VMI opens new engineering, service centre in India

Haaksbergen, The Netherlands – Tire & rubber machinery major VMI Group has opened a new service centre facility in Vadodara, in the eastern Indian state of Gujarat.

The expansion represents a ‘new level of commitment to India’ as “one of the world’s largest and most dynamic economies,” said Harm Voortman, CEO of the Dutch machinery group.

India is “an extremely important fast-growing market for automotive products and tires,” Voortman added in a 4 Oct announcement.

The new engineering, service & research centre will employ 50 people by the end of the year and will become ‘an integral part’ of VMI’s global engineering team.

The team at the Indian unit will deliver service support, including performance optimisation, maintenance, troubleshooting and upgrade services to global customers.

Vadodara will also support VMI’s machine-learning and artificial intelligence advances, focusing on software engineering to support the introduction of these technologies.

“The growing scale of software capacity needed can be achieved rapidly by the new facility in India, which is expected to increase [in scale] substantially in the next few years,” VMI added.

With strong economic prospects and a growing tire industry, group leader Voortman concluded that the new facility would serve as a “key part” of VMI’s growth strategy going forward.