Established in 1990 in Hyderabad, Thermo Cables is a leading manufacturer of various types of specialty cables. An ISO 9001-2015, ISO 14001-2015 & ISO 45001 certified company, Thermo Cables is an accepted brand across sectors including Indian Railways, Navy, defense, renewable energy (wind and solar), nuclear power, process industries and underwater applications. The in-house testing laboratory is NABL-accredited which makes the test results unanimously accepted. In a recent conversation with Wire & Cable India, Mr. Srinivasa Rao Nagula, President-Marketing, Thermo Cables Limited, shared the company’s recent ventures, expansion in infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, the segments they serve and their future plans.
Wire & Cable India: Please tell us about the recent developments at your company.
Srinivasa Rao Nagula: Thermo Cables has consistently been a strong player in the specialty cables industry and around three to four years ago we ventured into the cable harnessing industry. In this industry, we have already started doing business with the railways, navy and wind energy sectors, where we are supplying cables along with connectors, and have already become established players. We have undergone large scale capacity expansion for cable manufacturing and harnessing processes, as there is a huge demand from many consumers. Furthermore, we have ventured into developmental activities for the Indian Navy and Indian Railways, for which we have set up multiple specialty machines as well as testing equipment. Our company is also one of the chosen partners for the development of the indigenous cables for the Indian Navy. We have manufactured about 35-40 indigenous products which they have been importing. We have also been manufacturing and delivering fire survival cables for Indian Railways.
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“We are competing with companies like Prysmian, Nexans and Draka and other Turkey manufacturers, we win many orders against them. Our export turnover has been contributing about 50 percent of our revenue for the past 2-3 years.”
WCI: How have the infrastructure and manufacturing capacity grown in line with the developments?
SRN: We have expanded a lot in terms of manufacturing and infrastructure as cable harnessing is a complex industry which requires a good level of technical know-how. For example, there are some typical connectors which require hot pot moulding, even for that process the right polymer must be found to be compatible with the molding activities. To take care of this we have a professional polymer engineer present at our facility, who works on developing and manufacturing of good quality polymers. All of our manufacturing is done in-house, from copper rod drawing to various polymers. We have also added some high end machines to our facility for processes like insulation and sheathing. We have added an 8 wire drawing machine, which has great speed and maintains the uniformity of the wire, and some bunching and wire drawing machines from Niehoff, Germany, for fluoro-polymer high temperature cables from Rosendahl, Austria. In addition to this, we have our R&D team, called the New Product Development or NPD team, which is consistently working on new development activities. The professionals in our NPD team and maintenance team have the technical expertise to build certain machines at our in-house R&D laboratory, which has been NABL accredited for 5 years.
WCI: Please shed some light on the industries that your company caters to.
SRN: Our company mainly caters to 5 verticals. The first one is the domestic market, where we sell the general type of cables. The second sector is railways and third is the navy, where we have been working for 6 years and have established a strong presence. The fourth sector is wind energy, where we are associated with all big companies who are doing lots of wind energy projects in India like Enercon, GE, Siemens and other European brands. The fifth sector is exports. We have multiple export approvals in the Middle East as they have a huge market for oil and gas, which is another industry we are present in. Although we get many orders from India for oil and gas, even outside of India we are competing with companies like Prysmian, Nexans and Draka and other Turkey manufacturers, we win many orders against them. Our export turnover has been contributing about 50 percent of our revenue for the past 2-3 years.
We also have our representatives working in many countries across Europe and especially in the Middle East because it is important to have a local presence. We have also established ourselves in the South American and Russian markets.
“Currently we have a turnover of almost INR 600 crore and we aim to increase it by another INR 1,000 crore in the next few years.”
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WCI: What are your future plans for expansion and how do you plan to achieve them?
SRN: Currently we have a turnover of almost INR 600 crore and we aim to achieve a turnover of approximately INR 1,000 crore in the next 2 years. We are foreseeing the requirements for more machines at the facility in order to reach our turnover target. Therefore, we plan to keep expanding our existing facilities by adding newer machines and increasing developmental activities as we have to be ready for consumer and market demands.
