Honeywell eyes 30% revenue growth in next few years from Impact brand: Ashish Modi

MUMBAI: Honeywell is eyeing around 30 per cent revenue growth in the next few years from its Impact brand, which provides sustainable and digital solutions for Indian businesses especially the MSME segment.

"Since the last 3-4 years we have been growing at 30 per cent. We will grow at 30 per cent or at high double-digit given the growing Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) in the country," Honeywell India Country President Ashish Modi told PTI.

Pune-headquartered Impact by Honeywell was incubated in 2019, to develop sustainable and digital products that can enable MSMEs to optimise their business operations, boost process efficiency and performance and optimise costs.

"When you go to the market, reaching the masses is very different when you want to reach your handful of customers and that's been a big learning. We absolutely wanted to do something meaningful in 'Make in India'...

"So we had to think about how we would think about innovation because, again, reaching the masses at that scale was a different ballgame. On top of it, you have to have the brand and quality of Honeywell and we branded it differently, we branded it Impact," Modi stated.

India is growing and so are the MSMEs, which have very different problems and requirements compared with large organisations and Impact is aiming for innovative solutions to their unique problems, he added.

"The products by Impact are sector agnostic, but in the innovation that we have done, it's largely been around buildings, around retail, around logistics. Think of sectors which are fragmented, that go to the masses, that's where we have had most of our innovations so far," Modi said.

As innovation is the key, Impact has its own research and development (R&D) centre in Pune in Maharashtra where around 50 engineers design and innovate products that provide solutions to the MSMEs.

"We think of the R&D spend as a percentage of revenue. I think that's a good measure. Obviously, we are in the inception phases. So our R&D spend is high, it's about 15-20 per cent of our revenue," Modi said.

MSMEs want safety, productivity, cost efficiencies and compliance, and Impact is providing them the right solutions which are designed for the scale and complexity that they want to operate at, he added.

Further, Impact by Honeywell general manager Jasmeet Bhatia said, this entire business is created deliberately to be local so that the products can be cost efficient for the MSMEs.

"So our entire team of engineers, they are all co-located in Pune. We have around 40-50 engineers, all hired from local ecosystems of start-ups, so that they know the pulse of the MSMEs and they're able to design products right from day one. And when I say R&D, it's not only engineers, but also the entire supply chain that's also localised," he said.

All the raw material suppliers, assembly tooling providers, manufacturers are all local and are from in and around Pune, which is cost effective, he said.

"At the same time, the benefit is that we have access to the large resource pool of Honeywell. So if there is something which is not available in India, any skill set, whether it is cyber testing or AI analytics or some unique chipset, then we can go to the larger Honeywell pool available worldwide and get help," he added.