Exide Planning New Line For Electric Vehicles

Calcutta

Exide Industries Ltd, the country's largest storage battery manufacturer is developing an entirely new line of batteries for electrically operated vehicles. The company is in the process of tying up arrangements with Mahindra & Mahindra and Scooters India Ltd for sourcing the new batteries for the electrically operated vehicles.

Investments in this line of business will form a significant portion of the Rs 75 crore investment figure earmarked for fiscal 2000-1.

"The new product has a large potential in metropolitan and big cities in country where pollution is a problem because of fumes from petrol and diesel operated vehicles", pointed out the company chairman and CEO S B Ganguly.

The technology will be indigenously sourced from the company's research and development department, Ganguly told Business Standard.

The deals with the two companies are set to be tied up within this fiscal and trial runs have already begun. According to Ganguly, the vehicles have commenced skeletal services in cities like Lucknow and Agra.

This year, besides zeroing into the rural sector with a new marketing strategy for tractors and heavy commercial vehicles, the company is going to focus heavily on the industrial batteries division of which the new product is going to form a part of.

"We plan to increase the production of the valve regulated lead acid batteries at Hosur", he pointed out.

On the cards is restructuring the automotive capacity by 1 million to 5.2 million and adding ancillary units too.

The company has recently made a foray into the charger business by acquiring a new company Caldyne, and hiving off its power electronics division into a separate company under the name Exide Caldyne Ltd.

Ganguly said that the power electronics division has undergone a major revamp and this was an important aspect of the modernisation process.

The products would power sophisticated electronics for telecom, uninterrupted power supply and power house applications. The amount in this business is Rs 100 crore.

Exide holds 51 per cent stake in the new firm, while the rest is held by the original promoters of Caldyne Ltd.

Exide has been a low key player in the battery charger segment over the last two years and has recently launched a range of Switch Mode Power Supply (SMPS) chargers into the market.

The company is also gearing up to meet the huge demand for car batteries in the next five years as predictions say that the car production in the batteries will double upto 3 million cars.