He added that the decision to shift base was finalised after determining the strengths of each plant. The Tumkur unit, one of the latest watch plants for HMT with its younger workforce and technology to manufacture quartz watches scored over the others.

Post restructure, Bangalore division will make quartz components and service southern region's requirement of mechanical watches, while Ranibagh will cater to North's appetite for mechanical watches.

This move comes in the wake of rapid regrouping of units across HMT's business segments, tractors, machine tools and watches.

In fact, the four watch divisions in Bangalore "" watch factory I and II, quartz analog watches and the specialised watch cases division "" have been merged into one entity. These changes, the company hopes will result in 5 to 10 per cent savings on cost and provide working capital relief.