How
serious are our industrial in-house R&D efforts? A note
How serious are our
industrial houses involved in the R&D? This question is less often examined
in our context as a thorough evaluation of these efforts calls for an extensive
survey and domain knowledge to a certain extent. Considering that many of the
industrial companies are in the public domain and are mandated to make public
their efforts in this direction, there is a possibility of making informed
assessment of the same. This note is an exercise in this direction.
This is an analysis of
the R&D efforts in auto and IT software sectors as reported in their recent
annual reports. The analysis is not so much on the nature of R&D projects,
but the seriousness of the efforts, specificity of the work done as presented in
their annual reports. The analysis also looks into intensity of the R&D
expenditure, nature of research, proportion of companies investing on R&D in
the sector and other related aspects. The note confines to a few sectors with
relatively higher R&D spend in the country. The note is confined to the
public companies in the sector, as the data relating to the private ones are not
uniformly in the public domain.
On
the whole 51 companies invest in the R&D in auto sector in various measures.
This is 17.5 % of the total auto companies. An analysis of the R&D intensity
shows that 50% of the companies invest 1% or more of their turnover on R&D
and among the rest a little more than 50% invest less than 0.5% of the turnover.
Among the high investors exactly a half invest over 2% of their turnover and
four of them invest over 3% of their total sales. Automotive Axies Ltd. Ucal
Fuel systems are two among these high investors.
|
Low |
Moderate |
High |
|
19 |
16 |
16 |
R&D Seriousness vs Extent of R&D Investment
|
Rs.
<25 Million |
Rs.
25-50 Million |
Rs.
50-100 Million |
|
||||||||
|
Low |
Mod |
High |
Low |
Mod |
High |
Low |
Mod |
High |
Low |
Mod |
High |
|
10 |
4 |
- |
- |
2 |
6 |
3 |
3 |
- |
- |
3 |
15 |
R&D
intensity (% of R&D on sales turnover)
|
<0.5 |
0.5-1.0 |
1
-- 2 |
3> |
|
11 |
12 |
20 |
4 |
Intensity
of R&D investment varies when we take the sector turnover as a whole.
An analysis of the total turnover shows that a little over one-fourth of
the companies invest less than Rs. 2.5 crores and one-tenth of them between
50-100 crores. It is good note that more than one-third of these R&D
investing companies invest over 10 crores annually. Among the high investors are
Mahindra & Mahindra, Bajaj Auto Ltd., TVS Motors, Tata Motors and
MICO ltd.
The
analysis was also extended to know whether the R&D efforts focus more on
Research or Development and also the seriousness of the R&D by grading the
efforts on a three-point scale, namely High, Moderate and Low. The grading was
based on the careful reading of the write up provided in the annual reports of
the respective companies. Wherever the nature of R&D is of a higher level
the project and accomplishments were specific and on the other extreme are the
general descriptions indicating low level of R&D, despite the investment.
The analysis indicated that the companies in the auto sector with R&D
investment more or less uniformly distribute on low, moderate and high
groupings, with roughly one-third of them falling in each category. Tata Motors,
Ashok Leyland, Mahindra & Mahindra, Motor Industries Co. ltd. are some of
those which fall In the high category. It is also
interesting to note that not all companies with investment of over 10 crore do
specific R&D work. This trend is also true among the ten companies investing
in the range of Rs. 2.5 to 5.0 crore. Their R&D could be graded as moderate
or high, as they show focus in their efforts.
On
the other hand one-third of the companies which invest less than Rs. 2.5 crores
fall in R&D of low caliber, or unfocused in their efforts as their reports
describe the activity in very general terms, both on nature of work and benefits
derived from the same.
It
could also be observed that, barring a few of these companies almost all of them
conduct development work rather than research. Development work includes those
like adopting the product to local environmental standards, etc.
It
could also be noted that MNCs such as Honda, Suzuki and the others though invest
higher amounts, yet their work also confines to development and do not extend to
research.
Considering
that Auto sector is identified to be a high growth industry it is desirable that
research efforts would be intensified enabling the concerned companies to
compete In the international market. It is also to be noted that none of these
companies mentioned any IPR acquisition either in India or abroad.
R&D
investment scenario in IT sector presents is altogether different picture. This
sector has large margins and so have relatively larger investments in R&D.
But what is surprising is that more than a half (21 out of 36) of the total
companies investing in R&D perform a low level R&D, assessing from their
statements in their Annual Report under the head. On an average the R&D
investment among the companies works out to Rs. 7.8 crores and for the sector as a whole it is 0.75% of
the total turnover. Surprisingly
even the companies with large investment could be doing low end R&D, if at
all. (Table below). Majority of the companies invest between 2-3 % of their sales
turnover on R&D. the exceptions on the other extreme are the companies such
as M/s Banthina Technologies, which invest 44.37%, and Odyssey Technologies 81%.
However, the R&D as described by one of these two do not read specific
enough or of cutting edge nature in any sense of the term. On the whole the
figures suggest that IT companies have sufficient surplus to invest under
R&D head, though they do not seem to have R&D tasks cut out to
accomplish. Some of the description of R&D activities of the companies read
as follows:
|
Low |
Moderate |
High |
|
16 |
5 |
15 |
R&D Seriousness Rating vs Extent of R&D Investment
|
Rs.
<10 million |
Rs.
10-30 million |
Rs.
30 m > |
||||||
|
Low |
Mod |
High |
Low |
Mod |
High |
Low |
Mod |
High |
|
3 |
3 |
4 |
4 |
1 |
3 |
6 |
1 |
7 |
R&D
intensity (% of R&D on sales turnover)
|
1% |
2—3% |
3—6% |
7%
> |
|
6 |
13 |
6 |
6 |
*Row / columns do not tally as all the companies have not furnished the investment data.