AR Madhusudan, President and Local Division Manager, Drive Products, ABB India, outlines how locally manufactured, energy-efficient drives are reshaping India’s industrial future.
As India accelerates its shift toward smarter factories, greener operations and globally competitive manufacturing, energy-efficient motor-drive systems are emerging as a critical enabler. In this conversation, AR Madhusudan, President and Local Division Manager, Drive Products, ABB India, speaks about customised, connected and high-performance solutions.
ABB has expanded its local production of energy-efficient drives — how does this strengthen your role in India’s industrial transformation story?
India is witnessing a major industrial transformation. Across sectors, we are seeing rapid automation, digitalisation and a clear push toward sustainable, energy-efficient operations. ABB has been a crucial part of this journey for decades. ABB’s drives have ensured improved performance and energy savings in motor-driven systems where efficiency and reliability are essential.
However, the opportunity ahead is even larger as more industries sharpen their focus on operational and energy efficiency. Industrial progress today is no longer just about output; it’s about smarter, cleaner and more efficient growth. Our recently expanded drives production line strengthens our position to support this.
With this expansion, we are not only increasing our local production capacity but also ensuring that our solutions are delivered to industries faster and are customised based on the evolving needs of each industry, supporting this shift.
By building more of our portfolio in India, for India, we can tailor solutions to local needs, from harsh industrial environments to fast-scaling segments like data centres, water, cement and metals. This makes energy efficiency more accessible and accelerates the country’s broader digitalisation and sustainability objectives while supporting the country’s ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ and ‘Make in India’ programmes.
What makes the new Peenya production line a benchmark in innovation and manufacturing excellence?
ABB’s drives factory in Peenya, Bengaluru has long embodied the highest standards of manufacturing, delivering solutions with quality and reliability. The expansion and upgrade build on our rich legacy of two decades of drives production excellence in India.
The new line brings together advanced robotics and digital production-monitoring systems that enable the production of large batches with exceptional speed and precision, while giving us real-time visibility into every step of the operation. In line with Industry 4.0 standards, the line has also integrated sensor-based tools that guide and verify the accurate placement of components, ensuring every drive meets the highest levels of consistency and quality. To ensure safety and minimise manual handling, the line leverages robotics, streamlining the movement of assembled drives within the shopfloor.
ABB’s Peenya drives factory has evolved over the last two decades into a world-class, digitally advanced production hub. With the latest expansion, the facility reinforces our commitment to sustainable, high-efficiency drive production tailored to India’s fast-growing industrial needs.
How are ABB’s drives helping energy-intensive sectors like cement move toward lower emissions and higher efficiency?
Industries like metals, mining and cement are not only energy-intensive but also have extremely demanding environments. In the current industrial landscape, both higher efficiency and lower emissions are crucial. Systems in these industries often operate in high temperatures and dusty environments while managing heavy mechanical loads and long operating cycles. In such conditions, reliability isn’t optional; it directly impacts production continuity.
ABB’s industrial drives are engineered for heavy use in harsh environments. Typically, motors in a cement plant don’t need to run at full speed at all times. Drives essentially help control the speed of the motor-driven systems based on the actual process requirement, whether it is a fan, mill or conveyor. With this, industries can automatically reduce the energy consumed while ensuring improving the performance of the systems.
As India pushes toward net zero, what role will energy-efficient drives and motors play in decarbonizing heavy industries?
As part of India’s push for its net-zero targets, there is a sharp focus on decarbonising heavy industries like steel and cement. Energy efficiency is one of the most impactful levers here, and ABB’s drives and motors are already helping customers lower their energy consumption while keeping their operations running efficiently.
At the same time, as mentioned earlier, these industries demand solutions that can deliver reliability and high performance under tough operating conditions. This is exactly the sweet spot where ABB’s drives excel – combining energy efficiency with improved performance by allowing industrial systems to adapt their power consumption dynamically. It is a combination that heavy industries need today, and one ABB is well-positioned
to deliver.
Energy efficiency is no longer in the future; it is deeply embedded in India’s industrial strategy. Going forward, a wider adoption of variable frequency drives (VFDs) is going to be increasingly critical. As India’s industries scale up and decarbonise, the role of drives will become more strategic.
What key technological frontiers is ABB Motion focusing on to stay ahead in the sustainability and innovation curve?
From ABB Motion’s low-voltage drives perspective, we are consistently working towards making drives smarter, easier to use, and enabling more plug-and-play so our customers can leverage them for their specific and unique application needs. Our modern and advanced drives are well-connected, essentially meaning that they can send data to edge devices for local processing or to the cloud for advanced analytics, enabling remote diagnostics and improved visibility of operations.
With programmable logic controllers (PLCs) as part of our portfolio, motor-drive systems can be also paired with PLCs, which can actively monitor input signals from various sources, including drives. This data can then be used to make intelligent real-time decisions that can guide the actions of these drives. This results in more reliable, data-driven and cost-efficient operation of the application they control.
At the core of technological advancements are our people and partnerships. We recently also hosted the ABB Startup Challenge India 2025 to identify and co-create an AI-powered solution to advance smart drive technology.
Overall, we remain committed to delivering solutions that are smarter, more adaptive and are easy to integrate for our wide range of customers from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to industrial plants.