The worldwide press is currently occupied with the news from the end of January that the Tata Group from India has acquired Anglo-Dutch steel group Corus. It is both fortunate and coincidental that the theme for gasworld this month is Asia and our interview of the month is with Mr PK Jain, Managing Director of the Inox Group. gasworld set out to discover the drive behind the growth in the group and how it intends to develop in the 21st Century.
While the origins of the Inox Group date back to 1923, it was Mr Jain’s father who decided in 1963 that his trading company should evolve and move into manufacturing. According to Mr Jain, the SMS Trading Co was looking for a manufacturing business that had low raw material element and high value for product output. What better than industrial gases, since the air was $quot;free$quot; but the resultant products had value?
The industrial gases market was dominated by Indian Oxygen Ltd, which was a BOC subsidiary at the time, and the smaller but well-known entity Asiatic Oxygen. The gases business was a traditional oxygen and acetylene market, so it was not difficult to enter, but the lack of production equipment in the country meant that the Industrial Oxygen Co. (Inox) had to import a plant. Due to foreign exchange controls, the choice was limited to Soviet Union or East German built plants. So the Jain family formed Inox and invested in a 63 Nm3/hr gas plant in Pune which started up in 1965. This clearly means a lot to Mr Jain, as he remembers both make and capacity of the plant in question.
From those humble beginnings the company has grown into a group that specialises in industrial gases but has expanded into equipment manufacture, refrigerant gases and the leisure industry.
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