ET Infra visited Addverb’s manufacturing facilities located in Delhi-National Capital Region including India’s largest robotics manufacturing facility in Greater Noida called ‘Bot-Verse’, which has the capacity to manufacture 1 lakh robots a year. Addverb’s senior executives and industry experts shared their views about the evolving landscape of warehouse automation in the country and its future going ahead.
Amazon changed the landscape in warehouse management through robotics and automation when it acquired Kiva Systems, a manufacturer of mobile robots, almost 12 years ago. Kiva Systems since then has become an Amazon subsidiary and has been a major driver of Amazon’s global dominance in automation enabled e-commerce.
As the e-commerce and warehouse ecosystem grows in India, the country is at the inflection point wherein robotics and automation are beginning to play a major part in the logistics industry. One of the companies which is at the forefront of this such transition is Reliance Retail Ventures Ltd-backed Addverb, India’s largest manufacturer of autonomous robots for intralogistics operations.
ET Infra visited Addverb’s manufacturing facilities located in Delhi-National Capital Region including India’s largest robotics manufacturing facility in Greater Noida called ‘Bot Verse’, which has the capacity to manufacture 1 lakh robots a year. Addverb’s senior executives and industry experts shared their views about the evolving landscape of warehouse automation in the country and its future going ahead.
“After Covid, demand for warehouse automation increased as manpower was not available and the e-commerce businesses grew significantly. Our existing factory was at full capacity and we thought of opening another factory which can meet the demand of the (Indian) customers and also to meet the demand of global customers as well,” said Bir Singh, Co-Founder, Addverb.
The company was established in 2016 by former executives of Asian Paints, who specialized in making highly automated factories for the company. Addverb started with manufacturing of Pallet Shuttle as its first product and now has diversified into a range of mobile robots, automated storage and retrieval systems, sortation systems and development of in-house warehouse management and control softwares.
“This factory (at Greater Noida) is a pure play manufacturing facility which we call Bot Verse. This is one of the largest mobile robot and warehouse automation manufacturing facilities in the world,” said Satish Shukla, Co-Founder, Addverb.
“Bot Valley (Addverb’s first manufacturing facility in Noida) is spread across two and a half acres. This facility is spread across almost 15 acres. So the manufacturing capability of this facility is almost up to 1 lakh robots a year. That is the kind of capacity we have built and we are foreseeing a huge demand in the warehouse automation and robotics sector globally and this factory stands to cater to that demand in the next decade,” said Shukla.
WAREHOUSE INFRASTRUCTURE BUILD UP
Prior to the implementation of goods and services tax, companies had warehouses spread within a specific state to optimize on taxation but the same led to consolidated volumes being spread out across multiple small centers, and the volumes in these small warehouses did not necessitate the need for automation.
Since the implementation of GST, companies started to consolidate the smaller centers into larger ones for servicing bigger volumes and that has resulted in the demand for warehouse automation.
“India is going through a structural shift towards more modern and future ready warehouses and a lot of that shift has resulted in a lot of capacity being created in the country,” said Manish Saigal Managing Director, Alvarez & Marsal and Co-lead of India Business Transformation Services.
“We believe that there will be a significant shift over the next seven to eight years in the country, where more than 80% of the warehouses within Grade A and B category will fall across L1, L2 and L3 levels of automation. You will see quite a significant shift happening in the favour of L2 plus levels of automation in this country,” said Saigal.
Alvarez & Marsal categorizes automation maturity between Level 0 to 4, with Level 0 reflecting ‘Manual Operations’, Level 1 ‘Basic Digital Interventions’, Level 2 ‘Mechanization and Digital Enablement’, Level 3 ‘Island Automation’ and Level 4 ‘End-to-End Automation’.
But it is not just the consolidation and build up of larger warehouses that is driving automation, the extensive road and highway infrastructure being set up is also driving the trend.
“Earlier, maybe four years before, the average distance traveled by a truck, especially for long-haul, was anywhere between 250-260 KMs. That was the average distance traveled per day by a truck. But today, given the infrastructure and the roads which are coming up, this distance traveled has gone up. From 250, it has gone up 300 KM to 320 KM per day,” said Antony Prashant, Partner, Deloitte India.
According to Prashant, as the ability of a truck to undertake shipments in a day increases due to improved road infrastructure, the utilization of the truck increases and hence necessitating quicker turnaround time at warehouses, which in turn is driving automation.
GOING GLOBAL
Addverb and other companies in the logistics industry are not just catering to the Indian market but now have spread operations in other countries as well.
“Right now our revenue and demand mix mostly caters to India. 70% of our revenue comes from India and 30% comes from outside India. We have offices in Southeast Asia, Australia, US, Europe and Middle East and our clients comprise Fortune 500 companies who are spread across these regions,” said Shukla.
Shukla anticipates the demand matrix to tilt towards the global market in the coming years, wherein 60% of the demand will be driven by global markets and 40% of the demand by the Indian market.
While the prowess of Indian companies in manufacturing autonomous robots sees expansion, the warehouse management system softwares developed by these companies are already sought after in the rest of the world and are considered better than the ones developed by Chinese companies.
Addverb’s robots and systems are guided by warehouse management system software for inventory control, warehouse control system software for automation system, with warehouse execution system being combination of both the softwares.
Enabled by the 5G ecosystem developing in the world and expansion of larger warehouses within India, Addverb remains confident of a secular revenue growth in the coming years.
“We want to do a revenue of $1 billion in the next five years. Out of this $1 billion, $500 million has to come from outside India and rest we will have to earn from India itself,” said Singh.
