New Era Demands New Business Strategy

I feel privileged to address the readers of Modern Manufacturing India (MMI) magazine, for the first time, after being elected as the President of Indian Machine Tool Manufacturers’ Association (IMTMA).

Manufacturing on the whole is facing challenging times currently but I firmly believe that we will see light at the end of the tunnel, provided, we reboot, rethink, create an agile ecosystem and get ready for the marathon race. Meanwhile, IMTMA will continue to guide the machine tool industry to tide over this trying phase, explore various avenues for growth and leverage opportunities along the way as we move on.

It is an opportune time for us to look internally. Energizing the ecosystem, whether it is our teams, partners or suppliers and getting them to align with our new thinking is crucial. We need to gear ourselves to improve our processes, eliminate waste, and develop new products for new markets. These factors would help overcome the prevailing challenges and enable us to be ready when the market starts moving on the upward curve.

This edition of MMI focuses on the metal forming machine tool sector. Although, a big part of India’s metal forming sector is unorganized, it is significantly large with an estimated market size of around $600 million and holds immense potential. Machine tool manufacturers will have a lot to explore at IMTMA’s flagship exhibition IMTEX FORMING 2020 & Tooltech 2020 to be held in January 2020 at Bangalore International Exhibition Centre (BIEC), Bengaluru.

IMTMA is also organizing a mega event, ‘Symposium on Smart Automation’ on November 21, 2019 in Bengaluru to drive manufacturing excellence through automation. I am optimistic that these events will propel the manufacturing industry to scale greater heights.

While I believe that the auto sector will continue to garner significant business opportunities for the machine tool industry, the time is ripe for the industry to recognize opportunities in emerging sectors such as defence, aerospace, power, medical equipment, railways, heavy engineering, etc. which are likely to grow rapidly in the coming years. This calls for the industry to minimize technological gaps and brace themselves up to serve the requirements of its customers.

I wish you all a happy reading!

Indradev Babu
President
IMTMA