Give us a brief description of the company.
Drillman is an Australian-owned company with its setup in India. We have our corporate office in Pune. We are completely prepared to meet the exploratory needs of Indian customers. The company was initially established to support the oil and gas sector, but later Sandvik sold their exploration business to Drillman. Drillman's capabilities are now offering an even greater value-added service to our international clientele after we recently acquired the Global Exploration Business from Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology in a deal that includes exploration rigs, consumables, and production stocks, along with some trademarks and patents.

How do you look at the market for the construction equipment market and your products in India?
The outlook for the market is excellent. Our equipment has some good requirements. As you are aware, there are currently government programmes that encourage Make in India to expand and meet the demands of the nation. The market looks very positive. Because of the importance of safety, labour-saving devices are required for the machine. Also, lead generation machines are required. Multinationals have a major role to play. They build their rigs here, which in turn provides business to us.

Are all your products completely made in India?
At the moment, it’s quite diversified. We manufacture some drills in Finland, while some are in Australia, Canada, and India. Depending on the need of the country, the building facility will be specific to that country.

Nowadays, OEMs are looking for intelligent solutions to improve their productivity. So, how is your company helping with the equipment? The new-generation machines will be the trendsetter machines coming forward. We are into drilling machinery business. So, we see here how the parameters can be controlled well with new-generation machines, and the second could be safety. Safety is built into the culture of mining. We see there is a great opportunity to have digital machines.

How do you IoT and digital technologies are evolving in the business you are in?
Digital technology will come to supplement your GPS tracking, parameter tracking, and remote-control operation. So, these are the three fields where you can build up digital tracking.

Are there any new products in the pipeline? We have plans to build new machines, which are required especially in mine sites. These are tyre-mounted machines. We also need to record data in time. We have also planned to upgrade our technology. We also have plans of putting up a plant in India to build projects.

The Ukraine-Russia war has disrupted the supply chain. What has been the impact of this on your business? How did you overcome those challenges?
Yes, we had a disruption in our supply chain, and our customers did suffer because of the Ukraine-Russia war. Globally every company is thinking of a plan B on how to be self-independent in the supply chain and to have more manufacturing indigenously.

We are shifting to countries like India, where we can have our independent supply chain. There will be a Plan B, and we can source from those countries.

There has been a lot of transparency in setting up companies. At the ground level, there are a lot of bottlenecks and difficulties. The government is seeing at a macro level but it doesn’t happen at a micro level. When you deal with state governments or government agencies, new companies face a lot of difficulties.

In terms of performance, how was the year 2022 for the company? What are your plans for 2023?
The year 2022 has been a great year for us. Because of the commodity price getting higher, we saw a boom in the exploration business. We will definitely leverage this situation. Going forward, we will have new products, and new machines designed for the market.