Japan's Fuji Electric to expand India ops, invest $50mn, export made-in-India hardware

Fuji Electric, the 100-year-old Japanese firm that develops solutions for the energy, automation and environment technology sectors is actively expanding their India operations. At the inauguration of their latest factory to manufacture Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) and AC drives (devices to efficiently control, operate electric motors), the firm revealed that they are looking to further invest up to Rs 400 crore or $50 million in India, over the next four years.

With the latest factory in Chennai setup at an estimated investment of Rs 150 crore($20 million) and the pre-existing factory in Pune, the firm looks to significantly scale up their manufacturing in India. The annual production will be scaled up to 1,20,000 AC drives and more than 2,00,000 PCBs.

Kentaro Yamaguchi, Head, Automation at Fuji Electric told WION that the automated equipment being used in India for surface mounting (placing small electronic components) on PCBs is the most sophisticated of its class. He said that even the Japanese factories of Fuji Electric did not have such advanced machines that can perform the surface mounting in a nearly 100% automated manner and in just a few seconds of time.

Shivaji Waghmare, CEO, Fuji Electric India, said that they look forward to serve larger number of Indian customers with the increased capacity and also are looking at opportunities to export made-in-India hardware to South East Asia, Middle-East, Africa, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka among others.

The company is also looking at generating a total of Rs 1500 crore in annual revenue in India by 2025. For financial year 2022-23, the officials revealed that their firm has already surpassed Rs 1,000 crore.

On their future plans, the company said that they would need to further expand their India operations in the next four years, if they are to surpass Rs.1500 crore in revenue. That scaling up would mean a further investment in India of Rs 400 crore or $50 million for a much larger factory.

Queried about the quality standards of their Indian-made products over the Japanese ones, Shivaji Waghmare, CEO, told WION that the quality was no different from the Japanese-made ones. "We use the same machines, same processes as in Japan and it is also setup by the Japanese teams. In fact, the machines that are in use in the latest factory in India are much more advanced than those in Japan", he added.


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