Japan's Makino to set up tech centre at $3.3mn

New Delhi, Oct 24: Japan-based Makino, a leading metal cutting solutions provider, today announced the opening of its technology centre at Manesar, Haryana at an investment of 3.3 million dollars.

The centre comprises of a die-mould showroom, a turnkey application centre, fixture manufacturing, customer training and seminar, spares warehouse and design house.

''The key objective of the centre is to serve the local customers, share the technology and manufacturing know-how and improve speed of response in customer support,'' Makino India President K S Sankaran told reporters here.

The centre will be inaugurated tomorrow by Brij Mohan Lall Munjal, Chairman of Hero Group, one of the company's major clients, in the presence of Makino Global President Jiro Makino.

Having a dominant market share in the horizontal machining centers (HMC) in India and a leading player in vertical machining centers (VMC) as well, the company expects to up its machinery and turnkey solutions sales by 20 per cent to 80 million dollar by the end of the current fiscal, from 67 million dollars during the last fiscal.

It also seeks to raise the capacity of its international technology park at Bangalore from the present 250 VMCs per year to 500 units within two years.

The unit will be in a position to produce 400 machines by the end of next year and would be used for exporting machining tool components and turnkey fixtures.

A total of 50 per cent in the niche products of horizontal machining centers are being exported to India, Mr Sankaran added.

''Our present capacity is only able to cater to the domestic market as the demand is very high,'' he said.

Makino is further planning to set up a new technology center at Pune by mid-2007 with an investment of 1-2 million dollars, basically to cater to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) including Mahindras and Bajaj, besides an after-sales service facility in Uttaranchal.

The company is going to expand its products range by introducing J-3 smallest HMC and SL-22 smallest VMC (aluminium machining), to be available at a cost of Rs 30 lakhs.

UNI