Ennore Foundries gets set to reap rich harvest

The Rs 395 crore Ennore Foundries (which is part of the Hinduja group) will increase capacity by 50 percent on completion of its greenfield plant at Sriperumbudur near Chennai. Equipped with state-of-the-art technology the Rs 150 crore facility will be commissioned by the second quarter of this fiscal, said managing director, V Mahadevan. It will meet the growing needs of castings by local clients while 40 percent of capacity will be dedicated to the overseas market.

Ennore Foundries has already begun receiving orders from global customers. The focus is on cylinder blocks and heads for cars and commercial vehicles, SG iron castings for car brake carriers and spiders, camshafts, exhaust manifolds etc. Some of these products are not being made right now. It will also look at SG iron castings for transmission parts, he added.

UP THE VALUE CHAIN

The company will soon exit low-value products and focus more on high-value options like cylinder heads/blocks and pistons for engines that meet Euro 4 and 5 emission standards. Mahadevan said Ennore Foundries would go beyond raw castings to becoming a supplier of machined castings. The yield ratio of castings produced in the new plant would also be better and contribute to higher productivity and profitability.

The unit will house CNC machines as well as a high pressure moulding line. Mono/dual furnaces with auto-pouring furnaces are also part of the picture. Separate lines are being created for different products (as per weight) for core making and fettling. The process will be coupled with CAD and CAM facilities. The plant will also have in-mould and box cooling arrangements for better stress relieving of castings. The double station shot blasting will ensure better finish and sand removal from passages. “We would like to go for non-conventional energy sources like windmills to enable us to avail of carbon credits,” Mahadevan said.

TRAINING CENTRE

This is not all. A design and tooling development centre will facilitate collaborative product development with customers. Initially, it will have 60 engineers and this number will go up gradually. Like other companies, Ennore Foundries has to cope with shortage of skills and this is especially hard in a business considered dirty, difficult and dangerous.

To meet this challenge, the company plans to set up a full-fledged training centre at the new facility. Nearly 100 workers will be trained in the first year and soon this will extend to operators. Ashok Leyland contributes close to 50 percent of business. The mother plant at Ennore and the ductron casting unit in Hyderabad are undergoing technology upgradation and capacity optimisation.

BRIGHT PROSPECTS

Ennore Foundries will, in the future, look at entering aluminum diecasting and lost form process which can produce intricate diecastings for automotive applications. He said that with bright prospects for commercial vehicles, demand for castings would grow by about 20 percent this fiscal. Similarly, preference for intricate thin-walled cylinder blocks and heads is leading to use of better materials like carbon graphite iron. Tractors also play a key role in growth and prospects look good this year.

Mahadevan sees interesting trends in the foundry industry with small ones likely to shut down and OEMs setting up captive foundries to bridge the capacity gap. Ennore Foundries is also looking at acquisitions if this means a technological advantage or access to new markets.

T MURRALI