Which will be the key focus areas for you in 2016?
We have major plans for 2016. While we continue our association with our existing clients, we plan to strengthen our overall presence in this country. Enhancing our partnership with present clients, our key focus segments this year would be Passenger Cars, Commercial Vehicles and the Off Highway segments.

Tell us about your R&D activities.
In order to continue to be successful with innovative products, ZF annually invests about 5 percent of its sales (2014: around €890 million) in research and development

In India, ZF has the application engineering team for chassis systems and off highway segment. The country has a great advantage when it comes to its engineering base and cost advantage. The readily available strong technical as well as managerial talent has established India as a very attractive R&D destination. ZF is also one of the top 10 patent leaders in Germany with about 700 patents successfully filed in 2013. Our philosophy is to constantly evolve and innovate keeping the global mega trends as the epicentre. We are also exploring possibilities of setting up a development center for supporting our R&D initiatives.

Do you also export from India?
This country has tremendous potential and opportunities for the manufacturing and auto industry. Being one of the fastest growing economies in the world owing to its large size and enormous talent, India provides this sector a challenge to constantly innovate and produce the best quality of products. The Indian auto components suppliers are reliable and have great technological capabilities; hence the products are of superior quality with a good turnaround time. Realising this, we at ZF have decided to source quality products from India for our global product portfolio.

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