In July 2019, Sidel opened their new office in the DLF Cyber City in Gurugram, India. The office space has been created to serve the many clients the company partners with in the region across the beverage, food, home and personal care industries. This marks the latest step in Sidel’s strategy to establish dedicated offices in close proximity to its customers, offering global experience paired with local expertise.
“India is an important market for Sidel and one we will continue to invest in. We are proud to have a major presence here with a now state-of-the-art office in a great location,” says Rohit Sawhney, sales director India and Indian subcontinent at Sidel. “These new premises allow us to be closer to our customers and partners in the Gurugram area, alongside major players in the technology and beverage industries.” The DLF Cyber City area is well connected in terms of transport links due to the nearby metro stations and the easy access to the expressway, thus making it a prime location for Sidel’s new India hub.
Sidel’s commitment to the Indian market
By 2030, India will become the third largest consumer market after China and the United States, with the country set to overtake China to become the world’s most populous nation by 2025. This strong population growth, combined with rising incomes, increasing urbanisation and competitive production and labour costs, makes India a consumer market with enormous potential. Naturally, this highly dynamic situation is generating challenges as well as opportunities. While the country is facing the need to develop urban infrastructure, create jobs and provide skills training to its workforce, it also opens the door to investment and creates vibrant new markets.
23 years of local support
Sidel is able to leverage a long-standing presence in the Indian market: the company opened its first office in Mumbai in 1996, with the second office and the factory in Pune following in 2001, thus enlarging its footprint and expanding its offering to local businesses. Sidel also inaugurated an R&D Centre in Pune in April 2019, opening the door to further opportunities for building strong innovation and development skills in the region. Over the last 23 years, the company has acquired over 350 customers throughout the region across the various industry sectors it serves, while selling more than 2,600 pieces of packaging equipment to manufacturers active in India.
Giulio Bellanti, Sidel director of sales for food, home and personal care for Middle East, Africa and India, explains, “Regarding the markets we serve, I clearly see a positive trajectory in India. Namely, we are noticing that the dressing and sauce players are increasingly packaging their products in PET, benefitting from the transparency, design flexibility and 100% recyclability offered by this material. BL Agro is one of our customer successes in the industry of edible oil in the region. Furthermore, our long-standing packaging expertise is increasingly proving key to win preference from local converters, active in the beverage as well as in the food, home and personal care categories.”
Rohit continues, “Looking into the future, we also see that the dairy market in the country is significantly growing due to the introduction of many new products, such as flavoured and UHT milk, milk mixed with fruits, cereal, nuts and spices, and special dietary products containing high protein, low fat and less added sugar. As the market leader in aseptic PET and especially for Liquid Dairy Products (LDP), Sidel is uniquely positioned to support this rising demand thanks to our more than 40 years of PET packaging expertise as well as our complete, safe and simple packaging line solutions, including the FDA-approved Sidel Aseptic Combi Predis. Beyond the dairy sector, we are witnessing opportunities also in the bottled water and juice segments.”