Emerson and Renwick recently started to explore the Asia Pacific, South Asia, Middle East and Africa with currently a residential office based in Pune, the automobile and engineering hub in India to showcase the capabilities in the coating applications in high-value addition industries.
“Asia and the Middle East are the big powerhouses for many economic developments and reforms as well as investment in renewable energies, low carbon technology, biodegradability. Our focus is to cater to these markets from India. We already started our operations in India in April 2021 to scale our reach in these markets. Over the next three years, we aim to expand and set up sales and service functions catering to the Middle East to far East markets. We see a huge potential in packaging, architectural industry (moving towards solar energy), electronic vehicles (which will require rechargeable batteries), advanced artificial intelligence (which will dominate touch glasses), virtual reality and pharmaceutical industries,” says Andrew Jack, sales director of Emerson and Renwick.
Founded over a century ago by two family businessmen specializing in textile finishing machinery, Emerson expanded its business in the 1930s to the leathercloth industry. Three decades later in the 1960s, it further diversified to fluid management, and in the 1970s to inregister hot embossing. In the 1990s, the company diversified to the automobile industry. In 2014, the dynamic change branched its innovation and technology to the vacuum coatings for solar and flexible electronics.
“One of our key milestones was our centenary year in 2018, which strengthened our business at different verticals to focus on solutions. We offer both vacuum and atmospheric coatings and look at the other developmental milestones, particularly over the last ten years. We have learned a lot about the product stream and started applying it to new applications. We are utilizing all that experience and history, and moving forward to the next generation of products and applications, new branding which helps markets to understand that we are present in different segments of the industry, as it is the right time to expand our geographic presence from the silicon valley, which we cater to about 80% of the business from the west, to look at the opportunity to explore the east,” says Jack.
A new area in which Emerson and Renwick is extending its innovation is sustainability to support the green revolution. “Today every stakeholder is looking at greener solutions – from flexible packaging to medical to energy storage, there is a lot of work going on as a whole suite of possibilities,” says Nick Butcher, director of product and engineering development. Butcher adds that the team is investing in more energy-efficient measures such as looking at heat and energy recovery systems to feed back into the process for supporting energy savings within the production of the products.
Over the last five years, Emerson and Renwick has partnered with academia and select industrial partners to see what crossfading is possible in innovations and therefore invested in building its own technology center and launching new products. “We have several test stations, vacuum and atmospheric coatings. We actually walk the risk with our customers together allowing us to mitigate the challenges. Our work involves technology that is not ready to offer. We need to walk through the concept to execute the right and apt solutions for our customers,” says Ronojoy Basu, Asia and Middle East sales manager, Emerson and Renwick.
