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Germany-headquartered ZF Friedrichshafen AG, the €36.4-billion global auto parts major, aims to increase its content in commercial and passenger vehicles in India.
With new regulations coming in, ZF sees brighter opportunities to sell more of its products such as clutches, dampers and chassis components from its vast global portfolio offerings in the Indian market.
“India is an important market for us for two reasons. The pure size of the auto market, and, secondly, it is key for our production and engineering capabilities. The OEMs in India are asking for our systems expertise and it has forced us to have broader parts supply capabilities,” Holger Klein, Member of Board of Management, ZF Friedrichshafen, told BusinessLine.
Scaling up output
He said ZF’s India arm was ramping up production capacities of some parts at its Pune unit and increasing the number of engineers at its R&D facility in Hyderabad. But he declined to divulge financial details.
KV Suresh, President, ZF India, said while the company already had a strong foothold in supplying parts to commercial vehicle sector, it has also started supplying to passenger vehicle segment in the past two years.
“We have launched our transmission and are in discussions with OEMs for automated manual transmissions (AMT). We are planning to build chassis components and introduce dampers for CVs. We are also looking at what is it that has been successful in the PVs can we bring them to the CVs,” he said.
Double-digit growth
Suresh said the Indian arm had already proposed a growth strategy to the board, which would evaluate the same and revert. “We have been growing in big double digit in India in the auto space in the past two years. In the industrial space too, we have been growing,” he added.
There is a two-pronged approach in its growth plan – to maintain profitability for the current range of products despite growing competitive pressures and to achieve break even for new products faster. Earlier, Klein highlighted that the company’s India Technology Centre in Hyderabad, which was launched last year, has been focusing on building solutions for local market and has also become part of ZF’s global engineering network.
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