Competing against foreign competitors? How are Indian manufacturing executives/Industrial engineers creating value for their customers? What do we need to do differently?

I am working in China for a leading japanese machine tool Company.

Invovled in Customer engineering Turnkey solutions. I have few points to share

1. let me look into Machine tool business - Until 2 or 3 years before only MNC on Machine tools were covering most of the share in China. Now many local machine tool Chinese setups have made a very good show and gaining market share. One point to not - Most of the MNC companies have many indians for the key areas.. Chinese machine tools ae re doing well and have been participating in international shows such as EMO, IMTS. They are exporting machines all over. L&T has purchased over 40 machine's tool from China in the last 3 years.

2. Manufacturing set ups in China - Most of the companies PT (Power Train) T1 (Tier1) are mostly a MNC direct investment or a JV. Chinese law are firm and keep good control.There is lot of issues on IP rights, most of them have copied versions. Eg.( Chery  QQ is copy of GM, BYD Fi is copies verison of Toyota and so on). But the most important is the investment they do for the manufacturing is totally different. Even 8 years before they talk about complete line with automation( Low labour cost with full automation) this gives a different thought. Like in India recently Ashok leyland, M&M, Tata have started investing on Robots, this is welcome note.

3. China is becoming expensive, the prodution investment done is much expensive than India. The quality investment done is much higher than in India. The Lobor cost is cheaper but they put in many people to cover a production line. the most important is they cover their international customer with these state of art investments and get high volume order's. While in India even several big groups discuss a line investment for long time and most of the time the investment is delayed. While in China if the requirement is 100,000 parts per year, they invest for 125,000 parts FMS line.

India have a very big potential, every year when I visit India, I do visit many of our big customers and recently I find there is pradigm shift.India needs good governence and the thrust to participate globally. need to spend money for prototypes. the investment should be apt for international participation.

Foxconn a taiwan set up in China employes about 400,000 employees 65% of them are contract labours, this company is worth about 50 Billion USD, can buy even Nokia. But they way they do investment on machine tools for prototypes and approval within 2 weeks times giving no alternatives for the buyer. thats a mile difference happening in India.

recently Mobile manufcaturing in India investment is going high and there is no much indian set up there, Foxconn, Flextronics and BYD are the Chinese origin have setup JV's.

I would like to see India getting more competitive. The most important issues are the delivery time, quality issues and methods and Project management.

Thanks