We began in 1970 as a small engineering company in Pondicherry, a quiet coastal town in South India. We made turned components, including nuts, but the turning process is generally slow (~300 parts/h) and wasteful (30%-60% wasted raw material), as much material is removed to get the final part.
After a decade of surviving, we decided to leap into making nuts by cold forging, in 1982. Cold forged nuts are produced at a faster rate (~300 parts/min), are less wasteful (~12% wasted raw material), have a better finish and can do external forms that turning cannot.
As luck would have it, this coincided with the first changes in the Indian automotive market, marked by the entry of Suzuki and other global players. The formalisation in the sector, emphasis on quality and delivery, posed severe challenges to the small engineering company we were, tucked far away from burgeoning industrial clusters. We struggled, learnt, failed, grew, and were fortunate to find the right people and partners along the way, slowly building a reputation in a cutthroat market.
In the early 1980s, companies were vertically integrated – they did most processes in-house, and so did we. Today, outsourcing for cost-cutting is the flavour and many in the industry have done so. We remain an interated facility, relying on decades of learned experience to deliver better products.
In 2011, we partnered with our oldest customer to make large cold-forged parts. This diversification led to a new cycle of development, technical challenges and new customers.
The newest chapter of our story is the acquisition of Unistrong Engineers Pvt. Ltd., a cold-forged bush and roller maker in 2021.
Since the beginning, we have been a family-owned entreprise that takes pride in the value we provide our customers, our people and the communities we are part of. We love what we do and relish the challenges that come our way. At Fastenex, we believe in excellence - come, live the experience.
Lalitrai Mohanlal Shah forged out of his ingenuity and grit, in a sleepy little town, a company that supplies to the best in the world. From him come our values of always conducting business the right way, doing right by our people, and never failing the customer. His final project, at the age of 70, was to set up our new plant to manufacture large cold-forged parts.
A. L. Shah began his career as one of the first operators of Fastenex's first - and, then, only - cold-forging machine. He built up the company's processes in core and support functions, enabling us to scale today to close to a hundred forging machines. The width and depth of his technical abilities, learnt through decades of problem solving and endless curiosity have ingrained patient continuous improvement into the Fastenex culture.
An active participant in the ICFG, his other passion is advocating for consciously managing one's family business through the FBN.
He can be reached at alshah@fastenex.co.in