The Hindu Business Line : Kamla Dials buys production plant in Switzerland

Utility
To invest $2.7 m in Swiss plant.
Trial runs in June; deliveries expected to start by July.
To bring Swiss brand `Blanc Pain' to India this year

Bangalore May 11 Chandigarh-based Kamla Dials and Devices Ltd will soon have a manufacturing utility in Switzerland.

Pylania, a 100-per cent Swiss-based subsidiary of Kamla Dials, has acquired the plant of watch component maker Boegli, which closed down four years ago. The acquisition is valued at $7,50,000.

Kamla Dials will invest $2.7 million in this plant, located in a village called Grandval. Trial runs will begin in June; deliveries are expected to start by July. In the first year of operations, it expects to produce about 5 lakh watch hands.

The company has four manufacturing units in India — three near Chandigarh and one in Bangalore. These units have a total production capacity of 12 million watch dials and 30 million watch hands annually.

Kamla Dials supplies to several leading watch brands such as Titan, Times and Sonata, apart from exporting to lower-end players in Switzerland.

Target users

With the Swiss plant, Kamla Dials' "objective is to cater to the high-end market in Switzerland," said Mr Yashovardhan Saboo, MD, Kamla Dials & Devices. "There is boom in the luxury Swiss watch market now. Exports of Swiss watches have been growing 11-12 per cent year-on-year for the last 3-4 years. It is likely to continue.

Swiss component makers are unable to meet the demand for watch components. We hope to cash in on this demand-supply gap."

It is already in talks with leading Swiss brands like Swatch and Richemont. "There has also been interest from dial factories to fulfil their orders," said Mr Saboo.

Retail chain

Kamla Dials also runs a chain of retail outlets called Ethos, which sell some of the leading Swiss watch brands such as Omega, Longines, Tissot and Rado. The company will bring in another Swiss brand to India — Blanc Pain, from the Swatch group — this year.

There are eight Ethos stores in India, in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Pune, Chandigarh and Ludhiana. The company plans to invest Rs 45 crore to set up 40 stores by 2009-10. Eight stores will come up this fiscal. Kamla Dials finished 2006-07 with a turnover of Rs 85 crore (manufacturing contributed Rs 65 crore, the rest came from retail). This year it hopes to garner revenues of Rs 120 crore, with manufacturing contributing Rs 80 crore.