KONE, the Finland-headquartered elevator and escalator maker, plans to raise exports from its factory near Chennai, in southern India, and sees the country’s aging elevators as its next source of growth, its chief executive said in an interview.
Philippe Delorme, president and chief executive of KONE Corporation, told The Hindu BusinessLine that “India is a manufacturing centre for the world.” The plant at Sriperumbudur, near Chennai, is one of KONE’s four principal manufacturing sites worldwide. It mainly serves India, he said, but KONE wants to raise its export capacity. The interview put KONE’s investment in the plant at approximately $46 million at current exchange rates.
Illustrative: a glass-fronted elevator entrance. Photo: Dinkun Chen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Upgrades before new builds
The report estimated India’s installed base at nearly one million elevators. Delorme said “India is still a relatively young elevator market,” but demand to modernize equipment installed earlier is beginning to show. KONE has developed a method to modernize an elevator in one week and plans to launch it in India in the coming weeks, for buildings of up to ten floors. Not every installation will qualify, he said.
The time saved matters in small residential buildings. A single-elevator building of six to ten stories can lose its only elevator for five weeks under a standard upgrade, which is hard on elderly residents and people with limited mobility.
Beyond the largest cities, KONE sees room to grow in the next twenty cities, mostly in low-rise and mid-rise housing. It has also introduced the Villa 100, an elevator for premium homes. Delorme named digital transformation as the company’s top priority for the next five years: “Digital transformation. It is something we cannot afford to miss.”
KONE opened its first Digital Experience Center in India on October 9 in Pune, in western India. The company said in a statement that it is the first of its kind in the country’s elevator and escalator industry, and that it lets customers try KONE’s digital design, service and monitoring tools.
The TK Elevator deal
KONE has announced plans to combine with rival TK Elevator in a deal valued at $32.9 billion. Regulators in India, Europe and the United States must approve it. Delorme said KONE plans for a close in 2027, possibly late in the year. Until then the two companies compete, and KONE would look to combine TK Elevator’s India operations with its own if approval comes.
KONE reported 2025 sales of $12.5 billion, with more than 60,000 employees in close to seventy countries. It has operated in India since 1984 and now has more than fifty branches and more than 6,000 employees there, with its India headquarters in Chennai.
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