Craftsman Automation is a contract manufacturer that builds the metal bones and muscles of vehicles and factories - engine blocks, gearbox housings, aluminium chassis parts, and automated warehouse systems - for the world’s automotive and industrial giants. Founded in 1986 in Coimbatore by a first-generation mechanical engineer, it spent its first two decades as an export-heavy precision shop before pivoting hard into India’s domestic auto boom, and then, starting around 2016, built an aluminium-casting business from scratch that is now its largest unit. The recurring approach is a “Company-within-Company” model: each vertical runs as an independent profit centre, sharing a common backbone of in-house machine-building and process engineering that lets the group shift resources between sectors and enter new lines without betting the firm.
Business segments
Four engines at different stages - a legacy machining cash cow, an aluminium lightweighting platform built to national scale, an industrial backbone that feeds the other two, and a storage-solutions specialist - each grown with the cash flows and capabilities of the one before.
1. Aluminium Products: the lightweighting platform built from zero
In under a decade, a business that did not exist became the largest segment by turning bought castings into ready-to-fit machined parts for every major Indian car and two-wheeler maker, then acquiring its way into captive foundry capacity.
- Machining is the value, not melting metal - 95% of the aluminium business is machined, meaning the company takes raw castings from partner foundries and delivers finished components (cylinder heads, crankcases, transmission housings) that can go straight onto an OEM assembly line; pricing is always per component, never per tonne of metal.
- Three casting technologies under one roof, soon four - the group now holds capabilities in high-pressure, low-pressure, gravity, and sand casting, and is entering counter-pressure casting, giving it a full toolkit to serve two-wheeler, passenger-vehicle, and commercial-vehicle customers from a single supplier.
- Bought scale in two strategic bites - the 2023 acquisition of DR Axion (sole supplier of cylinder blocks and heads to Hyundai and Kia in India) and the 2024 purchase of Sunbeam Lightweighting (principal supplier to Maruti Suzuki and two-wheeler leaders) added captive foundries and deep customer relationships that a greenfield build would have taken a decade to replicate.
- Riding a structural tailwind that still has room to run - the average Indian passenger car carries only 40-50 kg of aluminium, against a global average of 160-200 kg; every tightening of emission norms pushes OEMs to replace steel with aluminium, expanding the addressable market without the company having to win share from rivals.
- Alloy wheels are the volume play on hold - the company has capacity for about 5.5 million wheels a year across two plants, but is running at an annualised exit rate of roughly 3 million and has paused Phase 2 expansion while it watches commodity pass-through dynamics and import competition.
2. Powertrain: the legacy machining engine
The company is the largest independent machinist of cylinder blocks and heads for India’s heavy-truck industry, and is now parlaying 35 years of process know-how into a new stationary-engine business aimed at the data-centre build-out.
- Process, not product, is the moat - the competitive edge lies in designing the machining sequence, building the special-purpose machines and fixtures in-house, and running them at scale; general-purpose machines can switch between truck, tractor, and off-highway components as demand cycles shift.
- The truck cycle’s shock absorber for OEMs - because the company can rapidly scale capacity up and down, vehicle makers avoid committing their own capex to machining lines for cyclical MHCV volumes, making Craftsman a preferred outsourcing partner.
- A $100 million order book for an engine type it never touched before - the company has set up a new business line for large stationary engines used in power generation, with a first tranche of orders already finalised and revenue expected by FY 2029-30; the opportunity is framed as a 7-8 year growth story driven by data centres for AI.
- Backward integration into big castings - a new foundry is being built to produce specialised large ferrous castings for off-highway engines, renewables, and capital goods, reducing dependence on external suppliers for the largest and most complex parts.
- Germany adds a European foothold - the 2024 asset purchase of Fronberg Guss, a German foundry, brought in-house capability to cast iron components for stationary engines and gave the segment a manufacturing presence on the continent.
3. Industrial & Engineering: the backbone that also sells outside
This segment is two things at once: an internal machine-building and tooling workshop that keeps the automotive divisions competitive on capex, and a standalone storage-solutions business that is among India’s fastest-growing providers of automated warehouses.
- Builds the machines that build the parts - the division designs and manufactures special-purpose machines, material-handling systems, and toolroom equipment in-house, which is how the Powertrain and Aluminium segments avoid paying third-party machine-builder margins and can customise lines for each OEM contract.
- Makes parts the size of a truck, for wind turbines and machine tools - a precision machining unit handles components weighing up to 10-15 tonnes, fed by an in-house iron-casting foundry at Kothavadi that was set up specifically to serve the renewable-energy and general-engineering markets.
- Automated storage, from software to steel - the Storage Solutions sub-segment (64% of divisional revenue) makes everything in-house: racking, stacker cranes, shuttles, conveyors, and the warehouse control software that runs them, which gives it faster execution than integrators who stitch together bought-in subsystems.
- Beyond e-commerce, into cold chains and batteries - the company has broken into pharma, cold-storage, and automotive battery-storage projects, including India’s first sub-zero rack-clad automated storage system operating at minus 30 degrees Celsius for food products.
Group structure and partners
The listed parent sits above a consolidating aluminium subsidiary, a German foundry operation, and a web of minority investments in captive renewable-power projects that are steadily greening the factory electricity supply.
- A joint venture with Carl Stahl, in which Craftsman holds 30%, generated turnover of about ₹90 crores in FY26.
- The company has taken minority stakes (typically 26% or less) in over a dozen special-purpose vehicles that own solar and wind assets under the Group Captive Scheme, lifting the share of renewable energy in its power mix from roughly 5% in FY21 to nearly 24% in FY25 (D67 p.4, D24-D49).