NEW DELHI: Haworth Inc , a global furniture manufacturer is setting up its second facility in Chennai with a total investment of $8 to $10 million, its global president Henning Figge said Friday. In an interaction with this newspaper, Figge said that the new facility will be fully operational in three years’ time, depending upon the regulatory approvals.
“The current facility in Chennai produces only for the Indian market and we even have to import goods to fulfill the demand as we cannot produce enough here. Now, with the new facility we will be able to cater to the domestic market along with Asia Pacific and some parts of North America,” Figge said.
Figge is optimistic about the Indian market which has not yet been affected by the global slowdown. According to him, there is a lot of demand in the Indian market with IT companies looking to set up their offices in tier 2 cities for their employees. “We don’t feel the slowdown in the country. We had the best year of our history last year in India. This year is also very good.
We are very bullish on the Indian market. Overall we do see a slowdown in North America, Europe and some other countries. But overall things are not as bad as we had anticipated,” Figge said when asked about the impact of the global slowdown on demand in India. Haworth head also expressed the need for bringing the furniture sector under the production linked-incentive (PLI) scheme, considering the growing demand for office spaces in India.