Embraco, the world’s largest manufacturer of compressors for refrigeration appliances, has announced its entry into the Indian market. A forty year old company founded and headquartered in Brazil with factories in Brazil, Mexico, Slovakia, Italy and China and offices in Atlanta (USA) and Russia, Embraco manufactures 32 to 35 million hermetic reciprocating compressors per annum in the range of 1/8 to 1.5 HP suitable for R134A, R404A, R600A and R290. The company, fully owned by Whirlpool, employs about
12,000 people worldwide of which over 600 are engineers. It has forty engineering labs, including a state of the art acoustics lab and some joint labs with major customers for developing refrigeration appliances. The Chinese entity, founded in 1995, began as a joint venture with Snowflake and is located at Qingdao, close to Embraco’s biggest customer Haier – the largest refrigerator manufacturer in the world with shipments of 12 million per annum. Haier recently conferred the Best Supplier award on Embraco. Embraco also caters to several other large refrigerator manufacturers, and both the soft drinks majors Coke and Pepsi. The company holds 1603 patents. It has instituted the Embraco Innovation Award for young engineers. Some innovations that its compressors sport are:
• Miniaturisation, resulting in the use of lower amounts of copper, iron, aluminium and other materials.
• Full motion technology, in which the compressor speed varies in response to load.
• Oil free compressor with gas lubricated bearings, which was recently launched by Haier at the Appliances World Expo in China in February in its Pasarte brand of
refrigerators. 

Arup Majumdar, the newly appointed Director for Asia- Pacific, informed the Journal that the decision to enter India has been prompted by the large domestic market for refrigerators, which stands at over 10.5 million today and is expected to keep growing in double digits due to the low penetration of refrigerators in Indian households and the demographic advantage of its burgeoning middle class. He expects the company to grab share in the Indian market – where refrigerator compressors are treated as a commodity – by differentiating its compressors on a platform of innovation, backed by a 10 year warranty. He has drawn up plans to locate staff and set up a distribution network. Compressors will be supplied from China, Brazil and Slovakia.