Indian JV Offers Engineering Services for BIW Weld Shops

October 19, 2016

Jennifer Shuttleworth

Joint venture VDL Pinnacle Engineering India will provide specialized engineering services for the production automation industry worldwide, focusing primarily on body-in-white (BIW) weld shops.

Pinnacle Industries and VDL Groep, of Eindhoven, Netherlands, partnered in August 2016 to establish VDL Pinnacle Engineering India in Pune, India. The joint venture will provide specialized engineering services for the production automation industry worldwide, focusing primarily on body-in-white (BIW) weld shops. With this collaboration, the company will provide services in process engineering, tool design, robot simulation, layouts and facilities engineering.

VDL Pinnacle Engineering India will supply optimized turnkey solutions according to the requirements of the Indian automotive OEMs and their Tier 1 partners. It will also provide solutions to VDL Steelweld, a Dutch company that has several automotive customers in Europe, the U.S. and China.

In addition, VDL Pinnacle Engineering India will provide engineering services in product design for other VDL Groep companies such as the VDL Bus & Coach companies.

"We are delighted to partner with the VDL Groep, which is one of the most prominent and reputed family owned industrial groups of Europe,” said Sudhir Mehta, Chairman and Managing Director, Pinnacle Industries and Chairman Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), Western Region, speaking about the joint venture. “VDL brings the best-in-class technology coupled with their extremely strong network of 87 operating companies across Europe."

The collaboration aims to become a preferred partner to the Indian automotive industry and also within VDL Groep in the near future. This is the first joint venture in India for the VDL Groep and marks their entrance into the expanding Indian automotive market.

"Our joint venture with Pinnacle marks our first foray into the fast-growing Indian automotive space,” Theo Toussaint, Executive Vice President and Member of the Executive Board, VDL Groep, said. “Our strong technical abilities, coupled with the highly skilled engineering resources available in India, will support not only our business for the Indian automotive OEMs, but also the worldwide operations of VDL Groep."