Taking its root from four famous companies´Ameliorair (1938 France), Air Industrie (1968 France), LTG Air Engineering (1925 Germany) and Kenya (1972 Italy)´AESA Engineering has an experience of more than 10,000 installations world wide, in a wide range of Industrial applications. AESA´s main specialities are textile industry such as spinning, weaving, knitting for cotton, man-made fibre, wool preparation and worsted spinning, non woven applications, other industrial applications, such as tobacco processing factory, glass fibre factory, paper mill & tissue industry.
The ITJ Senior Sub Editor Karthik Muthuveeran met Manish Kapoor, Vice President, AESA Engineering, during ITMACH exhibition in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Kapoor spoke at length about the company´s formation, products on offer and the company´s plans ahead.
Excerpts…
Karthik Muthuveeran (KM): How has AESA Engineering evolved over the years?
Manish Kapoor (MK): AESA Engineering was earlier known as LTG. LTG started the business in India with the joint venture of two companies ? AMELIORAIR from France and LTG from Germany. They uniformed the group and did business all across the world, dividing the territories in two parts. Far eastern countries was looked after by AMELIORAIR and from the Middle East to the US was looked after by LTG from Germany.
In 1995, these two companies merged together and formed LTG Air Engineering. In 2003, LTG from Germany pulled out of textile air engineering business, and the group companies, which were earlier attached to the Germany office, found a new group called AESA Engineering.
By the virtue of time, we were looking for a partner in India to manufacture products for the Indian markets and thus how we collaborated with Batliboi. We are using their facilities to manufacture our products for the local market. Our partnership with Batliboi has helped us a lot. Earlier a lot of equipment was coming from Germany and it was getting very expensive. And now with this joint venture, we are having benefit in terms of cost and better products.
In fact, in 2010 we touched our maximum business in India and the growth is continuing for us despite the market being slow. This is because we are still executing our past orders. We have a credit of doing a very big project of about 40,000 spindles at Saluja, Ludhiana. We also have a huge project in Budhni, Madhya Pradesh, which is about 180,000 spindles in three units.
KM: What are the wide range of products offered by the company? What makes these products different from that of the competitors?
MK: For conventional humidification industry, AESA Engineering has bought in pre-fabricated housing structures. It is easier to install and much faster in execution. Apart from these features a lot of other important things are factored in. It increases the productivity by virtue of time constraints.
KM: Which are the strong markets in India and abroad?
MK: In India, we are not focused only on one particular market. We are offering our services wherever ginning industry is present. We are doing various projects in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Punjab, Madhya Pradesh, and many other states. We are spread all over India. It is not confined to any particular state.
Being a global industry, we have a lot of experience in variable climate and making a climate control out of variable atmosphere. Globally, we have orders from Indonesia, which is handled by our Singapore office. Countries like Indonesia, Thailand, etc. are doing extremely well. There is a shift of focus from Chinese manufacturing industries. Taiwanese have more focus on China than on the US.