The December 2009 issue of Castings & Forgings News (CFN), featured an article based on an interview with Sanmar Metals Corporation Managing Director P Natarajan. Here are excerpts from the interview.
In recent years Mr Natarajan (Managing Director of Sanmar Metals Corporation) has seen many noteworthy developments including the acquisition of Matrix Metals foundries in North America, expansion at the Trichy foundry and the winning of several top-notch customers.
Sanmar is one of the more developed foundries in India and, indeed, at its Trichy facility boasts one of the world’s largest single locations for steel castings with a capacity of 25,000 tonnes per annum. The same location also has an investment foundry and well-equipped CNC machine shop. Mr Natarajan states, “The Sanmar Metals business consists of two distinct and independent sectors, namely the iron and steel foundries.
In both these businesses we have operations in India as well as overseas. The iron business is largely focused on the automotive segment particularly for the turbo charger applications. Our Eisenwerk Erla foundry in Germany specializes in Ni-Resist (D5S) alloys for highly cored complex parts used in turbo charger applications.
We have recently started a Greenfi eld Iron Foundry in Chennai (India) to complement the Germany foundry. The steel foundry business, on the other hand, is very different.
Here the applications are largely in fl ow products like valves, for the construction and mining segment and rail / transit applications.
Our foundries are located in US, Mexico and India, but we service customers on a worldwide basis. Another difference is that in steel we make a wide range of castings from very small to large size and in a wide range of metallurgies from carbon steel to super high alloys.”
“Thanks to our experienced team and sharing of practices across the locations, we can offer a wide range of casting solutions and today are also in a position to offer large capacity from a low cost country like India”.