Coimbatore, Jan. 4: After quite a gap, textile machinery manufacturing major Lakshmi Machine Works (LMW) today announced the launch of JVM 60, a moving column vertical machining centre for the automobile and auto- ancillary industry.

The Chairman and Managing Director of Sakthi Auto Components, Mr M. Manickam, unveiled the machining centre at the INTEC 2012 expo.

LMW sources, however, begged to differ, stating that they had come up with 7-8 machines in the last one year. “We preferred to unveil JVM 60 at the INTEC Fair,” the source said.

The LMW's Director (Finance), Mr R. Rajendran, later told Business Line that the machine was equipped with a robust spindle, constructed to minimise axial and thermal expansions, and dynamically balanced to ensure extremely low run-outs. “The Rotary Automatic Pallet Changer (APC) with 7-second pallet change time and a swift automatic tool changer add new dimension to high speed machining,” he said, by way of explaining the features of JVM 60.

The company had worked on this project for almost 18 months, before the roll-out this morning. It would attempt to target the large corporates for marketing the machine. JVM 60 is priced around Rs 42-43 lakh.

Stating that it would serve as replacement for imported machine, and was at least 10 to 15 per cent cheaper than imports, he said the company proposed to manufacture 5-6 machines a month, within the next 6 months, and would thereafter strive to make more, based on the market response.

“The vertical machining market is huge. The annual demand for such vertical machining centre is estimated at 10,000,” he said in reply to a question.

On the machine tool division's manufacturing capability, he said, “the production has almost doubled in 2 years. We needed mother machines; invested huge sums on strengthening the infrastructure.”

In line with doubling production capability, the machine tool division's turnover also almost doubled from Rs 93 crore to Rs 180 crore in 2010-11.

The company is expecting a 60- 65 per cent jump in the division's revenue this fiscal at around Rs 250-270 crore.