At the India Steel Expo, SmallCap Spotlight caught up with Mr. Niranjana LK, Head of Aftermarket, NBC Bearings who shared insights on NBC’s key industrial verticals and product innovations designed to serve sectors like steel, mining, cement, and power. Tune in to the entire conversation to know more about the company’s journey.
Mubina Kapasi: Bearings are the forces driving manufacturing, be it of automotive OEMs or railways. SmallCap Spotlight is at the India Steel Export 2025 and we are catching up with NBC Bearings, a part of the multi-billion dollar CKA Birla Group. Niranjan LK shares insights into the industry and business.
Hello and welcome to Small Cap Spotlight. Today we’ll be casting the spotlight on NBC. This is a company that’s in the business of manufacturing bearings and is slowly expanding what they’re offering industries across the spectrum.
I have with me Mr. Niranjan LK, he is the head of aftermarket. Hi Mr. Niranjana and thank you so much for joining us. I think to begin with, why don’t you introduce NBC Bearings to all of our viewers.
Niranjana LK: Yeah sure, thanks for the call today. So NBC is a part of a three billion dollar industrial house, one of the oldest industrial house in India and NBC is one of the group companies of this three billion dollar group company. So there are multiple business verticals under CK Birla Group.
We are into healthcare, we are into automotive, we are into housing, electrical and NBC is one of the business vertical of CK Birla Group. So the name of the company is National Engineering Industries. NBC is the brand which is in the bearing business for last almost 79 years in India.
Mubina Kapasi: Okay, tell us a bit about your own role in the company and how did it all begin for you when you joined NBC?
Niranjana LK: Yeah, so NBC we have a multiple business vertical right. So very broadly we can categorize our business vertical into automotive, rail and industrial. So I’m responsible for industrial aftermarket business within NBC to handle the bearing replacements in the industrial sectors within India, be it a cement plant, power plant, general engineering industries, chemicals, fertilizers, aggregates.
So broad spectrum of industrial customers when they need bearing for their maintenance and the replacement during their operations, that’s where we fulfill their demand through a network of industrial distributors and that’s what is my role within NBC.
Mubina Kapasi: So could you tell us a bit more about the product basically at what stage in the manufacturing or you mentioned maintenance also. So where exactly is it used and also I understand there’s a new product on the annuals if you could also talk to us about that.
Niranjana LK: Yeah of course, I mean we within NBC in the industrial product spectrum we cover almost everything what the industrial needs under the broad bearings category. We make all types and size of ball bearings, spherical roller bearings, cylindrical roller bearings, needle row bearings, pillow blocks, plumber blocks, all varieties of bearings which can cover almost like 80% of the needs of the industrial. Of course few special types of bearings can be reviewed and made available on the need basis and the primarily on the industrial sector we are focusing more on metals, power generation, mining, cement and general engineering.
These are some of our core markets where you want to focus and today what you see here in expo is what is that NBC can offer to a steel industry. I would per se categorize this as a metal industry what we can offer the metal industry. So normally metal industry you can categorize into a you know longer long flat product rolling and the long product rolling based on the type of the end product they you know offer to their customers.
So for the flat rolling customers we have all the bearings which goes into their hot rolling and cold rolling applications which is extremely critical. Large size bearings typically a high performance is expected and NBC offer work roll, intermediate roll and backup roll bearings for radial and thrust positions for all the hot rolling and cold rolling applications in the flat rolling. And also apart from these critical rolling applications we offer bearing for the casters for the segment rolls, the spherical roller bearing for the casters and the segments and all the general MRO bearings which are used in the plant maintenance in the conveyor in the gearboxes within the steel plant ecosystem a complete integrated steel plant all the bearing needs have been served by NBC.
Now today we are launching few selected products which can be a very useful to the maintenance or the end users within the industries. Though we are launching it in the steel export but this can be horizontally deployed and used by all the industrial upper industrial end customers. The first part which I’m going to talk about is a broad sense wireless condition monitoring system.
So this is basically customers can measure the triaxial vibrations of their critical assets through a wireless mode and they can have a centralized receiver which can cover a radius of one meter and they can give the vibration and temperature information at a set frequency to the customer’s computer. So by which they can measure the vibration trend or temperature trend and take some proactive actions when the equipment trends are you know being abnormal. So by way by this way the end user can plan their maintenance much better and that’s a great help for the anybody who is maintaining any equipment.
It’s like giving the advanced information whether there is something wrong happening here. I mean I’m not normal now so that’s one of the product we are launching today for all the industrial customers. Of course it can be used in mobile and railway and other markets as well.
That’s one product we’re launching. Also on the steel I also talked about the flat rolling. In the steel there is also long product rolling where all the construction related TMT bars and the wires and the rods and these are manufactured.
And when these long product mills are manufactured there is an application called diode box where the consumption of bearing in today’s world today’s standards is very high. The bearing life varies from a few hours to few days and we did a detailed study on these applications and we are launching a guide box special polyamide cage, special steel, special heat treated steel, ball bearings and tapered bearings for the guide box applications which will enhance the bearing life of the customers when they’re using in their mill. So that’s the second product we are launching.
And also though it’s a standard product when the long product rolling mill happens normally the customers tend to use a four row cylindrical bearing. This in fact was a product gap to us and we are launching that product to the customers today. So that’s the another product we launched.
And the fourth one is a vibratory screen bearings. So these are the spherical roller bearing with special features with the controlled radial internal clearances, the controlled tolerances on the bore and the OD dimension. This is in the format of the standard spherical roller bearing.
So we are launching that product which is typically used in the vibratory screens where they want to you know size the commodity iron ore and all. So that’s the fourth product we are launching today. So it’s a mix of few technologically advanced products, few products which solve the customer problem, few products with a few more enhancements which are already existing in the market with our competitors but we are offering that in NBC brand.
So that’s all about the products what we’re launching to our customers.
Mubina Kapasi: Okay great. So the raw material that you use when you make the bearing is essentially steel, I guess.
Could you just give us some insight on that? What exactly goes into production for you?
Niranjana LK: Yeah I mean the input for any bearing manufacturing is the steel bars of various diameters. Once you have the steel bars they’re cut into size and they’re forged into a near net shape in the rings. We call them as rings.
They’re forged or rolled into form of the rays. Then post the forging then it undergoes the some of the turning and the machining operations followed by the heat treatment operations and then it gets into the subsequent operations for grinding, assembly, testing and that’s how the normally the bearings are made. So in MBC as a plant we have in-house capability of starting from the heat treatment till there are the grinding, assembly, testing, packing, inspection everything is available in our set NBC.
Mubina Kapasi: So who are your competitors?
Niranjana LK: Well we per se as I said we are the first bearing manufacturing company based out of India. The Indian origin first bearing manufacturing company you can call us right. So the competitor landscape you can break them into few multinational competitors and few domestic competitors.
From the multinationals some of our competitors you can name them to name few there SKF, Schaeffler, Timken, NTN, NSK. These are the five major brands whom we compete with them. Apart from that there are a couple of other brands whom we also classify them as a tier two or the outside these big five brands.
You have ZKL’s, you have ARB, URB very selected areas we try to compete with these brands. In automotive a couple of Indian companies like DLUX, TXPIN these are the companies which we compete with the different markets.
Mubina Kapasi: Could you tell me a little bit about the competitive landscape and where is NBC essentially in market leadership?
Niranjana LK: Well we have significant share of business in automotive market and similar share of business in the railway business and we are going very strong in the industrial markets.
Mubina Kapasi: Anything on the steel supply chain that’s affecting you because I mean you know there are tariffs etc that are being talked about.
Niranjana LK: Well right now our position is to wait and watch because still a lot of things are not very clear from the policy making point of view. So as of now we are still maintaining the status quo as we are not still very clear about the what’s the outcome and how things look like.
It’s going to have influence both on our supply chain as well as our ability to compete or increase our footprint on the global base. So as of now our position is to wait and watch what will be the final outcome.
Mubina Kapasi: Mr. Niranjan thank you so much for joining us today on Small Cap Spotlight.
Niranjana LK: Thank you.