As part of Berkshire Hathaway, Lubrizol has real and significant opportunities to continue creating customer value by providing complex and innovative chemistries, formulations and solutions for some of the most demanding performance applications in the world. Lubrizol employees remain committed to maintaining the industry leading expertise and technical skills required to meet the needs of the customers. To get into the insight of Lubrizol technical capabilities and strategic intent team WCI interacted with Mr. Timothy Earl Madden, Managing Director, South Asia Region, Lubrizol Advanced Materials India Pvt. Ltd. Excerpt
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Personal Dossier
Age : 52
Qualification : BS in Chemical Engineering (Michigan State University), MBA (Baldwin Wallace)
Hobbies : Bicycling and running
Favorite Indian cuisine : Punjabi
One thing which you say every morning to yourself :- Discipline and focus – drive towards the long term goal do not let the momentary pitfalls and potholes of the day shake the focus from succeeding in the longer term objective.
Wire & Cable India: Lubrizol is a leading innovative specialty chemical company. Kindly brief us about its worldwide operations, workforce, R&D facilities etc.
Timothy Earl Madden: Lubrizol an innovative specialty chemical company founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1928 operates in two business segments Lubrizol Additives and Lubrizol Advanced Materials. With the consolidated revenue of USD 6.1 billion and the work force of 71,000 we aim to deliver value to our stakeholders. We have the right mix of people, ideas and market knowledge needed to improve the quality and performance of our customers’ products. We primarily serve customers in the transportation, industrial and consumer markets around the world. Lubrizol relies on similar technologies in all of the markets we serve, providing unique, hard to duplicate formulations that includes surface active chemistries, rheology modifiers, polymer and film technologies. Lubrizol engineers and chemists develop new products and improve existing products to best fit the needs of our customers. Our sustainable approach to business enables us to maximize our environmental and economic performance and meet our obligations as good corporate citizens while minimizing the negative impacts.
WCI: “By being closer to our customers, we are able to drastically reduce lead time and provide our customers faster turnaround time, thus increasing their success”? Kindly highlight about the above strategy and what areas are you interested in exploring further?
TEM: At Lubrizol our focus is on translation of chemistry to the end use application. To do this you must understand the end market as well you must understand your customer’s strategy in the market and provide products that fit with their strategy. There are companies that consume lot of time and wasted effort in trial and error at the customer site – our approach is to work with the customer on needs. We then work out the options and feasibility in our own labs first saving time and making the process more successful. We then can use our pilot facilities to produce scale up quantities and supply to the customer. We keep inventory of our most popular graded here in Mumbai to allow for changes in demand at the customer end.
WCI: Taking in account the Indian demographics what value additions does Lubrizol intend to provide to the Indian cable manufacturers?
TEM: Lubrizol is a supplier of specialty performance based materials developed and tested globally. We can draw on our global experience and connect that with our proximity to the needs of the local customers. India’s young population drives utilization of the internet and mobile access. Cables needed for the IS infrastructure here in India must have the toughness and tensile to be able to survive relatively rough installation process as well as resist attack of fungus, microbial attack and rat and termite resistance in use. Similarly as power consumption rises, areas such as coal mining increases and ultra-tough mining cables are required to deal with the rough mining conditions. For solar and wind power the environment can be salt spray and UV – polymers used must be resistant. In the case of consumer electronics non-halogen flame retardant and highly loaded white compounds are the items of high interest. This is only a partial list of special requirements that is forcing the cable industry to think beyond PVC and polyolefin to more specialty materials that meet the ever more challenging spiral of needs.
WCI: “Lubrizol wants to be a more-valuable partner at every stage of product development”. Elaborate on some of the new product developments/innovations?
TEM: We succeed only after our chosen customers succeed. We are always reminded of this both in choosing the right customers and then understanding their needs well enough to be a development partner for them. Our developments come in the form of special compounded solutions – such as zero halogen FR, high tensile and abrasion proof compounds, rodent and insect resistant compounds, controlled molecular weight materials that allow for faster extrusion speeds as well as less downtime, modified compounds that reduce die build-up as well as highly filled white colored compounds just to name a few.
WCI: What growth opportunities and challenges you are looking forward in South Asian market especially in India?
TEM: We feel there is huge scope in wire and cable for telecom, auto, mining, solar, wind power, and robotic cable, all are significant growth areas for Lubrizol in India. The opportunity is certainly to provide a tailored solution that works. The challenge will be to get the customers to temporarily put aside price on the item and focus on what will make the product perform in the way they are expecting in the end application. We are seeing the winds of change and expect more of the same going forwards.