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MOTORINDIA
l July 2012
Global automation
companies eyeing India,
but next only to China
With the accelerated growth in the manufacturing sector, automation plays a vital role and contributes major
revenue for the exchequer. Since India and China have emerged major glowth centres, the global automation
companies have set ambitious sales targets in these two countries. It is against this backdrop that the Auto-
matica 2012 held during May 22-25, has assumed greater significance.
The MOTORINDIA Managing Editor, who was specially invited to cover this world event, spoke to many
automation industry experts to learn their views on the specific Indian market prospects.
Here are their views:
By R. Natarajan, Managing Editor & Publisher
One of the challenges facing
the automation sector in India,
according to Mr. John Dulchi-
nos, President & Chief Execu-
tive Officer, Adept, is its small market. It is hard to justify
a production facility for automation in the country to support
its production volumes. At the same time, import levies are
very high, making robotics very costly. The challenge lies in
balancing local manufacturing with importing.
He said: “We have a couple of small distributors and inte-
grators in India. We make small robots and sell them to big
companies to make small product assemblies. Currently the
products we sell in India come from the US, while the ap-
plication support is either from the India or Singapore office.
The import duty we pay is very high, at 40-70 per cent”.
Adept strongly feels that for India to become a major
robotic market, the infrastructure should be much improved.
“We have 185 employees across the world, of which 5-10% are in India. India is an important country for us,
and there is a lot of talent. We don’t sell to the automotive OEMs. Instead, we sell to component manufactur-
ers like Bosch, Delphi and Hella. The number of robots despatched to India as given in the IFR Statistics are
actually under-stated, because some units are sent to India from the company headquarters, which are not taken
into account in the statistics”, he added.
Mr. John Dulchinos,
President & CEO, Adept Technology, Inc.