3M India plans for more 'made in India' prodcuts

3M India plans to focus more on the domestic market by investing on localised products and by expanding the market into smaller towns. The Indian arm of the US-based company is also eyeing revenues of $1 billion by 2015.

The company which started its India operations in 1988, in 23 years touched revenues of Rs 1,175.6 crore in 2011 and made a profit of Rs 98.8 crore. Presently, 3M India sells around 4,000 products of the 50,000-odd product portfolio it has globally.

“We have a roadmap before us to achieve revenues of $1 billion by 2015. For this we are planning to focus more on the India market by developing products for India by the India team,” said Ajay Nanavati, Managing Director, 3M India.

To create a new range of product portfolio for India, the company is planning to increase its R&D base in the country. 3M India, which has 125-member-strong research team in India is intending to take its R&D team strength to 300 in five years. 3M, considered one of the most innovative companies in the world, developed 23 innovative products from India and has also received around 14 patents for products developed out of India. The company also aims to target about 40 per cent of its revenues from new products in the next five years.

3M India also opened a new R&D facility in Bangalore with an investment of around Rs 100 crore. According to the company, the facility would initially focus on developing products for key industry segments like infrastructure, automotive, healthcare and, oil and construction.

“As we are investing in more products, our goal is to make around 40 per cent of our revenues from the new products. Having said that, we will work on the existing products to develop more applications that would contribute around 20 per cent to the revenues going forward. We will spend around 2.5 per cent of our India revenues on R&D,” added Nanavati.

The company also said that Asia region China is the number one market. However, the growth of India business is higher than the Chinese business. Apart from the Bangalore-R&D centre, it has another R&D centre in Gurgaon and also four manufacturing facilities in India.