The Hindu Business Line : Sandvik Asia sets up EOU for cartridges

The plant is expected to become operational from the second quarter of 2004, Mr Anders Thelin, President, Sandvik Coromant AB, Sweden, has said here on Wednesday.

He said with this the global production of tooling cartridge would be brought into the Pune plant. Currently, there are seven such plants spread across the globe.

He said the idea behind setting up of this EOU was to release the capacities in the other plants as global requirements for other products were also on the rise. He pointed out that the Pune facility would begin production of tooling cartridge as the initial step and "provided they prove themselves, other products would soon follow".

The Pune plant would become the prime location for the tooling cartridges while the other seven locations would act as a backup if the requirement arose, he said. "We would not like to comment on the production capacity or the investment that has gone into this plant as we do not want competitors to know," he said. Mr Anders said currently there are two units working within the Pune premises for the manufacture of tooling cartridge and noted that from the first plant, about 75 per cent was for exports. Asked why the second unit was set up, he said, the first unit would now look more at the domestic market and the second one would be for total exports.

He said exports had almost doubled during 2002-03, touching Rs 100 crore as against Rs 50 crore for the previous year. Of the Rs 100 crore, 75 per cent came in from the Pune plant with its bouquet of products and the remaining came in from the unit manufacturing stainless steel product.

He said the Pune plant has been ranked one of the top three among its other plants with respect to quality, productivity and rejection rate. Mr Anders said Sandvik Coromant, a recognised brand in the metal working industry has set up a productivity centre also in its Pune premises. This centre would train the customers in the art of lowering the manufacturing costs, achieve better machine utilisation, shorten lead times and have better machine output. This is the 21st productivity centre being set up by the Sandvik Group. The investment, he added, would be approximately Rs 4 crore.

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