Exide Industries Ltd: Always on trend
Kolkata-based company, the country's largest maker of lead acid batteries and power storage solutions, has kept pace with rapidly evolving technology and industry needs
Exide’s first manufacturing plant in Shamnagar near Calcutta (now Kolkata). Image courtesy: Exide Industries
In the years before Independence, Exide batteries were imported into India by Cesco, a British company. In 1947, the company ceased its operations, and was incorporated as Associated Battery Makers (Eastern) Limited (ABMEL), which took over Cesco’s manufacturing business. It set up its first manufacturing plant at Shamnagar near Calcutta (now Kolkata), on the banks of the Ganga, at a time when the automotive manufacturing industry was taking root in the country—right across the river from Shamnagar was Uttarpara, with Hindustan Motors’ Ambassador factory.
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Catching on to industry trends, locating its manufacturing units in close proximity to emerging automotive hubs and reaping the benefits of burgeoning demand, is what the company successfully continued to implement in the following decades. Although ABMEL primarily made batteries for road vehicles, it started charting a parallel track for itself by supplying batteries to the Indian Railways, and, following the war with China in 1962, it doubled its production of special batteries for the defence forces. With the setting up of an original equipment manufacturers’ hub in Chinchwad, near Pune, ABMEL set up its second factory there in 1969.
Although the company remained under its London-based parent Chloride Group, over the next few years, ABMEL, renamed Chloride India Limited in 1972, began to draw strengths from India’s talent pool. It started making the country’s first polypropylene batteries in 1973, and set up a state-of-the-art R&D centre in Kolkata in 1976, its first such centre outside of Europe.
Exide’s fourth factory in Hosur, Tamil Nadu, set up in 1997. Image courtesy: Exide Industries
It was in the 1980s that the company made its presence felt significantly in the India growth story, and met significant milestones under its first Indian CMD Jahar Sengupta. It established its third factory at Haldia, a port south of Kolkata, in 1982, with its production targeted to meet the growing export demand from the USSR. The decade also saw Exide batteries become the first indigenous original equipment inside the Maruti 800, which, till then, was built with 100 percent imported components. In 1988, the company was renamed Chloride Industries Limited.
