Hirotec's New Plant in Coimbatore to go on Stream by Dec View Original Article

Posted by Jayashankar Menon at the Automotive Horizon

Hirotec India, the leading player involved in the manufacture of automotive car doors, exhaust systems, hemming equipment and assembly tooling announced yesterday that its new facility that is coming up in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu would go on stream by the end of this year. According to Brian G McGinnity, Chief Financial Officer of Hirotec America Inc, the Indian arm has already invested Rs 10 crore for its design unit. What is more, another Rs 20 crore has been infused for the setting up of a plant in Coimbatore. We have already located the site at Arasur, near Coimbatore. The requisite machinery for this plant is likely to be imported from the US and the installation would happen by August this year. If everything goes well, we would start operations of this plant by the end of this year", McGinnity added.

In India the US-based firm already has a facility in Pune. "With these investments that includes Rs 10 crore to our Pune facility, we would be able to control critical to success manufacturing processes and further we would be able to have cohesive focus on hemming tooling that will have Japanese quality at Indian price", the official pointed out.

"In the global perspective, India's share to our total sales turnover of $ 1.3 billion stood at just $ 3 million. However, our Coimbatore unit is going to be a game changer. We have targeted our new unit to achieve a turnover of $ 6 million or Rs 28 crore during 2011-12", McGinnity said. When asked whether the firm contemplated on starting the production of doors at the Coimbatore facility, the official said that it would depend on the demand from the Indian market, which was witnessing a robust growth. "As an estimated $ 40 million to $ 60 million investment would be required to establish a full-fledged manufacturing facility, exclusively for the manufacture of doors, we should get a bare minimum order of around 300,000 doors. Only then we will be able to set up a separate line for doors", McGinnity concluded.

Evolution:

As early as May 23 last year, the Hirotec Group announced that KGHirotec Engineering Services Private Limited had changed its name to Hirotec India Private Limited. This reflected the group's commitment to bring best in class body-in-white closures to the Indian market by providing high quality, low cost hemming and flexible systems.

Hirotec now has two sites and the first location is in Coimbatore, instituted in 2005 and provides cutting edge engineering and technical services. The second site in Pune is committed to providing lean body shop tooling, utilizing the latest manufacturing technologies to support the local and global market demand.

The group have global sales in excess of $ 1.3 billion and 21 global locations. For well over seven decades, Hirotec Group has been providing innovative and highly flexible products and solutions to automotive industry around the world.

Design solutions:

Hirotec India's talented pool of workforce has extensive experience in offering quality designs. What is more, by choosing Hirotec India, its customers would benefit from its global presence, which supplies low cost solution to meet any of the OEM design needs.

It customers include Mahindra, Mazda, Suzuki, Honda, Nissan, Caparo, A&S, Comali, AMT, GM, FIAT Group, Chrysler and more.