ABB at CABLE & WIRE FAIR 25

“Empowering Motion, Efficiency, and Innovation
ABB India’s Motion Drive Products division, a global leader in drives, showcased its latest technologies at Cable & Wire Fair 2025. With a legacy of engineering excellence and a strong focus on sustainability, ABB continues to enable energy-efficient motion and automation across industries, now offering integrated solutions. Engineering Review interacts with A.R. Madhusudan, President – Drive Products at ABB India, to learn more about their participation, innovations, and vision for the future.

Q. ABB India’s Motion Drive Products division has brought its latest drives and motors portfolio to Cable & Wire Fair 2025. Could you share what key technologies or innovations ABB is highlighting this year and how they address the evolving needs of the cable and wire manufacturing sector?
We are here in fact for the first time in Cable and Wire Fair and we decided to invest in the exhibition to showcase our drives and automation solutions. Automation solution includes our PLC offering and also the servo solution including the servo motors. So, we are happy to proudly say to the customers that though we are strongly present in drives, we are here now with the full solution of integrating the drive with the automation of PLC and servos. So we are able to give the perfect fit for what customer is looking for in the cable and wire industry because at the end of the day they look for a solution and the portfolio with that makes sense.So, together with the partners, we want to ensure that we are a perfect fit for our valued end customers and the OEMs.

Q. Energy efficiency and sustainability remain central to ABB’s philosophy. How do your advanced drive systems and motor solutions help customers in wire and cable manufacturing achieve higher productivity while minimizing energy consumption and carbon emissions?
In fact, sustainability has been the core of our purpose in ABB and whatever we produce today is primarily focusing on making sure that the customers use less energy in what they do. Electric motors consume almost half of the world’s electricity. Hence the need to have efficient motors and drives. In fact, recently we launched IE5 motors also and coupled with the drives, there is a significant scope for reducing the energy consumption. With the high efficiency motors and drive systems, we are sure that we are going to help the end users to achieve the sustainability goals in their own plants.

Q. With India’s growing focus on “Make in India,” industrial automation, and energy transition, how is ABB’s Motion business aligning its strategies to support local manufacturing and contribute to the country’s sustainable industrial growth?
I think this is also coming at the right time. In fact, the exhibition is also happening at the right time because just last week we increased our local production of drives by 25%. In fact, just about three years back, we also increased by about 35%. So, overall now, there is a substantial local production increase in capacity at ABB. And as the volume goes up, depending on the need, we want to invest more and more and this helps us to deliver faster, increased turnaround times and also maintain consistency, and being close to customers in helping them in the solutions and the availability what they need.

Q. So, how is the response from your customers for this initiative of yours?
The response has been quite nice. In fact, we have been well positioned on the stall also with respect to the hub of the manufacturers. You see most of the manufacturers who make the conducting portion right from rod to the standing, then the layer over it on the conductor which you call as extrusion process. Most of these machinery manufacturers are nearby and this gives them confidence that we can serve them quite well with our solutions.

We had good interaction coming from all the stakeholders, the customers such as OEMs, partners, and also the partners who could be getting associated in the future. So, we believe this will be a good platform for us to increase our presence in this industry which is growing fast because there is a big need for cable and wire in industries such as energy, infrastructure industries and so on. We want to capitalize on this, and we also see some of the OEMs talking about orders booked for months together in advance.That shows a sign that there is a need in this market and we want to be part of this excellent journey which is going to be a good boost for the nation also.

Q. ABB has always been known for its close collaboration with customers. Could you share some recent examples of co-creating solutions with Indian OEMs and end-users? Also, what emerging trends do you foresee shaping the future of the drives and motors segment?
This is also an interesting question because we want to make our products much more user- friendly and much better connected to the needs of the customers. So, if you look at our drives as such, you can also have dedicated application software into the drive that makes it much easier for the drives to be used in the machines.

And we will also be having libraries in the PLCs which can be readily adaptable for the applications and solutions that our OEMs need. And all these things can be bundled together including our latest generation of low inertia motors so that there is a perfect match on the response and also the solution we want to expect the customer to have from us.

Q. So, you mean you also deliver predictive maintenance, remote monitoring and enhanced operational solutions intelligence to your customers?
Yes, that’s how I think. If you look at our drives, all these drives are now connected.
Basically, there is a built-in Ethernet communication available so these data can be taken to the cloud via Ethernet. There is no need to add any additional devices and they can do some intelligent algorithms based on this. Similarly, our PLCs are also having a high level of cyber security so that the data which can come both from drives and PLCs can be integrated to do their own computations that are relevant for them to use advanced diagnoses for monitoring purposes. They can then give them to their end customers.

Q. So, finally I would like to know what emerging trends do you foresee shaping the future of the drives and motor segments in recent future and also tell about the uncompromising reliability of your solutions.
In fact, there is always a need to continuously excel in what we do. That is the reason that more than 5% of our revenue is ploughed back into R & D every year. We also invest in high performance machinery which will give much faster accuracy in our production. Today, if you are having a drive with accuracy of say response time of one second, we will bring it down to say one- fourth so that they get much faster output and increase the productivity of their machines. This is what our goal is.As we evolve in the industry, we have to be ahead of the technology solutions and ABB is well-known for it and we want to remain in this as an innovation and a technology leader in the days to come.