Brakes India outlines de-risking gameplan

The component maker has put in place a comprehensive strategy which includes new locations and a portfolio of adjacent products. Managing Director, Sriram Viji speaks to Sricharan R on the roadmap.

- Sriram Viji

One major lesson that the pandemic taught the automotive OEMs and suppliers is to be ready for whatever may come. Keeping this in mind, many companies have brainstormed on de-risking strategies in order to make sure their operations go smoothly even if one part of the whole system comes to a complete halt. One among those companies is the automotive braking systems supplier, Brakes India.

Sriram Viji, Managing Director told Autocar Professional said that the company had kicked off its de-risking strategy even before Covid hit. “Due to the scale of the Indian economy and how things were going, customers started asking us for de-risking opportunities way back in 2018-19. This was when the market was at peak. While we were largely a Tamil Nadu-based company for a long time, we decided to enhance our footprint by investing in Gujarat in 2016, and two years later in Jamshedpur,” he says.

As Viji puts it, braking systems for commercial vehicles were earlier entirely made from its plant at Sholingur in Ranipet district. Now, it has moved 30-40 percent of this capacity to Jamshedpur. Similarly, Brakes India would manufacture front and caliper brakes almost entirely at the plant in Polambakkam near Chennai. Now, about 40 percent of that has been moved to Gujarat. “We started to look at places to de-risk from multiple angles. Be it logistics, manpower, political situation etc., whatever it is, we needed to have checks and balances, especially for our customer requirements,” he says. “Such moves have helped us, even during the pandemic too,” he explains.

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