Indian machine tool industry sees growing use of software in manufacturing

The Indian Machine Tool Manufacturers’ Association (IMTMA) has said that the usage of software has increased in the machine tool industry as the demand for high technology products has been increasing in automobile industry.

Talking to Autocar Professional on the sidelines of Delcam Asian Technical Summit 2015 held in Bangalore, Goutam Doshi, advisor, IMTMA, said around 60 percent of machine tool products manufactured in India are ordered by vehicle manufacturers and Tier 1 component suppliers.

Around 65 percent of machine tool demand in India is being met by the domestic industry while the remaining 35 percent depends on imported industrial machine tools, Doshi said.

To compete with the foreign players, Indian machine tool makers too have improved their technologies in recent times. The usage of software products is growing rapidly in the domestic machine tool industry. Another major reason for implementation of software products is increasing precision and mass manufacturing ratio in the Indian auto sector, he added.

The Indian machine tool industry has been growing at the rate of 15-20 percent and its growth is completely dependable on the auto component industry.

CAD/CAM software solution providers like Delcam, CATIA and SolidWorks from Dassault Systemes, Tebis and hyperMill are widely supplying their latest technology products to the Indian machine tool industry. Doshi referred to PowerMill and PowerShape from Delcam as two among other most widely used software products in the automotive-related machine tool industry.

He said India stands in 12th position in machine tool production in the world while it is ranked seventh in consumption. The current size of the Indian machine tool industry is in the range of Rs 10,000 crore. If the economy grows at the rate of 7-8 percent, he said the industry will expand to Rs 20,000 crore by 2020.

Currently the country imports machine tools from countries like Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and Korea to meet 35 percent demand here. Going forward, the import ratio may come down as domestic players have been improving their standards on par with other developed markets.

Doshi added that while Punjab and Rajkot are traditional machine tool manufacturing hubs, the Bangalore region has emerged as the machine tool hub of India, followed by Pune.