What is driving this investment for Ceratizit?
An investment strategy is a kind of long term strategy. It's not something that you turn on, turn off and so on. Ceratizit obviously has a long term vision. Our medium-term objective is to be within the top three players in the cutting tools industry. And therefore, India is a very important country both as a market and also as a manufacturing base for our group. We want to expand that role of India for the group, and therefore we have decided a few years ago to increase our investments and production space. When we get more orders, and we hope to get more orders soon, we will feel it more and more visible.

You are also looking at making this as an export hub for other markets as well. Which are the other markets that you are looking at?
We are already exporting products from here through Europe, but also to Southeast Asia and China because we have capabilities here that we don't have today in China or in Thailand. For example, we are doing a lot of special things for those market and standards as well. So, it is, first of all India for India, India for Asia and it will be also more and more of India for the rest of the world.

Which are the key industry sectors that we are looking at to drive the growth?
I think in the past this plant has been very focused on automotive and that was very good. Today, we are still focussed on that area and that is very important but on the other hand, we are also shifting our focus to other industries. Considering the whole group and the different brands that we have, we have all the products to go very fast into aerospace. Therefore, that is one of our main focus areas as well since we have very good products.

How's been the market for Ceratizit India in the last one year?
Last one year has been very, very bad. I think we have all been hurt. Everyone in the market is in minus; some are more or less depends on whether you are more in the automotive industry, or you are more in other industries that are less affected. But I think this is temporary. We are thinking long term it helps us also now to move the equipment from one building to the other because we have now more capacity. If we are running full, then, we would lose capacity by moving. So, the downturn also has a positive side to it.

You also have a technical center here in Bengaluru. What purpose does it serve?
Yes, more and more of our products are highly technical. It's not always easy to show it at the customers' premises because he may not have the right equipment or the people who know how to run the latest cutting tool. Therefore, this technical centre will be used more and more to train customers and to convince customers that our tools are performing. So, if the customer wants to give us some technical test on a component, we can do it here for him. That's the purpose for the customer. On the other side, we also we want to train our sales force, because our sales people are out there with the customer. In our catalogue, we have 100,000 articles, so they need to know how to use those articles and therefore, we also use this technical Centre for training our people.
END