SKF India is fundamentally a business built on mastering rotation - every machine that spins, from a motorcycle wheel to a wind turbine the size of a room, needs bearings to reduce friction, and SKF designs, makes and services those precision components. The company began as a ball-bearing plant in 1923 and incorporated in 1961, growing over six decades from a manufacturer into a knowledge-driven engineering partner that now wraps bearings in a full suit of seals, lubrication systems and predictive maintenance services. The recurring approach that explains everything else is a refusal to compete on price: SKF sells the long-term value of a bearing that does not fail, charges a premium for it, and will walk away from a low-margin segment rather than cut prices - a discipline that runs through both its automotive and industrial worlds.
Business segments
Two engines, recently separated into independent listed companies - an automotive business that supplies every major Indian two-wheeler and truck maker, and an industrial business that keeps railways, wind turbines and steel plants turning.
1. Automotive: bearings for every vehicle built in India
SKF holds a commanding share with Indian-owned vehicle makers, supplies the aftermarket through a distributor network it now controls directly, and is already designing the bearings for the electric vehicles that will replace today’s engines.
- Dominant with domestic OEMs, limited with foreign ones - the company has very strong, decades-long partnerships with large Indian manufacturers like Bajaj, Tata and Mahindra, but holds little share with Japanese and Korean car makers because their bearing sourcing decisions are made in their home countries, and SKF has some share with Maruti but finds it very difficult to supply to other Japanese and Korean players.
- Two-wheelers and commercial vehicles are the backbone - two-wheelers contribute roughly 13-15% of automotive revenue and commercial vehicles including tractors about 6%, with wheel-end bearings dominating the product mix in passenger and commercial vehicles and transmission bearings as the second-largest category.
- EVs mean fewer bearings but more expensive ones - an internal combustion vehicle uses about 10 bearings, an electric vehicle about 7, but the price per bearing is higher because EVs need high-speed, low-noise, insulated bearings, sometimes with ceramic balls instead of steel, and SKF already has a dedicated 200-member engineering team developing these products for India and abroad.
- The aftermarket shift: from push to pull - the company historically pushed product to distributors and had a low-single-digit share; it has now taken control of the channel, pulling demand from mechanics and retailers through digital tools like a WhatsApp service and a web parts finder, served by over 321 distributors.
- Manufacturing at automotive scale - automotive production is 90-95% localised, with single production lines capable of producing 10 million bearings a year without changes, and the Haridwar factory is 100% automotive while Bangalore is being transitioned to the same.
2. Industrial: the business of never letting a machine stop
SKF sells reliability to industries where downtime is unthinkable - railways, steel plants, wind farms - and customers pay a premium for the genuine bearing because a substitute that fails costs far more than the bearing itself.
- Railways is the crown jewel - SKF holds over 40% market share in passenger, locomotive and metro bearings, 60% in electric locomotive bearings, and 100% of the drive system and anti-roll bar bearings for the Vande Bharat Express, with approval processes that take two to three years creating a barrier for new entrants.
- Wind: room-sized bearings under multi-year contracts - wind turbine bearings are so large they are described as room-size, requiring specialised manufacturing, and the company has secured a multi-year supply contract for main shaft bearings on a 3 MW platform with a leading Indian wind turbine maker.
- Paid per tonne of steel produced - through Rotating Equipment Performance contracts, SKF takes over the entire bearing function at a customer’s plant for a fixed recurring fee; at SAIL’s Bhilai facility, a five-year pay-per-ton contract moved SKF’s share of the bearing business from zero to 100 percent.
- Localisation is the industrial strategy - only 25-30% of industrial bearings are manufactured by SKF India, with the rest imported or made by partner entity SKF Technologies, because industrial production runs are small - 5,000 to 100,000 bearings - and need aggregated demand across regions to justify a local line; a new Pune plant dedicated to industrial is now being built to change this.
- Remanufacturing as a competitive weapon - the REMAN programme refurbishes large bearings and train bearing units, cutting the carbon footprint by up to 90% and energy use by 90% compared to making a new one, with nearly 25,000 bearings remanufactured in a single year.
Group structure and partners
The business was deliberately split in two - automotive and industrial - because the macro dynamics, customer needs and factory philosophies are so different that a single management could not serve both well.
- A Swedish parent, a global network - SKF India is an affiliate of AB SKF, founded in Sweden in 1907 and now present in more than 130 countries with around 17,000 distributor locations worldwide, giving the Indian entity access to global technology and export channels.
- The demerger created two pure-play listed companies - in FY25-FY26, the automotive and industrial businesses were separated through a court-approved scheme, with shareholders receiving one share of the new SKF India (Industrial) Ltd for every share they held, while SKF India Ltd retained the automotive business; the split was driven by fundamentally different manufacturing philosophies - automotive runs million-unit batches, industrial runs small lots - and dissimilar customer needs.
- SKF Technologies is the industrial manufacturing partner - a separate entity with turnover of approximately ₹1,000 crores that manufactures bearings for the industrial business and also runs lubrication and seals businesses, forming a critical part of the supply chain alongside SKF Engineering and Lubrication India Private Limited.
- Captive green energy to power the factories - SKF India holds 26.74% of Sunstrength Renewables and 26% of Clean Max Taiyo, both special-purpose vehicles set up to generate solar and wind power for captive consumption at its plants, supporting the target of decarbonising manufacturing by 2030.