How The Sure Chill Company is leveraging Godrej Appliances to introduce medical refrigerators?

UK based medical refrigerator producer Sure Chill Company in technology licensing agreement with Godrej Appliances eyeing to widen its footprint in the country by leveraging the wider domestic and overseas presence of Godrej Appliances. Under the agreement Godrej Appliances will manufacture, sell, service, distribute and do the marketing of Sure Chill products. Therefore betting on factors like growing GDP, increasing spend on healthcare, power cut-offs in villages as the driver of sell of Medical refrigerators Peter Saunders, Chairman, The Sure Chill Company spoke to Indianretailer.com on the occasion of launching its vaccine immunisation refrigerator with maximum 13 days holdover capacity.

In partnership with Godrej & Boyce what are your plans of enhancing the presence in India?
In technology licensing agreement we are using the power of Godrej Appliances to reach out to every village of the country, large number of people and to have our brand alongside their brand. Godrej will manufacture, sell, service, distribute and will do the marketing of our products with their expertise. They can do it with their whole range of different products as well so certainly we will be benefited from this partnership. This is how they will reach out to every village.  Also the important part is Godrej can also maintain the servicing of the product which is really very hard.

We are delighted to partner with Godrej Appliances to extend the reach of the Sure Chill technology around the world. We have the potential to save millions of lives.

What is the tenure of this agreement?
It’s a five year technology licensing agreement with the Godrej.

Under the agreement Godrej can also sell your vaccine immunisation refrigerator to the nearby countries too?
Under this technology licensing agreement we allow Godrej to expand the sell to their overseas markets too and it’s their responsibility of sell and distribution. There are other countries in Asia where under the licence agreement we would sell the products but still will take the manufacturing from Godrej India. By these two mechanisms we can actually reach out to large part of the world. Like with Godrej we have a similar agreement with the company called Zero Appliances in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Inline with offering vaccine immunisation refrigerator will you extend the range to blood storage refrigerators too?
Yes we will further extend the range to the blood storage refrigerators with Godrej. In terms of vaccine immunisation refrigerator Godrej response to the feedback from the government and the market they already have widened the range in response to the sizes the market is looking forward and also the holdover (refrigerator can run without electricity or solar power) of 13 days . If the holdover period is reduced the cost also gets down. There is a cost for having a long holdover. One of the things we have done on the Lite series is that actually reduce the holdover period to three days and reduce the cost as well.

How do you look at the potential of the Indian market for the future growth?
Growing GDP and increasing spend on healthcare making India is one of the highly important market with huge potential in the world. The factors that support the growth are wider geography, large population, growing emphasis and spends on healthcare by the people, power cut-off conditions in different locations and the different standards of power exists throughout the country.

Going further for the Indian market your larger focus will be on the solar power run or grid power run medical refrigerators?
It depends on what the market want actually. We think there will be very strong demand for the solar power run refrigerators inline with grid power run refrigerators. We have two models in different sizes one model is for grid power and the other model is for solar power.

What are your future plans for the Indian market with this partnership?
This licence agreement at the moment is limited to medical appliances, but we can also use the technology in other areas as well. In domestic filtrations like home appliance, beverage refrigerators among others we can offer whole range of products. This is something for the future and the focus for the moment is medical appliances. Godrej is in medical at the moment, they have all the domestic appliances and this is a very important development for them with whole new medical refrigerator sector. It’s not just a commercial opportunity but also the humanitarian opportunity as well and they are putting a lot of effort behind it.

What is your estimation of turnover from the Indian market?
We are very ambitious about the contribution I won’t put any of the figure. In the five years down the line we believe the growth in medical refrigerator sector will be enormous with Godrej. Once we will start with the contracts and the ministers of health of various states can actually see the technology, understand it, learn it and accordingly grow up. People are conservative in the beginning so it tends to start slowly but I think we will build a very strong product image.