Having so far confined itself to distribution activities during its 17-year existence in India, Mitsubishi Electric India is ready to make a big push into the industrial automation products space and is considering the establishment of a greenfield plant of its own at Pune.
"We are distributing industrial automation products here for the last 17 years. Recently, we decided to acquire our distribution partner in India, Messung Group. This is just the beginning of a vigorous journey that we are looking at the Indian market," a company official told PTI.
Mitsubishi Electric India's turnover currently stands at Rs 267 crore. It does not have any manufacturing base in the country and all its business mainly comes from marketing imported automation products.
The official said the company's turnover is likely to go past Rs 1,000 crore by the end of March, 2014, though only 20% of the projected revenue would come from selling products which are manufactured here. The rest will, as usual, will come from marketing of imported products.
Pune-based Messung Group has an indigenous R&D and factory automation products manufacturing set-up along with a strong sales and service network.
The official, who preferred not to be quoted, said the immediate plan of the company would be to start full-fledged production of factory automation products like programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and human machine interfaces (HMIs) at Messung's Pimpri factory in Maharashtra.
"Mitsubishi Electric India will leverage Messung Group's expertise in sales and manufacturing to strengthen solution business and penetrate more deeply into this fast-growing market under a growing commitment to provide quality products and services to Indian customers," he said.
Since the land area of the Pimpri facility is just 1.2 acres, he said Mitsubishi might look at a bigger place in Pune for setting up a greenfield plant. However, the proposal is at its nascent stage that may take 3-4 years from now to fructify.
