I understand that your Technology Centre in India plays a key role in enabling customers to cope with technology oriented market challenges. Please tell us more about the same.

Brajesh Kumar: As Walter Tools, we often talk about "Engineering Kompetenze". That is the only thing that can deliver. And we are helping our customers to deliver that by honouring our commitment to them. It could be process, it could be tooling or it could be commitment about cost reduction per component during the machining. And this particular Technology Center is helping me to prove all these things in the actual manufacturing atmosphere. So my customers can come to this center and see for themselves. This helps us strengthen their belief and trust in our commitments.

Many times customers don't want to carry out developmental activities at their production lines. So they need a competent partner to work with them. That's where we play a role with our Technology Center. We help them for developing certain complex components. We make sure that this partnership is going to help them in completing their developmental projects satisfactorily.

So in both respects, the Technology Center is helping us help our customers grow.

India also needs to bridge the huge industry-academia gap in terms of creating industry ready engineers. What can we expect from Walter towards this cause?

Brajesh Kumar: The fact is that none of the universities in India is dealing with tooling or its technology. Even within the mechanical engineering curriculum, tool engineering gets very little focus. So there's not much focus on tooling specifically.

However, we are very much connected with the technical schools and diploma colleges. We always try to help them in execution of their projects in the final years. Most often, engineering students do not get touch a cutting tool before actually taking up a job. So we openly invite relevant institutes to bring their students to our Technology Center and let them experience the latest in the field of tooling. We have displayed the latest tools at the Center and students can physically touch and feel these tools. Our application engineers and our training managers also visit the colleges and technical schools where they conduct technical seminars and provide information to the students; it is likely that tomorrow some of these students could be our partners, employees or customers.

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