Philips India announced that it is investing around Rs 300 crore in the expansion of its manufacturing facilities and has plans to hire around 1,000 people as part of that initiative, according to a top company official statement to PTI.
The company will be expanding its manufacturing facility at Chakan near Pune as part of its Make-in-India initiative.
Philips has already started to ship out its Affiniti range of ultrasound machines from there and has also planned to roll out magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) components from the expanded facility.
“We are talking about an investment of Rs 250-300 crore and also we are talking about a thousand new employees that we are hiring. They are very sophisticated engineers, with different types of skills that we are looking at hiring,” Philips Indian Subcontinent Vice-Chairman & Managing Director Daniel Mazon told PTI.
“We are dealing with the short term challenges that we have, but we believe in the long term also. We are making significant investments,” Mazon added.
“The ultrasound (Affiniti), we have inaugurated and started shipping to customers. In MRI, we are finalising that. We are continuing to expand the factory, we are doing construction,” he added.
Sharing more details, Mazon said that ultrasound machines would be for the domestic market only. “Ultrasound machines – we will not be exporting. We are making them in India for India right now. We are exporting MRI components to the world,” he said.
“There are so many components on an MRI. We are starting with the components and then that is also shipped to other parts of the world… So India is a very important industrial footprint for the MRI components for now. We are walking with the local industry, developing the ecosystem and being part of making MRIs in India. It’s quite exciting,” he said.
The company has already started construction of the building and other infrastructure, required from MRI. “And right now we do not have our facility operating at full capacity because we are really working only with the critical things,” he added.
“But depending on when we can open that factory to start operating as planned; it could be this year or it could be pushed to the next. It all really depends on when our employees can come back to work and continue operations there,” he said.
Besides, Chakan, Philips will also expand its operation at Bengaluru, where it is setting up a new campus, which would be ready in the next three years.
“But also at the same time we have big plans for the future and that is not just in the Chakan factory in Pune. The same thing we are doing in our Bengaluru facility. We have our digital footprint over there,” Mazon said.
“The new campus that we are building near the airport in Bengaluru and which we will be inaugurating by 2023 will be able to house 5,000 employees,” he added.
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