Starting in India at Pune/Maharashtra in 1962, Cummins India Limited has pioneered diesel engine technology to meet the diverse power requirement of the country and region. Today, Cummins powers hundreds of installations and equipment in India, Nepal and Bhutan.

It also operates a fleet of rental trucks, and a truck-stop chain, and sets up and helps run power plants. It also does back-office accounting, human resource, and info-tech support work for Cummins worldwide. It even owns a $50 million company providing IT services to clients like Unilever. It shares ownerships of antother Indian venture formed in 1996 to make lighter truck engines with Tata Motors, India's premier maker of cars and trucks.

The two-year-old Cummins Research & Technology India center is playing an important role in helping the company slash development costs and time its bid to best such arch-rivals as Caterpillar. The centers 100 engineers specialise in 3-D computer modeling and simulated testing of engines and components. They collaborate with R&D teams in each of Cummins' 20 other development centers worldwide.

 

In 1995 Cummins partnered 50-50 with Dongfeng Motors Co., a state owned maker of cars and trucks. The Xiangfan factory, profitable from the outset, churns out 120,000 truck engines a year. It has boosted output fourfold since 2001 while trimming the workforce by 10%, to 1,900. It is fitting thousands of buses in Beijing and New Dehli with hybrid engines that burn liquefied-natural gas.

In three years, sales at the Xianfan venture have zoomed from $63 million to $554, yielding $89 million in operating earnings for Cummins.

In China, Cummins is about to open its first development center, also a 50-50 tie-up with Dongfeng. It will focus mainly on custom-designing engines for China.

 

1) What does the expanding business in China and India mean for the workers at headquarters in Columbus/Indiana?

2) To keep up its 30% annual growth in tech services, India requires more than 65,000 engineers a year. It also needs about 10,000 engineers annually to fuel growth in other industries. How does a student of the country's 975 private engineering colleges manage to pay for tuition? The typical urban middle-class household earns $800 monthly.

3) 35% of India's 1 billion people are under age 15. What effect has this on government, environment and business?

4) Some numbers:
a) 1 Million premature deaths each year in China and India attributed to air pollution.

b) 30 Million Indians and Chinese projected to be infected with the HIV/AIDS virus by 2010.

c) 203 Million worker without fulltime employment.
What do you think?

5) Why are diesel engines widely employed in trucks, ships, power generators, tractors, construction equipment and mining?

Sources: Cummins Inc.; BusinessWeek, August 22-29, 2005