KONE, the Finnish firm which has been in the elevators and escalator business for more than a century, is aiming to up the ante on innovation in the field. With more than 1.1 million units in service and operations in over 60 countries, the company is equally bullish about the Indian market. The company is credited with installing the first machine-room-less (mrl) elevators featuring the gearless hoisting technology (KONE MonoSpace) in 1995. It has also introduced its own EcoDisc technology, which it claims drastically reduces energy consumption and provides gearless ride comfort for residential buildings.
The company has also partnered with IBM and will use IBM’s open standards-based Watson IoT (Internet of Things) cloud platform to bring in more innovation. The platform will gather data from sensors and systems connected to elevators, escalators, doors in KONE’s maintainence base. KONE will also leverage IBMs analytics engine information to provide new services and experiences to its customers.
“We will always remain focused on innovation. We are currently optimistic about the Indian market though a large chunk of the market consists of unorganised players. It is predominantly an elevator market and the escalator business forms a very small portion of this market. We have had many installations in the country namely the Delhi Metro, the escalator at the Mumbai airport, the light house in Chennai, the Vidhana Soudha in Bengaluru etc. Keeping the Indian market in mind, we are now coming up with Vastu-compliant designs for our elevators keeping in mind the different elements of nature,” said Amit Gossain, Managing Director-KONE India.
The company, which has its Indian headquarters in Chennai, has more than 4000 people working for it in the country. It also has a manufacturing plant in Chennai which produces elevators for the Indian market as well as for Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Additionally the plant also manufactures components for the company's modernization projects in other Asia-Pacific markets such as Australia, Korea, Singapore and Malaysia. KONE also has a global technology and engineering centre here which is a testing and research hub for the company.
Currently, at the global level, the company has bagged the project for Jeddah Towers in Saudi Arabia which is slated to be the tallest building in the world and is expected to have a height of over 1 kilometres. Globally, in 2015, KONE had annual net sales of EUR 8.6 billion, and at the end of the year close to 50,000 employees.
