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PACPROCESS-DRINKTECH 2019 SHOWDAILY 13 DECEMBER 2019 | SUPPORTED BY PACKAGING SOUTH ASIA & INDIFOODBEV
KHS INDIA: NOT JUST A PLAYER IN INDIA – AT DRINKTECH
Focus on a major
role in Southeast Asia
Part 2
With its headquarters and factory in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, West India, on a production site of 18,000
square meters, KHS Machinery Private Limited plays a significant role in supplying the KHS portfolio to
customers from India and Southeast Asia. At Brau Beviale in Nuremberg, Germany, Susanne Blueml spoke
with Partho Ghose, executive vice president and board member, about the strategies of the Indian company
concerning the product portfolio and actual requirements in the packaging landscape.
Are there any plans to do
cooperation with recycling
companies?
I was in Düsseldorf a month
ago, for the K show – and we
have had discussions with pro-
spective partners. For KHS,
sustainability is a vast topic – all
our solutions are focusing on
sustainability and efficiency. It
is also one of the top strategies
of our customers, who are now
getting into the EPR regime
– which means extended pro-
ducer responsibility. Custom-
ers are coming to us for solu-
tions to partner with them on
this journey. For instance, both
at the K show as well as in this
exhibition, KHS presented a
100 % recyclable PET juice bot-
tle with enhanced barrier prop-
erties for added shelf life and
product safety. This is what we
are doing from the technology
side, and these are things we
will definitely continue.
You are representing a
German company in India and
you are producing there. What
about the confidence in your
products?
When we started the company,
and even today, we have been
using one tagline to define our
offerings – ‘German technology
– made in India.’ We are trying
to convey that this is the best
of both worlds – top-end tech-
nology from Germany manu-
factured without compromise
in India and backed by world-
Partho Ghose, executive vice president and board member, KHS
class local service. Quality
and reliability are the corner-
stones of this manufacturing
philosophy, and we can deliver
it consistently due to the im-
plementation of a very robust
know-how-transfer (KHT) and
quality assurance process. This
is done by a team which com-
prises of German and Indian
engineers. When a machine is
built for the first time or new
technology is introduced in
India, this team ensures that
the product coming to the In-
dian market is meeting all the
requirements of the global de-
sign of KHS and specific local
conditions. We may offer cer-
tain features optionally to local
customers but we never com-
promise on the essential design
criteria and quality. In short,
we deliver the same machine
performance with an Indian-
built KHS machine as we would
do with a German-made one.
Are there any opportunities to
introduce Indian requirements
in the machinery?
This has been a constant dis-
cussion over the years. Let me
classify it into two main buck-
ets – one is that if a German
machine has got something as
an inbuilt feature, I might of-
fer it in India as an optional
feature to give that cost vs.
benefit choice to my customer.
But this process is strictly con-
trolled at our end and offered
only after careful study of the
said feature(s) and not merely
because a customer ‘wanted’
it. This is one kind of differen-
tiation.
The second one is that we
sometimes change specific
components within a machine,
mostly third-party compo-
nents, where better local ser-
viceability of the same, as an
example, may trigger the need
to change. For instance, we are
not a specialist in pump man-
ufacturing. So if Germany will
select a pump for a standard
global product from company
A in Germany, the KHT team
might decide in favor of a com-
pany B due to its strong service
support in India, provided all
technical specifications and
performance parameters are
met. The local service back-up
thus might become a very big
and deciding factor in the end.
How big is the share to adapt
the machine for the Indian
market?
It is difficult to give a percent-
age. The guiding factor is the
performance of the machine,
one factor that is never com-
promised. For some machines,
it could be even 0%, and in
some others, it could be as high
as 20%, but typically not ex-
ceeding that, because the basic
machine is not changed at all.
How long does it take to find
the right partner in India,
when thinking of these parts in
the machine?
It is not very difficult in that
sense since our first non-nego-
tiable guiding principle is not to
compromise on performance.
If we are developing another