Hyderabad: FunderMax India, an arm of 130-year-old Austria-based cladding and facades specialist, is seeing growth opportunities in Hyderabad, with the market overtaking Bengaluru. Hyderabad has emerged as one of the top markets for the company in India across asset classes. The company, with its sustainable facades, extends the life of buildings.
Facading/cladding meets aesthetics and functional requirements of the buildings, protecting them from rain, wind, sound, and heat. The idea is also to enhance the life of the building and clad it in a way so that it improves thermal efficiency in the building.
FunderMax India MD & CEO Prashanth Reddy told Telangana Today, “We import panels from our parent company in Austria and carry out value addition in India. Almost 50 per cent of the value addition happens here to meet the domestic market needs. We are experts in creating facades. We know usage of light or air-conditioning is critical in creating green buildings and if we can clad two-thirds of the building, we can improve overall thermal efficiency. This helps in reducing the energy consumption by 20-25 per cent.”
He added, “The facade of a building actually contributes to its strength. The use of sustainable facades can help in protecting the structure of buildings during extreme heat as well as monsoon. A well-designed facade reduces the thermal bridges, condensation of water vapour, protects the building, and increases sustainability. During the summer season, it saves lots of energy by keeping the internal environment of buildings cool. One of the ways to prevent buildings from collapsing and damaging during monsoon season is to create sustainable facades to strengthen the structure.”
The effort goes into selecting the right material, which is renewable, without using non-toxic material, reducing wastage, and making it easy to maintain. FunderMax uses its engineering team and works with architects.
“From our side, we provide application engineering support in terms of structural design, design compatibility to the panels, and how panels should be fixed for sustainability. We provide design freedom to the architects in projects,” he added.
Market opportunity
The company has executed 15,000 projects since 2009 across hospitality, hospitals, residential, retail, commercial malls, airports, metro stations, and takes up around 1,000 projects every year. The company works with developers and architects, focusing on exterior applications. Metro cities account for 70-80 per cent of the projects pan-India, and the smaller towns that currently account for 20-30 per cent of activity, will see increased activity in the coming years.
He informed, “In Hyderabad alone, we have executed 1,500 projects. The city is a big market for us. New metro terminals offer enormous opportunities both in terms of taking care of their interiors and exteriors. We are seeing significant activity from tier-3 and tier-4 towns of Telangana as well. People are looking for larger houses and several commercial projects are being developed in the smaller towns. This augurs well for us.”
The company is also seeing opportunities to cater to the interiors segment for corporates primarily in wall panelling and partitions. In the residential segment, the company plans to enter kitchen furniture by the end of year.
Reddy said, once the company reaches a certain scale, the company looks at setting up a manufacturing plant in India.
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