Auto-component manufacturer Sona Group is planning to invest in research and engineering to become globally competitive inAprecision forgings business, a company official said on Wednesday.
The group bought out its Japanese partner Mitsubishi Minerals' 25 percent stake in their joint venture Sona BLW Precision Forgings (SBPFL).
"We came to a point where we felt that we had created growth aspiration in forging business. We want to investment in terms of technology, materials we are using. We are supplying for electric vehicles in US and Germany.
"We see this trend happening in terms of disruption in the automobile industry. We want to make more investments in research and development and in engineering as well. That is we bought them out," group's Chirman Sunjay Kapur told BTVi in an interview.
Currently, SBPFL has seven plants spread over India, Germany and Hungary.
"We started operations and investments are minimal, close to two million euro as most of the equipment are leased.A We continue to grow and invest in the plants through internal accruals. We see the opportunity for our own machining and heat treatment which is being outsourced to Germany. We see to move these to our own facility to Hungary," he said.
"We see lot of opportunities for cost reduction in terms of final product and more competitive globally," Kapur added.
The company's key global customers include OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) such as Daimler, Volkswagen Group, Renault, MAN, Scania, BMW, Porsche and Caterpillar among others.
SBPFL's Indian arm supplies to OEMs in the passenger and commercial vehicles as well as tractor segments like Maruti Suzuki, Tata, Mahindra & Mahindra, TAFE, Escorts, Volvo Eicher, ITL and Bharat Benz.
--IANS
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