Leading Mid-Corporates of India 2021

22 Experts' View Leading Mid-Corporates of India 2021 How would you describe the journey of your company since its inception? What are some of the key milestones of the company in recent years? GMM Pfaudler has come a long way since its inception in 1962 as Gujarat Machinery Manufacturers Private Limited. Over the past six decades, the company has grown to become market leader in corrosion resistant technologies, systems, and related services for critical applications in the global chemical and pharmaceutical markets. Today we are operating 14 manufacturing facilities with presence across four continents and more than 1,500 employees. Over the last year, as the size, scale and complexity of our business has changed significantly, we have also made several senior level appointments including recently appointed, Mr. Aseem Joshi as CEO for India business and Mr. Manish Poddar as CFO, India. In the past year alone, we have made three strategic mergers and acquisitions which give us a cutting edge over our competitors. To start with, in July 2020, we acquired the Glass-lined Equipment manufacturing facility of De Dietrich ProcessSystems IndiaPvt. LtdinHyderabad which helped us strengthen our presence in the region. This was followed by the acquisition of HDO Technologies Limited in Vatva, Ahmedabad in March 2021. This is a state-of-the-art facility is spread GMM Pfaudler Limited Tarak Patel Managing Director over 12 acres with seven manufacturing bays. And the most strategic acquisition was acquiring a majority stake in the global business of Pfaudler Group. With this acquisition, GMM Pfaudler has become the holding company of the Pfaudler group, with the entire business of Pfaudler being consolidated into GMM Pfaudler. We are proud of the fact that we managed to complete all the three M&As in record time and have seen zero attrition amongst key personnel. Last but not the least, we recently announced phase 1 of our global ESOPs program and we are one of the few companies operating in the capital goods industry to offer ESOPs to our employees. It is a mark of recognition of the efforts put in by our dynamic employees and at the same time aligning them directly with the company’s performance as it progresses into new horizons. Your company has recently acquired a majority stake of the parent, the Pfaudler Group. How do you foresee the synergy help your company achieve even greater success? The acquisition of a majority stake in the PfaudlerGroupwasasignificantmovefrom a business perspective. This transaction has brought synergies at different levels within the organization. Portfolio expansion & cross selling, value sourcing and operational excellence are the three major pillars of our integration efforts following this transaction. We recently launched a new sealing technology by Pfaudler, the Interseal ace5000™, for the Indian market as part of portfolio expansion. Through value sourcing we will focus on using low-cost production sites to improve market share in price sensitive markets, while operational excellence will focus on improving throughput across our manufacturing sites and cross-selling will emphasize on selling a wider range of products to our existing customers. We have had a long working relationship of more than 2 decades with Pfaudler International and we are aware of their culture, systems, and processes. Moving forward we will look at strengthening our workforce and building synergies across all our office locations. We look at this acquisition more like a partnership and not an acquisition. The journey ahead of us is indeed exciting. Which additional areas / sectors you plan to explore post the merger? What is your company’s growth strategy for next 3-5 years? Through the initiatives under our integration, we aspire to become more competitive and capture bigger market share in Asian, American, and European markets. We have secured large orders from Russia, Spain, and the US, besides Europe and we are eyeing Eastern and South-East Europe besides South-East Asia. We have been growing globally at about 15% and in India at about 13% and the idea is to leverage our strengths as a group to win market share around the world. Earlier we couldn’t export our products in markets such as Southeast Asia, Russia, Spain, some parts of South America, Africa but after the acquisition of Pfaudler Group we have direct access into these markets which will improve our operations and margins. Dun & Bradstreet