This will make it an integrated manufacturing facility, besides enabling it to enter new segments.

The company is also developing UPS (uninterruptible power supply) using solar power to charge the batteries. It makes inverters for residence, retail and office under the brand 'Xenon', in the range of 400VA to 10 KVA.

G. Indeevar, General Manager, Amara Raja Electronics, said the 2,000-sq m manufacturing facility in Diguvamagham in Chitoor district in Andhra Pradesh, about 150 km from Chennai, will be increased ten times over in less than a year from now.

This will help the company to make all the components and sub assemblies in-house. At present it outsources transformers.

The inverter market, excluding the battery, is estimated at Rs 3,000 crore, of which 80 per cent is of square wave inverters, which cannot support power requirements of IT sector. Amara Raja operates in the other 20 per cent of the market, which is of sine wave inverters. In terms of technology these are twice as expensive as the former.

Square and sine waves are parameters determining quality of the electric power. Sine wave of the power from inverter ensures electricity that is similar to that of grid power in terms of quality and is hence compatible to gadgets and equipment.

Due to increasing awareness on quality of power, the pure sine wave inverter segment has been growing at 20 per cent CAGR for the last three years while the other remains flat.

'Line interactive' inverters

Amara Raja hopes to leverage the growth and with capacity expansion project it plans to enter 'line interactive' inverters (having voltage regulators) this year.

Next year, it plans to foray in to online inverters, which has zero transfer time (no time taken in transiting from grid to inverter power) that are preferred by large organisations in sectors such as IT and health care having safety critical applications.

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