Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/25391
ion battery technology owes its genesis to a wedding caterer in Kanpur, India. Te wedding caterer's son is now president and CEO of MEGTEC Systems, based in De Pere, which won the Industry Supplier of the Year award last year at the international Battery Technology Expo. Award judges said MEGTEC’s innovation had “the potential of reducing costs of electrode manufacturing by more than 50 percent.” Industry experts say the primary factor driving the cost of electric vehicles is the battery component, so reducing the cost and weight of the battery and extending its operating life would go a long way toward reducing the cost of buying and operating those vehicles. “It’s wonderful to see the sort of technological innovation and vision for manufacturing scale-up that MEGTEC sees in their future,” says Daniel Kammen, director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California-Berkeley. Kammen, a judge in the Battery Technology Expo awards, is currently on leave from Berkeley to serve as chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency at the World Bank. “What is important to note is that we can expect an impressive rate of cost reductions with production,” says Kammen. “Te learning curve for mass-produced products has been repeatedly verified and shows a 20 percent reduction in cost for each doubling of total manufacturing. Tis makes the MEGTEC plans reasonable based on established theory.” How MEGTEC got to this game-changing place in automotive history has a little bit to do with chance and a lot to do with creating a culture of innovation that keeps the company’s engineers and consultants open to new possibilities. The road from Kanpur T hat entrepreneurial spirit owes much to Mohit Uberoi’s upbringing. Te MEGTEC president and CEO grew up watching his father, Satish Uberoi, develop a series of small businesses – each evolving out of a discovery of need among his Kanpur neighbors and customers. Te elder Uberoi still operates a profitable catering business in that city of 5 million on the Ganges – quite a challenge, considering Indian weddings oſten last three or four days with a thousand or more guests. “My father was never afraid to take a risk and he was always focused on what his customers needed, and 28 | INSIGHT • Februar y 2011 MEGTEC employs more than 700 people worldwide, including about 350 at the company's De Pere headquarters, engineering center and manufacturing facility. I learned a lot from that,” says Uberoi, a chemical engineer by training but an entrepreneur by birth. His speech is precisely cadenced, as you would expect from an engineer, but he breaks into a warm and ready smile whenever talking about something dear to him. Tat would include his family, as well as the employees of the company he heads. Uberoi’s road from Kanpur to De Pere took him first to the Indian Institute of Technology in his home town, then to the University of Arizona, where he earned a doctorate in chemical engineering in 1990. He found work immediately at W.R. Grace in Baltimore, working in the company’s research and development division, but he was already marked for bigger things. “I was asked to be on a team with several senior managers, looking for new business opportunities for Grace, which was a $10 billion company at the time,” says Uberoi. One of the Grace business units was a company called TEC Systems, based in De Pere, headed by President Alan Fiers, who was also on the business development committee with Uberoi. “TEC Systems was a pioneer in developing drying technologies for the printing industry and one of the opportunities Grace wanted to pursue was to develop technologies to control emissions in the printing industry and other industries,” says Uberoi. “So I spent a lot of time with Alan Fiers and got to know him pretty well.” www. insightonbusiness .com