We expect that the first six months of 2014 would be subdued. The year 2013 witnessed very limited growth to no growth in parts of our business. The lack of implementation of major infrastructure projects by the Government, high inflation rates and high interest costs, rupee devaluation, difficulties in borrowing in the mid-tier market segments have all contributed to lowering the capacity utilisation of the Indian manufacturing sector. This has led to lower employment generation. Also, the industry lost its competitiveness to other countries as we were not able to upgrade technologies in a number of areas. Therefore, innovation has also suffered.

The Indian industry has been very adept at accepting these challenges and has started addressing the need for innovation to stay relevant in the global markets. CII and the Government of India have been helping support the needs of the industry by inviting partner countries to offer new relevant technologies and negotiating with individual States to respond to these needs proactively. We do see this initiative to continue in 2014.

In addition, the future will be all about converging technologies and collaborative approaches to create solutions that will be applicable to both, the bottom of pyramid markets (towards social uplift) and also across the segments that have the purchasing power. The industry today needs to work with an objective to create markets in India, for India and by India.

At Ingersoll Rand, close to 40 per cent of our engineers who work specifically to create products and solutions for India are using the technology and innovation convergence approach to achieve the same. Thus companies need to deploy strategic innovation to achieve market expansion through a new definition of collective collaboration across industries and other relevant stakeholders. This will enable lowering capital investments and increasing returns.

We believe these are challenging but exciting times in economies like India and together with the Government, society and enterprises we need to be well-primed to ride the new wave of growth by the end of 2014.

(The author is Chairman and President, Ingersoll Rand India)

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