Huaheng Automation Pvt Ltd, the wholly-owned subsidiary of China’s Huaheng Welding Co Ltd has recently announced opening of its first fabrication-cum-assembly unit in India. On the sidelines of the inaugural event, Xu Xujion (popularly known as Xu Xu), Chairman of Huaheng Group speaks about the company’s roadmap for India. Edited excerpt from his interview:

Huaheng is one of the major welding players in China. How do you see the opportunities in Indian market?
Established in 1995 Huaheng Welding Co. Ltd. is a leading designer and manufacturer of integrated automatic welding solutions in China. We provide state-of-the-art, high-performance products like orbital welding systems, large automatic plasma/TIG/MIG welding systems, and robotic welding systems.

We are actively present in India for more than 7 years through sales activities and consider Indian market as strategically important for our business. As the Government of India is increasing emphasis on infrastructure development and encouraging domestic manufacturing through ‘Make in India’, we felt this is the right time to increase our presence in India. Ease of doing business in India has also improved significantly during the past couple of years.

We want to empower the Indian industry by providing them advanced technology and at the same time we will make use of the upcoming opportunities to grow our business in India.

Could you be little specific about your roadmap for India?
We would like to serve the Indian industry by increasing our footprint supported by locally available solutions, technology and resources. On this note, we have opened a full-fledged fabrication-cum-assembly unit in Savli. Our advanced welding and cutting systems like automated orbital welding, mechanised welding, robotic welding, and automated CNC cutting will be made available at this new facility. We are also committed to create more and more direct and indirect employment opportunities.

What sort of responses you are getting from the local industry?
It’s very encouraging! We are very privileged to have clients like INOX, Sany, Hitech, Lanco Infra, Glatt, and Endress+Hauser Flowtec in our clientele. They have extended their supporting hand and are quite happy of our localisation. We have promised them of our assured product quality and reliable after-sales support.

What are the value additions that Huaheng can make? What’s your strategy in beating the competition?
We will not repeat our mistake what we have done in China. Along with a positive attitude we are going to be above our competitors. We have something to offer which are unique and different from others. We have entire range of welding and cutting product, one stop solution to offer for the Indian industry. We have more and more focus on our standard product which we would like to promote through our dealers’ network.

What are the application areas of your products?
Our products are ideal for use in a variety of industries such as oil and gas, petrochemicals, boiler and heat exchanger, offshore, shipbuilding, nuclear energy, power generation, pharmaceutical, food and beverages, high pressure vessel, semi-conductor, dairy, engineering construction, locomotive, mining, defence etc.

Tell us briefly about your manufacturing facility in China.
Our manufacturing facility in Kushan, China is equipped with a full range of manufacturing, measuring, inspection and analysing equipment such as high-precision CNC machining centre, automatic cutting table, and automatic robotic welding system. We maintain stringent quality check at the each end every step of manufacturing.

Are you planning to introduce any new product in the Indian market?
Huaheng has also excelled in the making of advanced industrial material handling and storage solutions. In India, we plan to launch our Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) and intelligent storage systems which attracted huge attention and appreciation during the live demonstration from customers.

Tell us more about this AGV. What are its unique features and applications?
AGV is internal logistics equipment used for material handling, storage, delivery, and assembly solutions in a wide range of applications. AGV systems are infused with mobility features and used to move materials around the facility of a warehouse, factory and shop floor or even on production floor.

Do you conduct any training for your staff and customers from India?
Yes we conduct regular training for our workforce to understand how the welding and cutting machines work and operation of the same as well as their maintenance. Many of our Indian staff have already visited Kunshan facility to get acquainted with our work culture and technologies.

Most importantly, the efficiency and productivity of a machine depends largely on operator’s performance. In this regard, we share provide adequate practical trainings to our customers.

What will be efforts towards increasing business network in India?
We are aggressively looking at expanding our sales and distribution network in India. We are also going to conduct training programs for our dealers to make them familiar about our culture, principals and product offering. We invite more and more sales and dealership partners to be a part of our journey and create a win-win situation for all stakeholders.

———————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
We want to empower the Indian industry by providing them advanced technology and at the same time we will make use of the upcoming opportunities to grow our business in India.

Xu Xujion, Chairman, Huaheng Group