Destiny - A must for survival and growth

Having had this accident and survived - both times I believe it was destined to happen this way.

I am sure lot of people will disagree with me on this and say its hard work that pays but I strongly believe without destiny hardwork alone does not move things. I have seen lot of examples in my life which I would like to share here. Destiny makes things to move and where as hard work helps in execution.

Till the year 2000 we were only making turned parts for our customers in mining industry. In 2000 we got an opportunity from our customer to supply conical bits. There was a new activity involved in there – forging. We at LNM till that time had not supplied or manufactured any forged part. We did a successful development of these parts and were doing 20000 to 25000 nos every month. This is the year when we shifted from LCL shipments to containers as the volume increased. LNM was doing good and growing and then in 2001 , September 11 happened. Business with US suddenly took a big dip. And all customers at that point of time were based in US. LNM had so much of inventory lined up and all orders were put on hold. This is when I thought I should look for some local industries for business with India. One day I saw an ad in newspaper about a mining exhibition in Calcutta. Just for a break I thought let me go to Calcutta and take a small holiday with friends there and visit the exhibition for couple of hours. Inside the exhibition I came across Widia India Ltd, a company based in Hyderabad and Bangalore and in their stall I saw products similar to what we were making for US market. At that time I had no idea that any one was using conicals in Indian market. I made my presentation to Widia and we did our first shipments to them in February 2002. Though the requirement was small but we were having a regular business.

As we started to understand more and more of the mining and construction market, I started exploring possible customers. I came across Kennametal Inc and Sandvik Ltd. – which were amongst the largest buyers of our type of products. I went to there websites, wrote mails but never received any reply back. May be they never reached the write people. And then sometime 2002 kennametal bought over Widia India Ltd, my customer. This made LNM a vendor to Kennametal and opened doors for future growth with Kennametal. In some other posting I will detail the business with Kennametal. In Jan 2004 kennametal sold of the Hyderabad plant to Sandvik. And now we manufacture products for Sandvik and Kennametal both which combined is almost 50% of LNM’s business.

As you notice from above I believe my casual trip to Calcutta, then Kennametal taking over Widia for a short period – good enough time for LNM to start business with them - and then Sandvik – all was destined to happen. Today LNM makes almost the maximum type of Bit Block these two companies use for there worldwide requirement.