Demand for energy efficiency and automation is growing rapidly, including in India, and these are major investment focus areas, informs ABB’s CFO Timo Ihamuotila. ABB makes motors and drives, which are central to anything that moves – water supply, transportation, elevators, escalators, windmills, industrial equipment, and factory production lines. These involve enormous use of energy.

Ihamuotila says that the rise in energy prices and environmental concerns are driving demand for high-efficiency motors and drives. Digitalisation, where India plays a significant role, is also enabling remote monitoring and predictive maintenance of these products. This motion business, Ihamuotila informs, is a clear investment priority for ABB in India.

ABB has done the digitalisation of JSW’s steel melt shop – it tracks the movement of ladles and cranes that carry molten steel and makes thermal loss predictions, which then help to optimise the casting speed of steel (conversion into a solid-state) and increase productivity. ABB will also continue to make significant investments in India in R&D and shared services. India hosts several of ABB’s centres of expertise that use new-age digital and analytics tools.

Ihamuotila informs that it’s possible today to automate almost the entire e-commerce chain. He adds, “New technologies in automation allow you to build production lines that can be described as lot size of one, where you can say you want these many chips and these many cans of something, and so on, and then the production line will produce this, package it, and ship it”.