Investing in ‘Make in India’ to be a local company: Vishal Wanchoo, GE

Vishal Wanchoo took over as GE’s president and CEO for South Asia. The conglomerate’s regional arm saw a 40% jump in orders to $4 billion in 2017 with revenues rising 20%. Wanchoo plans to build on that and discusses opportunities and challenges. Excerpts:

Economic growth has picked up, but investment remains slow. How is your business doing?
All the businesses had a good year. We had a record year in 2017 and the only business that was soft was marketdriven because of what happened to the onshore wind business in 2017. And, that is now off to a very good start. From outside the US, that was probably the strongest from a country perspective. We are making far more investments in ‘Make in India’ to be a local company.

What kind of Investments?

The big investment was (in the plant in) Pune and we continue to expand that. It has become really one of the most efficient factories in the GE context. The second big investment is in our factory in Marhowra (Bihar).

When will you produce the first locomotive?
In the third quarter this year. The plan is to deliver 100 locomotives in this upcoming fiscal year, out of which roughly about 40 will be imported and 60 will be domestically produced. In a couple of years, we’ll be 70% local. That was the tender requirement and we will achieve that very very quickly.

You took longer than Alstom, which has announced they have produced the first locomotive.
We were actually initially going to deliver a large number of locomotives from imports. That mix has changed — initially it was going to be roughly 100 imported and now it’s 40. So, it’s actually going ahead of schedule.

There is a talk of a global restructuring and GE being split. How is that impacting business?
It hasn’t impacted us in the region at all. As I was mentioning, 2017 was a very strong year on all fronts. We anticipate 2018 to be a very good year. Last year, orders grew by about 40%. This year, we anticipate, it will hit the range of 18-20% growth.

On the power side, the business that you’re essentially looking at is retrofitting in India. Is it a function of the fact that you aren’t seeing any power projects coming?
That’s one macro-challenge in India. The coal-based sector has not been meeting anyone’s expectations.

Even gas hasn’t been.
The gas segment has been dead for a long time in India, though I would say that we do see opportunity in gas, especially with the abundant amount of gas. If you can get that at right price point. It’s very state specific, in terms of what the tariffs are in the state and the gas availability. But on the coal side, the market in India used to be roughly at about 12 GW a year. That has gone down about a third of that. There is some concern in general from power industry. We’ve had discussions with the Ministry as well that if the industrial outcome will pick up.

As new GE head for the region, what is the new thing that you are planning?
While our focus on digital continues, the next big opportunity is additive manufacturing. GE offers a full line of metal additive manufacturing machines, materials and engineering consultancy services to customers in many industries, including aerospace, medical, automotive and energy.

GE has extensive knowledge of what it takes to design and manufacture additive parts and systems.