Q&A – GCIP 2016 @ Delhi – Final Jury Round

Q1: It is not clear to me what is the uniqueness of this product, especially I am curious why you did not choose to apply for patent. How do you plan to sustain? your competitive advantage?

A1: The uniqueness of this product is that it is based on hydraulic energy instead of compressed air, so you can see at the bottom instead of using 30 HP power of compressor, which has only 30% efficiency of transmission to the end (point), we are using 12.5 HP with a higher pressure of squeezing which is realising in better dimensions weight.

As far as the 2nd question is concerned, foundry industry is a very sluggish and typical industry and very headstrong.

So it is not easy to copy a machine and implement if I give the drawings.

If you see, the 30 years of domain knowledge it is the process integrated to the machine which is more important and not only the machine.

Having worked in the field these are the very entry barrier and probably it takes 3 to 5 years for anybody to enter such market.

If we have taken 5 to 7 years to establish this product and create the business cycle, our competition has come this year after 6 years of establishment.

Though they are still not near to us and we are continuously innovating, and I can share with you that on this machine we will be having the first machine with Robot working in India, which has not been done in the world. We are continuously innovating to keep our technology ahead of others.

?

Q2: How many years is your journey for this product

A2: on this product we made the first prototype in 2009.

Q3: How many machines you have sold till now.

A3: We have already put around 30 machines in working across India over these 7 years

Q4: Industry seems to be very conservative

A4: Yes

Q5: (lady) The potential is obviously pretty big with what you have presented here and the impact can be very high as what you have said, but what is going to give you that pull that you need to realise this potential and accelerate

A5: There is an issue of safety. Basically this whole technology is obsolete in Europe, its prohibited in Europe. So what we are looking for is the government to push the industry to adapt the changed and this is 1.

Q5.1: What have you done in this

A5.1: Our job is to continuously educate and create awareness of the difference. So first is to demonstrate the technology, yes it is equievalemtn, better, which is very important in the industry. You cannot just stop your production? and change over, and the 2nd is to educate and show to people when you can work and stand beside this machine without any noise, without any safety issues and work environment.

?

Q6: I have to give it to you that you are working in a very difficult sector foundries and in a very difficult customer segment which is SME’s. One more think I really wanted to ask you have really brought this to a certain point, but obviously it is very difficult to sell to this market. How many, that’s a …..question.

Creating Cleantech or creating an innovative technology that you do, it becomes important to make it sustainable environment business, that is the side that every innovation has to look at. What are you going to do to make it sustainable as ….of the technology that remain……for a lean and mean companies, which is the main stay of our economy in the industry. How to make it sustainable?

A6: One of the advantages which I have before we went with this innovation, we failed 2 times. So we know what is failure. We know why we should not fail and every year we should continue to do innovation and we should not sleep.

So we have been continuously innovating on our machines, we have even extended to cloud data of the machines & we have brought Internet of Things into the foundry. So we are a step ahead of the competition and in this industry if you don’t do that, of course you are not sustainable.

The 2nd pillar of sustainability is the team and we have invested in human capital by 2 ways, one is in training of our people and our team, and that is why you could see a project & sales engineer who is not an owner of a company representing Rhino Machines this year. The 2nd is we have invested in skill development with the Swiss infrastructure because we understand if we don’t create quality at the bottom, you cannot create quality at the top. We have invested in a lot of different areas to ensure sustainability and create a service network across India which no multinational can match.