Agility in adopting smart technologies to serve its customers has kept Delta Electronics India ahead of the curve in the industry. In conversation with BT, Mr Manish Walia, Business Head, Industrial Automation Solutions, Delta Electronics India, shares about the company’s participation in achieving the self-reliant economic goals of India
The key word to efficient manufacturing globally is smart automation. How does Delta differentiate itself in this competitive segment?
Delta, a leading player in smart automation, has primarily been a very strong manufacturing driven global organization. Having gained significant experience in putting smart manufacturing and automation technologies together, Delta, has built for itself a strong portfolio of Industrial Automation Solutions offerings for a wide array of services and solutions across industry sectors
How will the demand of the manufacturing industry shape over the next 12-18 months?
As the world lead towards a post-pandemic environment, industries are adopting business transformation using new-age technologies. It has been an important year for manufacturing strengthened further by several government initiatives, which are mostly to build digital network. Therefore, for the industry, IOT would play a big role and we stand to gain immensely from it. Also the industries like pharma & healthcare, packaging, IT, Telecom, E-Commerce have proved to be immune to the ruin the pandemic has caused. We have demands from all across whether it is from machine automation, factory automation and process automation as well. Thus, I do see a recovery in the year ahead.
What are the niche automation areas that Delta has leveraged with its expertise?
Delta Industrial Automation Solutions has progressed and shaped itself well in providing niche solutions to various core industries such as steel, cement, pharma, textiles, besides having expertise in robot-based and camera-based solutions and other areas as well. Delta also has an upper hand in the electronics industry because of its in-depth understanding of the overall supply chain and manufacturing that has enabled us to provide good amount of automation to the industry. In recent months, we emerged strongly in the non-industrial segments as well, which has buoyed our sentiments to move forward in terms of offering our product solutions to them. Another remarkable development has been in the plastics industry where we have done tremendously well in the last four-five months and envisage sustained growth in the coming months. Textile industry is another area where Delta’s business has flourished, as well as in the machine tool segment, which has grown recently generating huge demand and is largely being catered by us.
The Covid pandemic has affected economies across the globe. How has Delta continued to innovate, manufacture and sustain itself?
With the impact of the Covid crisis being unpredictable we went into introspection to plan future manoeuvrability. Internally, we enhanced our team’s understanding of product offerings viz-a-viz the industries that we are working with. Expert guidance from our business groups was sought while we imparted a lot of training to our different channels, to our end customers, to machine makers and others, besides introducing a lot of new pharma related products that are required for mask making machinery, ventilators, sanitizer stand etc. We also looked at our existing business model and its future viability, and doing some reasonably good tweaking the results of which have started to show. Offering solutions for remote monitoring of machines where our applications were essential was another area which opened up a lot of new avenues for us. With manpower becoming an issue, automation requirements from industries and from various segments of the customers poured in. Over the last several months, the overall market situation has been promising with seemingly better liquidity in the market
How does Delta see the path ahead for campaigns like Aatmanirbhar Bharat and Start-up India?
Delta has been an integral part of India’s economic development process since the company ventured into the Indian market in 2003. With our upcoming plant in Krishnagiri, more products will be added to localize the production for the domestic consumption and export with a vision of Delta Powering Green India. Shoring up Delta’s R&D facility is an upcoming centre in Bengaluru that would be fully functional in the near future. So, we have been supporting Atmanirbhar mission aimed at self-reliance when it comes to providing solutions to the market. To enable this, we have experts all across India in applications, products and solutions. Delta has simultaneously started to build aggressively a big portfolio by trying to integrate the complete automation and look at all the resources that we have across the country and try to grow together with our partners and customers.
The New year 2021 has started on a promising note. So, what growth plans does Delta Industrial Automation have in a changed scenario?
With the vaccinations getting approval, Delta like rest of the world is optimistic of seeing improvement. We have already started moving forward with a good mix of promotion and business development happening in response to increasing demand. With a surge in investments coming into India for manufacturing set-ups corporates are looking for local options, which augurs well for us as that’s where we can actually gain from. I see 2021, as a pretty good year for the manufacturing, digital, IT, pharma industry and also the core sectors that look very promising for India, which could soon become a global supplier. We intend to explore these avenues and try to get the maximum share out of it with a vision of Delta Powering Green Automation. With our strong roots in the Industrial Automation space in this country, we tend to leverage our reach and bring in a strong momentum in the Building Automation space going forward. Huge opportunities and potential exist with infrastructure expected to get a big push from both Government and private sector. We can support the growing market with Delta Building Automation Solutions which will also play a critical role moving ahead.
