Inspirational Renishaw Co Chairs India UK Advanced Manufacturing Group Meeting

Vince Cable MP with Rhydian PountneyThe meeting was part of a wider JETCO programme that involved Vince Cable MP, UK Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Indian Minister for Commerce & Industry Anand Sharma, and a trade delegation of UK businesses.

Mr Pountney, who is responsible for business development in 10 of Renishaw’s overseas subsidiary operations, said, “Renishaw is a highly successful UK exporter of high technology products for the engineering sector with its own sales and manufacturing operations in India. I was able to draw on this experience to positively contribute to the JETCO Advanced Manufacturing Group which I co-chaired, and where we discussed important areas of collaboration with our Indian partners, on specific projects in the Indian manufacturing sector, manufacturing skills and collaborative research.”

Vince Cable, UK Business Secretary, said, “British businesses like Renishaw are doing good business in India providing an inspirational example to the army of small and medium sized UK firms who could also do well in this market. Trade with India is up nearly 20 per cent this year building towards our shared goal of doubling two way business by 2015."

Ben Taylor, Renishaw’s Assistant Chief Executive, said, ”Despite the sometimes challenging economic climate in India, having invested for the longer term we believe that we are now well placed to benefit from a more positive business environment. We established a representative office in Bangalore in 1993, converted this to a wholly owned trading subsidiary in 2000, and today we have offices in five cities, plus resident sales engineers in other key areas. In Pune we also have a 80,000 sq ft building which houses our customer demonstration and training facilities, a large software development team, and a manufacturing operation for certain products where assembly costs are critical to competitiveness.”

In addition to The Advanced Manufacturing Group (AMG), there were also concurrent JETCO joint working groups that discussed Education and Skills Development, and Innovation. All three groups gave feedback to a plenary session attended by Vince Cable and Anand Sharma, with Mr Pountney reporting on discussions from the AMG