in India The fabricated metal products industry in ... - Teknikföretagen

and as an increasing number of global companies are off-shoring their manufacturing
capacities to India.
A snapshot of the fabricated metal products industry
The fabricated metal products industry is small in comparison to most segments
of the engineering industry in India. However the industry is comparable to other
industries in terms of the number of factories and the number of workers employed.
This is because the industry is highly fragmented where there are a very large number
of companies producing a wide range of metal components and parts. Due to
the basic nature of being labour intensive, the industry employs a very large number
of people. According to the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, the industry
employed 3.69 per cent of the workers and 3.78 per cent of the employees in the
manufacturing sector in India in the year 2004–2005. 2
Since the industry has been growing at a slow pace, industry associations and
research institutes have formulated plans to help develop the industry faster. It is
believed that a balanced growth approach for accelerating growth of large scale manufacturing
clusters across states is essential to give a boost to the fabricated metal
products industry.
Evolution of the Indian fabricated metal products industry
Surge in the automotive industry, machinery and equipment industry, electronic
equipment industry and electrical machinery industry has increased domestic
demand for fabricated metal products tremendously. The fabricated metal products
industry like many other industries in India has been developing to a large extent,
due to the shift of manufacturing facilities from western countries to India. Increasing
globalization combined with more open trade regimes has helped the industry
tremendously. As a result, over the past few years, the industry has witnessed an
increase in exports across segments, although over a small base.
After the Asian crisis in the late 1990s, India’s exports of fabricated metal products
increased substantially accompanied by an increase in share of world production. At
the same time, the industry also witnessed a steady increase in employment in the
industry. However, even though employment was increasing, an increasing number
of innovations were also being made to make technological changes to increase
2) Reference has been made to Ministry of Commerce and Industry (2008a)
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