Schwing Stetter looking at setting up new plant in India

The company is considering various locations to make Rs 100-200-cr investment

German construction equipment manufacturer Schwing Stetter is looking at setting up a new plant in India to meet the growth in the sector.

While the plans for a new plant are in the preliminary stages, the company is considering locations in various states for making an investment of Rs 100-200 crore.

Anand Sundaresan, vice-chairman and managing director of Schwing Stetter India said, with the infrastructure sector expected to see a growth in the near future, the company will have to look for setting up another factory.

He said the company was contemplating various options, including setting up the facility in Tamil Nadu itself, where it already has four manufacturing plants, near Chennai. The other locations on the company’s radar include Gujarat, Pune and Odisha.

The availability of good quality vendor base is another criteria for selecting a particular geography for locating the manufacturing facility, Sundaresan said.

He said the current plant utilisation of around 65 per cent might go up if the market grows at a higher rate this calendar year. The company, which has a strong presence in concreting machine manufacturing, has recently expanded its portfolio by launching a tower crane. It also had recently launched a self-loading mixer.

The self-loading mixer automatically loads building materials like sand and other aggregates required for mixing concrete. It blend the raw materials, transports them and unloads the mixture.

VG Sakthi Kumar, managing director of Schwing Stetter Sales and Services Pvt Ltd, said the present market size of self-loading mixer in the country is 1,200 units, and the company was aiming at a market share of 10 per cent.

Schwing Stetter India is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Schwing Group of Companies, a euro 850-million concrete machinery manufacturer. It manufactures equipment for concrete preparation, placement, transportation and recycling. The Indian subsidiary manufactures concrete batching plants, transit mixers for transporting readymade concrete to construction sites, pumps among others.